Why are timeouts more acceptable than spanking?

First, mental and emotional punishment is more evil than physical punishment.

Second, whatever you do to your child will impact his/her life, so there is no one solution fits all since all children are different.

Third, in my opinion physical punishment is out of love but mental/emotional punishment is something else. Of course, any kind of punishment cannot be excessive or it becomes abusive.

mental/emotional scares never fully heal.

Society has placed a taboo on physical abuse of all forms for two reasons:

1) It can get carried away and become dangerous to a person's safety.

2) It can then lead to emotional and mental pain experienced by a child. I've never seen a timeout used in such a drastic manner - usually it's just having to go stand in a corner until you're ready to apologize. So while there may be some mental/emotional pain, it is not fully experienced by a child. On the other hand, hitting a child will initially cause them physical pain, but it may then evolve into emotional pain because the physical pain is viewed as being callous towards the child in question. This sometimes makes kids want to run away because they think their parents are mean - whereas with a timeout, a child doesn't have to experience that evolution of pain.

I think you have the idea of timeouts wrong and that is unfortunately why timeouts often don't work. It isn't the idea of "putting a child in the basement with the monsters if you don't behave". It's simply to remove the child from whatever stimulus is causing the offending behavior. True, it does remove a child from social interaction and that's part of why it works, too.

While I can think of a few examples where spanking may be appropriate, the problem is that most parents do it wrong. What they actually accomplish is to teach their children that aggression and violence are the ways to resolve conflict.

The biggest problem parents have in most areas is lack of consistency.

Because what we do is learned behavior. If we teach our children through spankings that thing's are right we are reinforcing that it is the physical force that makes the action right. As long as I am the strongest I make the rules. This is not a very healthy message for us to grow up with. With time outs the child has time to think about what they have done and most importantly why it was wrong.

Physical abuse is never the answer, like you said it impacts the child's life in the present and in the future.

Spare the rod & spoil the child.

Regularly scheduled beatings would remove any random factors, the kid will be fine.