You can pick up a child and carry it to its desk without spanking it...

And you do it again and again and again and again as many times as necessary until the child gets the message.

Two classic ways to fail at parenting are not setting boundaries and/or setting boundaries and not enforcing them.

Some people smack because they're lazy and uncreative. It's fast and effective because it gets the desired result for the parent. But that's not without significant unwanted consequences for the child. There is zero need to smack unless it's something extreme like immediate physical danger is present and you just need to get their attention. Even then they respond pretty well to the right voice signals.

Watch enough episodes of super nanny and it will sink in. She uses the same damn technique every. single. time. It's just consistently enforcing the boundaries. Sometimes for hours at a time if need be. This usually is on required for a few days and things change.

I'd say that so far has mapped pretty well to raising my toddler. It's not always easy but we do what we have to.

I haven't run into that level of rebellion from any of my four kids, at least not yet. I don't expect I will for some time, if ever, but what do I know about raising kids older than 9? Not much!

I agree with you, based in part on how I've seen some of my friends parenting their own substantially less compliant children, that the stereotype of a recalcitrant child not submitting to discipline has more to do with parental consistency and resolve than being endemic to child-rearing. One thing my kids have internalized from an early age is that no amount of bickering or disobedience will ever result in less discipline being applied; discipline and punishment only ever ramp up, never down. I also tend toward more severe punishments than many parents, which--at least in theory--sidesteps the risk of the kids developing a "tolerance" to some forms of discipline.

When it comes down to it, deprivation of activities is effective at length with all children. Children are born hedonists, and want to engage in pleasant and pleasurable activities. If I have a particular proactive disciplinary measure to apply (e.g., writing out chosen, relevant passages from Marcus Aurelius' "Meditiations"), it's almost always imposed as a substitute for some pleasant activity ("You'll do this during your normal screen time until you're done") and thus can continue in perpetuity should the kid choose to be recalcitrant. And since I'm typically there with the kid while they're doing the punishment (they're going to have questions about words, meanings, which passage is next, etc.) I can easily enforce the sequestration just by sitting by the door of the study :) There are definitely non-physical ways of punishing children that they simply can't "opt out" of.

As another example, one evening came home to learn from our kids' nanny that my two oldest boys were rude to their mother that morning. My wife had had a hard day at work as well, and getting home before her, I planned a quick trip to grab her a six pack of her favorite beer and order pizza from her favorite place. My boys, apart from having to write letters of apology to their mother, also didn't get to eat pizza. They had peanut butter sandwiches and water while we ate pizza. They wrote their apologies during their normal screen time and lost screen time privileges for a week, if I remember correctly. There's really nothing they could have done to choose "not to submit" to these punishments: if they tried to take pizza, I'd snatch it away, if they tried to use an electronic device, I lock it out of their reach. Disobedience wasn't really an option for them.

I find that the most effective punishments include a severe up-front penalty and a less severe but lingering over-time penalty. The severe frontloaded penalty makes it very clear how egregious the misbehavior was; the lower severity lingering penalty provides the opportunity over time to reinforce and reiterate how to behave better in the future.