rollin:
The thing is, if the reader is drawn into your world and is willing to accept it, you've succeeded, but you have to take pains to make sure people act somewhat logically, at least in terms of their own personalities, and you don't throw things in the readers faces and say "accept this as reality, but I'm not going to justify or explain it." That would be a mistake.
IMHO consistency of attitudes and behavior is important, the characters must be basically the same people--unless the storyline creates a plausible reason for personal change--throughout a given story and moreso for a story series or a group of interrelated stories. Okay, it's a bit of a 'stretch' to have a mother give her daughter a panties-down hairbrush whacking in the handicapped stall of a public ladies' room for being highly disrespectful to her, but my imagination can handle that--IMHO it's unlikely but not highly implausible. OTOH, if in a later part of that story or serial the daughter is similarly disrespectful but the mother simply shrugs it off, I'm going to need a really solid explanation for the woman's dramatically altered response to accept it as believable within the story context.
As I stated once before in a discussion here, AFAIC there's a big difference between unlikely and implausible. In any given babysitting situation, the odds are strongly against the sitter being given unquestioned authority to paddle her charges on their naked buttocks--however, it's not implausible for such authority to be granted in (let's say) one-half of one percent of babysitting situations, which happens to include the one being written about. If a modern/advanced society were shown wherein at least half of babysitting situations involved such disciplinary discretion being given to the sitter, then that would have to be considered science fiction or alternate reality (or even possibly social satire if written as such).
Accepting a 'world' that's created isn't too much of a problem (as long as fantasy elements aren't claimed to be RL realistic), as long as its consistent within itself... --C.K.