Is it okay to spank my child?

Babyment

Spanking has remained a common childrearing practice in the Asian countries. For most parents, their main goals in spanking their children are to punish misbehavior and thereby reduce recurrence of the undesirable behavior. Their second objective is to increase the likelihood of desirable behavior in the future.

According to the expert, spanking is indeed not an effective way to change your child’s behavior.

Why is spanking ineffective?

Your child is not learning

First, spanking only teaches a child to fear his parents, not to respect them.

When a child is spanked, his or her limbic system ( part of the brain that controls learning and understanding) goes into alarm mode. His prefrontal cortex(part of the brain that is responsible for reasoning and judgment) shuts down. In such a situation, his mind will learn nothing.

For the child, it is an experience of being small and unable to control an overwhelming and unpredictable force.

So, though a spanking may result in a quieter, more cautious child for a few hours, that apparent peace has a high price. A child’s sense of safety, and with it, his ability to reason, to cooperate, to learn, and to trust are all eroded with every spanking.

The main reason why spanking is ineffective is that it fails to adhere to the conditions that behaviorists say must exist for punishment to be effective, namely that it be immediate, consistent, and delivered after every instance of the targeted behavior. Most parents will not spank children following every instance of a given misbehavior.

In addition, spanking alone does not teach children why their behavior was wrong or what they should do instead. Rather, it teaches them that they must yield to the threat of physical punishment, but once the threat is gone, they have no reason to behave appropriately.

Spanking increases the mental health problem

According to a study published in 2002 “Corporal punishment by parents and associated child behaviors and experiences: a meta-analytic and theoretical review”, spanking was associated with increases in mental health problems in childhood and adulthood, delinquent behavior in childhood and criminal behavior in adulthood, negative parent-child relationships, and increased risk that children will be physically abused

It is dangerous

Spanking is dangerous because using force can injure a child. It gives the child an impression that it's okay to hit someone to get your own way. And experts warn that children who have this antisocial lesson beaten into them are more likely to exhibit violent behavior later in life.

It increases aggression

Unanticipated by many parents who think parental aggression decreases aggression in the child, spanking tends to increase child aggression. In an examination of 27 studies, researcher Gershoff found that spanking predicted increases in children’s aggression over and above initial levels [of aggressive behavior. None of these longitudinal studies did spanking predict reductions in children's aggression over time.

It undermines trust

Spanking damages trust between parents and children. Children who are spanked are more likely to step back from the relationship and build a self-protective shield around themselves in terms of relationships generally. They learn to mistrust the motives of others and become more threat-reactive in social situations.