Spanking Is Not the Best Alternative for Disciplining Children
Over the decades, spanking has been a corporal punishment and a widely accepted form of teaching children how to behave well before the psychological research expansion on the topic was made public. However, over the recent past, analysis conduct on adults experienced spanking as children reveal the side effects of these acts of physical harm. It is proven that spanking can lead to long-lasting psychological and physical damages to children; it is a universal denominator among criminals and is sprung from parental anger and not for discipline (Gershoff et al., 2018). The essay extensively reviews the literature relating to the physical and psychological effects of spanking children to determine its effectiveness and necessity is children’s discipline. Spanking may have desirable short-term effects, grounded on the necessary information obtained from different sources, and spanking can be the most detrimental act for children and thus not the best alternative for disciplining children.
Thiel (2018) claims that Most psychologists, including the natural child project opinion spanking as a form of child abuse and child spanking, are acceptable as striking a child will not teach moral behavior. Moreover, they argue that spanking hurts these children’s mental health, and spanking a child is no different from hitting someone else. They claim that majority of children who spank their children are at a point of anger and frustration in which they feel hitting kids is the last option on their hands. Additionally, more studies consistently link physical punishment to an elevated risk of harming the kids. According to these studies, children who experience spanking have a high risk of having low cognitive abilities, are more aggressive and have a higher probability of abusing others than those who did not experience spanking. However, a small number of psychologists, parents, and physicians believe that spanking is effective in correcting children’s behavior.
According to (Gershoff et al., 2018), Corporal punishment interferes with the bond between a kid and its parents as it is naturally inhuman to feel love towards someone who hurts them. The perfect spirit of cooperation between a child and its parent, which every parent desires, can only be obtained through developing a strong bond based on the feeling of mutual love and respect. Although punishment may sometimes appear to work, it can only produce a superficial good behavior based on fear, not love or respect, and can only take place until the child is old enough to resist. Unlike punishment, cooperation based on respect will permanently last, leading to many years of mutual happiness between the child and its parent as they grow up.
Spanking does not teach children good behaviors but makes them change the way they view things and may potentially have some long term side effects such as increased aggression, misbehavior, criminal or violent behavior, depression, impaired learning, and even suicide (Thiel, 2018). These side effects are alarming and express the grave concerns that spanking is more than just a mere punishment. Therefore, spanking is a less effective form of correcting children as it does not fulfill its cognitive intent of discipline but only breaks the bond between the parent and the child.
Spanking is not the best alternative for discipline children as it teaches children nothing more about the difference between the good and the wrong. According to Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor (2016), it only confuses the child as they cannot tell what the spanking means, and the parents are their example of what is right or wrong. As a result, spanking teaches the child that every time somebody makes a wrong choice should be smacked for the wrong choice they made. Moreover, spanking instills a sense of fear and resentment in the child towards its parents. As a result, the parent reverses discipline in the child, which is what they are trying to accomplish. Besides fearing the parent, the child will also lose respect for the parents and weaken the bond between them, and thus discipline will not work if there exists no respect between the child and parents.
Besides psychological hurt, spanking children also hurt their mental health as children that are often smacked lose their parents’ respect and lose respect for themselves (Gershoff et al., 2018). They develop a feeling that they are bad children or even develop a feeling that their parents hate them. Moreover, these actions will trouble them in-home setting and also affect them at school as studies claim that children affected may be less able to learn in school because physical punishment decreases children’s Intelligent Quotient (IQ). It exemplifies how it is not the best alternative for disciplining children because it interferes with the child’s learning process.
From background information and personal observation, these claims profoundly resonate as the only thing that children learn from spanking is that it is acceptable for them to use violence to calm down any problem. Parents are not aware they are mentally injuring their children, as illustrated herein. While most of the parents who spank their children hold good intentions at heart, they may corrode their young minds so they can solve conflicts through violence. Moreover, it extensively affects mental health as the kid is confused between the difference between what is wrong and what is right, thus leading to emotional problems down the line. Notorious individuals in the realm of stories such as Adolf Hitler recorded excessive physical punishments during their childhood.
Discipline challenges are complex and require a thorough assessment. They require a precise evaluation of the parents, children, and child-parent relationship, which includes the assessment of the child’s development and the evaluation of parenting skills and parental strategies. Parents can obtain more effective parenting techniques rather than spanking. On the other hand, physicians can reevaluate discipline strategies and guide parents through complicated processes in parenting. For example, progress monitoring is an essential and immediate reassessment of the situations; if an approach fails or referring the case, a specialist will increase the chances of successful intervention (Gershoff & Grogan-Kaylor, 2016). Therefore, parents require a close follow up and reevaluate the methods that do not result in the expected effect.
Generally, a few social scientists agree that spanking is not necessarily an effective method to discipline a child as it is associated with a variety of mental health and behavioral problems. Interventions focused on disseminating such empirical studies have achieved success in changing pro-spanking attitudes. Nonetheless, due to the strong connecting between spanking behaviors and attitudes and the conservative religious orientations, most conservative religious people are not compelled by these scientific studies. Scientific analysis indicates that attitudes towards spanking in both intervention conditions decrease when compared to control conditions and reduction in favor of good attitudes against spanking.
Due to the contemporary day pervasive spanking around the world, and in light of eyebrows raised by professional organizations such as human rights and intergovernmental organizations, the best way to evaluate probabilities of these claims is by drawing a definitive conclusion on the potential consequences of spanking on children (Thiel, 2018). Therefore, there is a need to develop a meta-analysis set to address the issue of child discipline. Most of the contemporary studies reviewed in this essay are distinguished meta-analysis studies by exclusively focusing on parental use of spanking and only includes peer-reviewed journal articles.
Conclusively, spanking children as a form of correcting their misbehavior is a generally accepted practice and yet shrouded by debates on its appropriateness and effectiveness. The extensive analysis outlined in this essay suggests that spanking is not associated with improved child behavior but instead is associated with amplified risk of the detrimental outcome. The analysis did not observe any support for spanking children to instill discipline on them, and the only contentions for a spanking were associated with detrimental outcomes when combined with abuse methods, and the hypothesis is methodically weak. Across the reviews, spanking is connected to determinant outcomes and isolates spanking in determining child outcome predictions over time. Additionally, spanking only instills fear to children, weakens child-parent relationship, and reduce respect which is an essential aspect of parenting. Therefore, parents who use spanking as a form of disciplining children, physicians who recommend it, and the policymakers who allow the practice should reconsider their decision as there is no evidence spanking achieves its intended purpose but only harms the child.
References
Gershoff, E., Goodman, G. S., Miller-Perrin, C. L., Holden, G. W., Jackson, Y., & Kazdin, A. E. (2018). No Longer Up for Debate: Physical Punishment Causes Negative Outcomes for Children. PRC Research Brief Series.
Gershoff, E. T., & Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2016). Spanking and child outcomes: old controversies and new meta-analyses. Journal of family psychology, 30(4), 453.
Thiel, B. (2018). AAP updates corporal punishment policy, offers parents alternatives to spanking. Infectious Diseases in Children, 31(12), 6-6.