Spanking Perhaps No Topic Generates as Much

Spanking

Perhaps no topic generates as much heated debate among parents and child development experts as corporal punishment. While defenders argue for the continued necessity of the practice, new research shows more clearly the benefits of sparing the rod and avoiding corporal punishment altogether.

These studies cite numerous reasons against corporal punishment, from increasing aggression in children to the practice's moral repugnance. This paper, however, focuses on studies that show corporal punishment as an ineffective way to address misbehavior. In fact, numerous studies have shown that practices like spanking or slapping do not address the reasons behind a child's unwanted behavior.

In fact, a parent who spanks a child may unwittingly reinforce a child's bad behavior.

Types of corporal punishment

Part of the difficulty in addressing this issue lies in the lack of a common definition of spanking or corporal punishment. Some school districts, for example, equate corporal punishment with paddling and nothing else. Generally, however, corporal punishment practices like spanking are broadly defined as "hitting a child with an open hand without causing physical injury" (Gilbert 1997).

Aside from spanking, common forms of corporate punishment include grabbing a child and hitting a child with a variety of objects (Straus and Donnelly, qtd in Spurgeon 1997).

However, the most common form of corporal punishment is spanking a child's buttocks with an open hand. One survey found that 90% of adults today received this form of spanking as a child (Spurgeon 1997).

Effects

Experts remain divided, though, on whether such practices cause other unseen injuries.

Most of these studies, for example, show a positive link between spanking and anti-social behavior in children. The children who were spanked were also more likely to lie, cheat or bully other children (Gilbert 1997).

One study by Marjorie Gunnoe, for example, examined the link between corporal punishment on a child's anti-social behavior and tendency to get involved in school fights. After following her subjects for five years, Gunnoe found that children who received corporal punishment at home also reported a greater incidence of fighting at schools (Gunnoe, qtd in Gilbert 1997). This study is thus consistent with the prevailing theory that in the long run, corporal punishment is counterproductive.

However, Gunnoe's results were also affected by factors like age, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. The opposite effect was observed among toddlers and African-American children. Gunnoe explains the anomalous result by theorizing that parents who do not practice corporal punishment in these instances fail to employ other disciplinary techniques as well, resulting in undisciplined and largely unsupervised children.

Experts have also theorized on why, despite conventional wisdom, spanking instead encourages aggressive behavior. Parents who spank want to encourage good behavior in their children by instilling a fear of punishment. However, the more common result is that the child learns to deal with conflicts through physical violence (Larzelere, qtd in Spurgeon 1997). As a result, children who are spanked may get into more fights when the encounter conflicts in the playground.

The motives of parents who spank their children also have a powerful effect on whether corporal punishment practices increase their children's aggression. While some statistics cite have found that more than 90% of parents use corporal punishment as an occasional form of discipline (Spurgeon 1997), many of the parents who support the practice tend to come from lower-income and minority groups. Experts thus theorize that stress is a major factor in a person's tendency to practice harsher forms of discipline (APA 2000).

Many parents understandably become upset at their children's behavior because they are more worried about the future of their kids. Most of the parents also see physical punishment as the only option. Unfortunately, because of the known deleterious long-term effects of spanking, many experts are thus worried that highly stressed parents are getting into a destructive pattern with their children (APA 2000).

Socolar found that often, parents who spank do not try such other measures, opting instead for a quick way to stop the offending behavior. Instead of spanking, however, experts recommend a variety of other measures to discipline their children. Gunnoe, for example, suggests a "timeout," where a child is briefly isolated from family and friends as a punishment for misbehavior.