The teachers struggle to restrain five-year-old Thomas, who appears hysterical with fear.

In the first video, which has been viewed more than three million times on Facebook, mother Shana Marie Perez looks on helplessly as two female administrators at Jasper County Primary School in Georgia prepare to punish her five-year-old son Thomas.

Perez, who filmed the video covertly while pretending to text on her phone, alleges that the administrators left her with no choice but to allow them to hit her son with a wooden paddle.

The teacher is seen wielding a large wooden paddle in the video.Source:Facebook

“They told me if he could not get a paddling, he would have to be suspended and if he got suspended for even one day I WILL go to jail for truancy ... Jasper County made me do this ... I could not go to jail or my kids would have nothing ... I can’t take care of my kids in jail ... And I was not texting I was recording this ... I couldn’t do anything to stop them,” Perez writes in her Facebook post.

Her son is seen crying hysterically and trying to protect himself as the two staff - identified as school principal Pam Edge and assistant principal Lynn McElheney - restrain him, one with the large wooden paddle held between her legs.

The second video apparently shows the aftermath of the punishment being carried out:

Perez had told local news channel 11Alive News that she was involved in a long-running dispute with the school over her son’s attendance, as medical issues had caused her son to miss 18 days of school this year. The school had previously arrested her for truancy.

Georgia is one of 19 states across the US that still allow corporal punishment — or spanking — of students.

Among them are Arizona, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming. Students in those states received corporal punishment 166,807 times in the 2011-2012 school year, according to the most recent federal data available. That’s an average of more than 900 times each school day, NBC News reports.