Should You Spank Your Child?
If your parents used spanking as a discipline method growing up, you
may have reconciled yourself to their behavior by 
justifying it: You
came out ok. You may even think there is no other choice for managing
kids who are "a handful." How else do kids learn?
We now have a
wealth of studies on how spanking affects kids. The research shows clearly
that children do indeed learn from spanking, but they don't learn what
we want them to.
Large, peer-reviewed studies repeatedly show that the more
children are hit, the more likely they are to hit others, including
peers and siblings. As adults, they are more likely to hit their
spouses. The more parents
spank children for antisocial behavior, the more the antisocial
behavior increases .
Quite simply, hitting children teaches them that it is acceptable to hit others who are smaller and weaker. “I'm going to hit you because you hit your sister” is a hypocrisy not lost on children. As every parent knows, kids do what we do, not what we say.
I often hear “I got hit when I was a kid and I turned out OK," or “I was spanked as a child, and I deserved it.”
It is very hard for us to believe that people who loved us would
intentionally hurt us, so we feel the need to excuse that hurt. If you
were willing to reach deep inside and really feel again the hurt you
felt when you were physically punished as a child, you would never
consider inflicting that pain on your own child. I have heard many stories from adults who still hate their parents because their parents spanked them "for their own good."
And the pain
does not end in childhood, even if we repress and deny it. A landmark
analysis of 88 corporal punishment studies over six decades showed that spanking during childhood was
associated with negative behaviors in adults, even when the adult said
that the spanking was deserved and had not hurt them. Even a few instances of being hit as children are associated with
more depressive symptoms as adults. While most of us who were spanked “turned
out OK”, it is clear that not being spanked would have helped us turn
out to be healthier.
I strongly
believe that permissiveness without limits creates children who are unhappy and impossible to
live with. But discipline means “to teach." If we're serious about raising good kids, we need to use methods
that teach kids to manage themselves. Spanking does not do that. Instead, it teaches kids to be afraid of us, which is no basis for love. It teaches them to be sneaky so they won't be caught doing something wrong. It teaches kids that they are bad, so they are more likely to behave badly. It teaches kids to behave punitively toward themselves, and toward others.
The secret is that spanking not only doesn't work, it is totally unnecessary. When children are raised with age-appropriate expectations and limits accompanied by empathy instead of punitiveness, they tend to behave and cooperate. Those children don't need much in the way of discipline at all, and they become self-disciplined adults.
So
next time you get so angry you want to hit someone, tell your kids
you’re taking a timeout and you’ll deal with them later. Then go into
the bathroom, run the water, and calm yourself down. Use the time to
get calm, not to justify your anger. When you come out, tell them you
need to think hard about what they did, but right now you need to fix
dinner (do the laundry, whatever.) Tell them you need them to be
little angels, and you will talk when you are all calm later. Then
follow through. Your discipline and teaching will be so much more
effective. They’ll learn a lot better when they aren’t in the flush of
flight or flight hormones. And you will be so grateful to see yourself
becoming the kind of parent every child deserves. (For more on this, see For Parents: How to Handle Your Own Anger.)
Click to see Dr. Laura Markham speak about Spanking on the Morning Show with Mike & Juliet.
Studies on Spanking:Gershoff (2002)
Strassberg, Dodge, Pettit & Bates (l994)
Straus, Sugarman & Giles-Sims ( l997)
Straus & Gelles (l990)
Strauss (l994)
Wolfe (l987)
"How to control one's angry impulses is one of the things you are trying to teach your children. Spanking sabotages this teaching. Spanking guidelines usually give the warning to never spank in anger. If this guideline were to be faithfully observed 99 percent of spanking wouldn't occur, because once the parent has calmed down he or she can come up with a more appropriate method of correction."
-- Dr. Sears
