Like every time someone posts a study about how it’s bad, you get a huge flood of people saying stuff like “I was spanked as a kid, yet I’m fine”.
part of it, i think, is resistance to change, i.e., “if it was fine for my parents to do, how could it be wrong now?”, and the other part is a fucked up desire to exercise domination over a child through violence.
Rites of passage. These parents earned the right to hit their kids when they survived their own childhood beatings and were taught that violence is a solution.