A group of private nursery practitioners tell Annette Rawstrone about how they deal with parents who use physical punishment on their young children.

Q: Has a parent ever smacked their child at your nursery?

'We have been open for 12 years and it was only a few weeks ago that we had an incident where a father smacked his child at the nursery. The nursery nurse mentioned that his six-year-old son had been unkind to another child. She thought he'd then taken his son off to get his coat, but he actually took him away, smacked him and then came back to say he'd dealt with the situation. The staff were all very shocked. I wrote to the father and said that we do not condone as practice what he had done and I did not want a repeat of it.'

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