Corporal Punishment: Damaging or Effective?

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For the past several years, corporal punishment and spanking has been an extreme issue, to the point to where that it is being argued that spanking a child for the purpose of punishment is abuse. Being raised in a home where spanking as punishment was just a part of growing up I was always on the defending side that there is nothing wrong with spanking and that it keeps a lot of children, (later in life) out of trouble and are usually respectful young adults. As I looked into some articles about this issue I noticed that a lot of these articles use studies that are done on a selected few to prove that spanking has a negative effect on children and can damage them later in life, and it made me raise several questions: how can there be a study on something that ranges from person to person? How can a study that has been done on a few people determine that this form of punishment is abusive to all? For something as big as discipline, this needs to be looked at from all angles before it is decided that this is abuse based off of a study done on a selected few. In my essay I am going to explore both the negative and positive sides to corporal punishment and show that this form of punishment depends on the individual and cannot be decided for a whole based off of a study.
Many of the research studies that have been done on this issue have all came to the same conclusion: corporal punishment is unnecessary and causes negative effects on children. But there is never another side shown; a majority of these studies that are shown focus on a selected group of individuals and ask if they spank their children and how many times, but never is it explored if the child knows why they are being spanked and if the parent still has a relations...

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...e, it can be clear that this (like most things) are not black and white. There are ways for corporal punishment to be abusive and there are ways for it to be strictly discipline and help shape a child into a respectful young adult. Categorizing corporal punishment as abuse is not only inappropriate but wrong because when used the right way it can be effective into getting the desired behavior that parents want, it is just how the punishment is carried out and how the guardians deal with it afterward. As I stated earlier in my essay understanding both the positives and the negatives of this issue allows for people to have their own opinions about spanking and see that there are advantages to this form of discipline and those that do participate in this practice are not always abusing their kids but trying to make them better people.

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