Parental Punishment

Spanking is subjective in the least. Most parents suggest that using spankings as a form of discipline is essential to the development of a compliant child. For most Americans, this truth is one of the core foundations of the American model home. “70% of mothers indicated they had spanked their child at least once by the time he or she was 2-years-old” (Lee, Altschul and Gershoff, 2015.) There are numerous amounts of evidence that point to the certainty that spanking is linked to child aggression. In,

A recent study shows 70 percent of parents believe it is right to discipline a child through physical means. Most commonly, parents will spank their children but being hit with things like belts or other objects happens as well. Parenting methods haven’t changed much with time and discipline in similar no matter the country. With more studies out to find the most effective method of parenting and discipline it’s coming to attention whether or not physical harm is the best way to teach children. Parents want what is best for their children, so it is important to constantly bring up and question methods commonly accepted in the past. One method that is becoming more controversial is spanking children. Though it is still considered normal to do, it is gaining more traction and more studies are being done to find the problems it causes. Checking on parenting methods can be difficult as everyone is raised differently. It is also difficult to test which forms of punishment lead to certain outcomes. However, there is a trend of negative effects from hitting. Gershoff acknowledges, “several national professional organizations have called on parents to abandon spanking as a child rearing practice and for professionals to recommend disciplinary alternatives to spanking.” Spanking children is a terrible discipline method as it has negative effects.

It also showed that mothers with lower education, mothers living in the south and mothers who are African American reported increased levels of corporal punishment; and that mothers reporting higher levels of religiosity also spanked more (Day 80).

Slade and Wissow in (2014) said, “children who were younger than 2 years were followed up ~4 years later, after they had enter school shown behavior problem.” This study show that those white non-hispanic children who spank shown mote behavior problem after the four year. This give some association to spanking. ii. Stack, Oshio, Gerad & etc in (2009) wrote that, “Among three ethnic groups, spanking was only associated with aggressive b behavior for children who had a Caucasian mother.”

One report shows that “physical punishment doesn’t improve children’s behavior in the long term.” Spanking your kids leads to many negative outcomes including mental health problems. There is even a greater risk for kids to have a serious injury when they are physically abused (“Discipline vs. Abuse”, 2016). Parents are likely to hit when they are angry. Being angry makes people go crazy. Parents could only mean to hit the kid a little, but end up really hurting the kid because they were angry.

Spanking as a way to punish children is a heated debate that does not appear to have an end in sight. The people on both sides of the issue have very strong opinions and do not seem to want to entertain the idea that the other side could be correct. This is generally how debates work, but one concern that is often not looked at is whether the claims from either side are valid and reliable. Anyone can make claims and find evidence for those claims, but the evidence may not be sound and therefore not useful. If we want our arguments to mean something we need to use evidence that is both valid and reliable. Lee et al. argue that spanking can lead to increased aggression in children ages one to five. They set out to determine if there is a correlation between maternal warmth and spanking in regards to childhood aggression (Lee).

Parents who use corporal punishment on a regular basis to discipline children run a higher risk of physically abusing their children (Gershoff.

“Studies have shown that parents tend to use largely nonpunitive methods in their parenting efforts” (Poljak, 2009; Socolar et al., 2007; Straus & Field, 2003; Straus & Stewart, 1999). The research on the Slovenian population by Poljak (2009) showed that 61% of the parents reported using at least one form of corporal punishment; 83% used at least one form of psychological aggression; one third of the parents reported having spanked, hit, or slapped their children in the past year; and one sixth reported having used a wooden spoon, brush, belt, or other object for exerting corporal punishment on their 10-year-olds. Research from the United States by Straus and Field (2003) showed that 88.6% of parents used at least one method of psychological aggression. According to research from Straus and Stewart (1999), 43.1% of parents reported using their hands to spank their 9- to

Parenting is one of the hardest jobs in the world. Children don’t come home from the hospital with an instruction manual and only so much information can be acquired from parenting books at the local bookstore. Discipline can especially be a hard subject for new parents, considering that there is no real “right” way to punish your children for bad behaviors. Spanking is a commonly used strategy to combat childhood wrongdoing. Spanking has been used as a disciplinary tool in reportedly 90% of American families (Wolraich et al.). Spanking and corporal punishment has a high prevalence in American society. Although spanking is seen as acceptable by the majority, this does not mean that spanking is good for the child. Dr. Elizabeth Gershoff, a developmental psychologist, asserts, “There is little research evidence that physical punishment improves in the long term. In contrast, there is substantial research evidence that physical punishment puts children at risk for negative

Ninety-five percent of all toddlers in the United States have been physically disciplined at some point in their short lives (Magnuson, & Waldfogel, 2005). There exists a conflicting message from our country’s systems around how we protect and rear our children. Physical forms of discipline including, “hitting or slapping, spanking, hitting with an object, or other forms of physical contact [for behavior modification]” (Magnuson, & Waldfogel, 2005, p. 178), are not allowed in non-parental settings such as daycare, schools, and children’s programming and yet the majority of our country’s parents have at some point or are currently spanking their children in the homes. Numerous studies have been conducted linking the use of physical discipline

The sample of kids came from the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study, which is a population of families form 20 cities from the United States. There were 2461 study participants who gave their time and information to this study. The predictor variable in this study is the mother’s use of spanking and how frequently the three-year-old was spanked for misbehaving a month before the first interview. The dependent variable is the child’s aggression at the age of 5, which was tested through a series of questions from a Child Behavior Checklist.

Psychologists differ on what produces the negative correlations in a study of corporal punishment. psychologist Dr. Gershoff argues that spanking leads children to believe that violence achieves results, while Psychologist, Dr. Baumrind and her colleagues opposes that excessive child misbehavior, which can elicit increased disciplinary responses of all kinds, leads to the detrimental outcomes, not the spanking itself. In such circumstances, says Gershoff, excessive child misbehavior is likely the product of ineffective parenting strategies that a parent has used over time (Smith, 2002, page

S. Lee, J. Manganello, J. Rice, C. Taylor (2010) preformed a study to understand childhood aggression. The journal article of Mothers’ Spanking of 3-Year-Old Children and Subsequent Risk of Children’s Aggressive Behavior starts by saying that they are not the first to perform this research and many of studies have displayed connection between corporal punishment with children and child aggression. They are testing their research with new controlling factors, which have not been controlled together before. (Lee et al., 2010) The main goal of the article is to determine the association between the use of corporal punishment against 3-year-old children and recognize later aggressive behavior among those children.

Children are like flowers, if well taken care of they will bloom. If ignored or tortured, they will wither and die. Child discipline is one of the most important elements of successful parenting. Today, many people have this notion that physical abuse is in no way a solution to helping children discern between right and wrong. Since generations children have been taught the art of discipline through physical punishment. Often this approach to disciplining has resulted in two outcomes, one is where the child becomes more tolerant and is willing to adhere to what he/she has been told, or the other which more often results in children developing a sense of anguish and desire to revolt.

The authors also identify the known effects of spanking on childhood outcomes. They noted that most of the literature has been concerned with aggressive child outcomes, such as increased child stress reactivity (Bugenthal, Martorell, and Barraza, 2003). They also noted that studies are emerging on the connection between spanking and child cognitive outcomes. (Gershoff, 2010). They criticize these emerging works as suffering from a lack of "…adequate controls for the predictors of spanking, risk factors which themselves could be