Research has shown that smacking your kids makes them brainier. Could there be any sweeter music to the ears of harassed parents counting the seconds until schools reopen after the torture of Christmas togetherness?

According to research from Marjorie Gunnoe, professor of psychology at Calvin College in the US State of Michigan, children smacked before the age of six perform better at school when they are teenagers. They are also more likely to do voluntary work and to want to go to university than their peers. Forget moving to that must-have catchment area, all the little blighters need, apparently, is a skelp around the legs.

The Prime Minister himself has admitted that at school he was thrashed with the Lochgelly Tawse, a Scottish instrument of torture comprising a leather strap with the business end cut into a number of tails. He may be facing redundancy in the spring, but he has certainly had moments of glory. And he does have a PhD in history from the University of Edinburgh, where he was enrolled aged just 16.

Yes, 16. Imagine it. If we genuinely believed that smacking would get our loafing teenagers off the sofa a full two years early, we’d be happy slapping every 15-year-old in the land on a daily basis, with the blessing of Ofsted.

On a personal note, I must own up to smacking my seven year-old for the first time about six months ago, and it marked an unforgettable watershed. Instead of patiently reasoning with her, explaining my position, empathising with hers and generally treating her as a sentient being with inviolable human rights, I raised my hand in sheer anger.

Boy, did it feel good. Frankly, I’d recommend it to every mealy-mouthed, middle-class parent who finds themselves bullied into a corner by their tyrannical tweenager. Stuff those fudgy compromises: I’m in charge, whack! Get to bed, whack!

It only took one short, sharp but very big shock to make her realise that I am her boss, even though she protested: “You’re not, God is, and Santa”.

Like a lioness swiping at her irritating cub, the incident was over in seconds, unlike the nightly arguments that drive my husband insane and do none of us any good. And now I learn that I’ve boosted her IQ to boot – how loving is that?

I don’t actually intend to smack my child again, but nor can I categorically rule it out. Let’s just say I don’t want to – but I might need to – and I certainly won’t be swayed by “research” from Calvin College, in Michigan, which bills itself as a Christian College that offers “an engagement with God’s world” as part of its core curriculum.

The trouble with the whole smacking debate is that it polarises parents into saints or sinners; neglectful liberals or pious disciplinarians; sadists or saps. To claim that hitting children increases their intelligence, drive or likelihood of a 2:1 at a Russell Group university is as nonsensical as declaring that not hitting children turns them into directionless misfits destined for failure.

Any approach to child-rearing taken ad absurdum will invariably end in disaster. All Victorian society expected of children was obedience. These days we seem to expect anything but obedience, as we curry favour with our toddlers and bend over backwards to be liked rather than respected. Either route leads to domestic hell in a handcart.

If there’s a secret to bringing up a successful – and by that I mean a happy, enthusiastic and kind – child, it’s probably love, sensitivity and clear boundaries. Occasionally those boundaries might require a little, ahem, emphasis, but it beggars belief that walloping a two-year-old can really be extrapolated into a direct improvement of their life prospects.

Corporal punishment is banned in 20 European countries including Spain and Germany; in Britain “reasonable chastisement” in the home is permitted as long as it doesn’t leave a mark – on their body, if not your soul – which sounds just about vague enough to cover every contingency.

But truth be told, you can assemble a Wallace-and-Gromit-style thwacking contraption or you can let your kids run riot. You can smack them or not smack them. The results, I’m sad to say, will be exactly the same – just ask Philip Larkin.