Joseph:
Your comments are increasingly bizarre. I feel badly for you, to have so little supporting your position while you are unwilling to let go and admit you’re seriously wrong.
You persist in contorting the posuk in Mishlei to meet your needs to make parenting and chinuch into a career of violence and subjugation. Nothing can be farther from the truth. If you want to trash דרכיה דרכי נועם, go right ahead. But don’t expect anyone else to believe you and accept your derech. It is antithetical to Torah, and would make Shlomo Hamelech quite angry to see his words distorted to the opposite of his intent.
You make a valid point, wondering just what sorts of infractions by a 21 year old would warrant corporal punishment. I ask the same question regarding the young child. And when I find the answer to what behaviors warrant the potch for the child, I must then consider the other variables to determine whether I may administer it.
You also wrote: Avram , the posek in Mishlei that I quoted falls pretty much in line with imploring. Otherwise the parent must hate his child according to Mishlei. You can nitpick the verbiage but that is a fair way to put it.”
If the implication wasn’t so tragic, I might have laughed. I will try to explain it while hoping bor brevity. I must say that I suspect you will accept none of it because it disagrees with your compulsion to hit children.
Nowhere does the posuk say to hit a child. It says חושך שבטו, which refers to the complete withholding, and the exclusion of it as a tool. The expression is clearly NOT about pushing the agenda to hit. There is not a single posek or chochom known that extolled the virtues of hitting and recommended it to be used as a main tool in chinuch. References you shared earlier say nothing of the sort that you wish to blame on them. The second half of the posuk refers to the loving of the child that uses “guidance”. Do you dispense with that half because it doesn’t support your agenda? No one is nitpicking the verbiage, just translating it as it states, and with the full support and backing of many, many generations of Gedolei Yisroel.
Lastly, you might decide that love of one’s children is nowhere in the Torah lexicon. Here, I send you to Chumash Bereishis, where Avrohom was identified as loving Yitzchok, Yitzchok as loving Eisav, Rivka as loving Yaakov, and countless times throughout תורה שבכתב ותורה שבעל פה.
Next time, begin with an open mind on a subject, look up references, and do not pasken or draw conclusions before consulting what Gedolei Yisroel said. You failed miserably at that here.