In the midst of the reporting on the midterm elections, you may have missed the news. The nation’s leading organization of pediatricians came out with a strong new recommendation to parents: Don’t spank your kids.
Why? There is now a large and growing amount of scientific evidence showing that children who are spanked actually end up more disobedient, more aggressive, more depressed and less connected to their parents. The evidence for negative effects has grown so convincing that the American Academy of Pediatrics decided it needed to take a stand and let the public know.
But lots of us were spanked, and it may feel like we turned out OK. The science isn’t saying that every spanked child will have negative effects, just like every smoker doesn’t get lung cancer. But the evidence says enough children are harmed that we shouldn’t court the risk.
Doctors think about spanking in the same way they might think about medical treatments. Suppose cold Remedy A cleared your sinuses but also had a proven risk of making your cold worse some of the time and it caused serious facial paralysis in a few hundred cases each year. Remedy B, by contrast, cleared your sinuses and had none of the risks. You’d expect doctors to tell you not to take Remedy A. You might even expect the Food and Drug Administration to take it off the market.
So, is there a Remedy B alternative to spanking? Science has indeed shown that other parenting techniques are just as effective as spanking in promoting good behavior without the negative effects. These include removing children from the problem situations, giving them strong, authoritative reprimands, taking away privileges or explaining what they did wrong and putting them in time out. It’s also very effective to praise them when they do the right thing. No technique is effective all the time, but these techniques work as well as spanking in gaining child compliance and without the harms. Abandoning spanking doesn’t mean abandoning discipline.
Of course, family traditions like spanking can seem hard to give up. But think of how much about parenting has changed over the generations. It used to be standard to hit kids with switches, put them to work at 12, wash their mouths out with soap and send them to bed without food. We’ve abandoned a lot of these once-common harmful practices.
Spanking is almost certainly going to go the way of these other practices sooner or later. Many fewer parents spank their children today than they did 40 years ago. Schools in most places no longer use corporal punishment, a practice that was once widespread. Hospitals and even whole communities have become “No-Hit Zones.”
Indeed, parental spanking and any kind of corporal punishment has been officially outlawed in 54 countries around the world. For those worried that no spanking will lead to a generation of children gone wild, you may be reassured to know that juvenile crime and delinquency have actually been dropping now in the United States for over 25 years. That’s the period when many families have been shelving their spanking. This is, indeed, what the science would predict.
Giving up spanking is also consistent with other trends. We have stopped using physical punishment to control prisoners, outlawed the hitting of partners and are building international institutions to prevent conflicts between countries from growing into wars. Hitting in the home is one of the places where we all learn early in life the twisted logic that physical force is the proper way to curb misbehavior, express displeasure and mete out justice. Stopping the hitting of children is just the next step on this long and hopeful evolution toward a less violent and more peaceful world.
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