Frank Hudson said he doesn't spank his 3-year-old son. But sometimes he wonders whether he's doing the right thing.

When he was growing up in West Baltimore, parents didn't hesitate to swat the bottoms of children who did wrong, Hudson, a 40-year-old contractor, said during a "Positive Parenting" class at the nonprofit Family Tree in Baltimore.

To spank or not to spank? Child-development experts have been recommending against it for decades. But though the numbers have been going down, polls show that many parents still believe physical punishment of children is appropriate.

But 70 percent of respondents to the American Demographics survey said that children's behavior today is worse than it was a decade ago, and that permissive parents are partly to blame.

On one side of the debate are well-known child specialists such as Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, who say spanking is never the right way to discipline.

The American Academy of Pediatrics advises its members to reduce bad behavior by giving children time-outs or taking away privileges. "Corporal punishment is of limited effectiveness and has potentially deleterious side effects," reads its policy, set in 1998.

A September study on the effects of spanking by the University of Michigan School of Social Work, found that even "minimal amounts" of spanking led to more anti-social behavior in children.

At the other extreme is James Dobson, a former assistant professor of pediatrics who now runs the conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family. In "The New Strong-Willed Child" (Tyndale, $24.99), a 2004 update of a parenting book first published a quarter-century ago, Dobson wrote that slapping of the fingers and later spanking can be necessary, particularly to deter dangerous behavior.

"In those situations when the child fully understands what he is being asked to do or not to do but refuses to yield to adult leadership, an appropriate spanking is the shortest and most effective route to an attitude adjustment," he wrote.

In Hawai'i, Salt Lake resident Robert Okuda, 36, gives his 3-year-old son spankings, usually after two or three verbal warnings.

"Now he's at the age where I know he understands right from wrong," said Okuda, a college funding specialist. "I don't want him to get out of hand. ... For the most part, it works."

But spankings are rare, as Okuda's son is typically a well-behaved boy; it's a trait Okuda attributes to his method of discipline. As his son gets older, Okuda is open to other forms of discipline, such as time-out.

Dr. Larry Wissow, a child psychiatrist and professor at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, likens the corporal punishment debate to the political divide over "red" and "blue" states. It's further complicated, he said, by the inconsistency of data over the years.

"This is behavior that occurs in private and can't be measured with a laboratory test," Wissow said. "It's very hard to study. Your interpretation of the data is still going to be driven a lot by your moral convictions about the behavior itself."

In the middle are parents trying to teach children to navigate a perilous world, whose everyday conduct falls somewhere between the extremes.

At the Baltimore family center, Hudson said that because of his own childhood memories of spanking, he doesn't spank his son. Instead, the boy sits in a "discipline chair" after he has misbehaved.

As a pediatrician, Dr. Alice Tsai recommends against spanking. But she suspects many parents who visit the St. Agnes Hospital clinic in Maryland where she practices do it anyway.

As the parent of two young children, Tsai understands the impulse, although she does not believe in giving in to it. "There certainly are times when you really feel frustrated with your kids," she said.

Jerry Wyckoff, a family psychologist and author of "Getting Your Child From No to Yes: Without Nagging, Bribing or Threatening" (Simon & Schuster, $10), said parents who take the time to show their children how they want them to behave can reduce the need for any type of punishment.

"My child needs to know how to go with me to the grocery store," Wyckoff said. "We're going to practice those things, and then I'm going to reinforce those by praising."

Robert Fathman, president of the anti-spanking Center for Effective Discipline in Ohio, said despite the divisions, spanking is slowly becoming more socially unacceptable. "The trends are in our direction. I don't think we'll eliminate it entirely right now, because it's a change in a social habit, and that's going to take a lot of time."