Spanking: Toxic to children
Spanking children has been on the back burner of our nation for a long time. “Sixty-five percent of Americans approve of spanking, that has been consistent since the 1990s.” Most people, don’t address it because it’s a “known secret;” We are expected to sit idly by and let parents do whatever they want behind closed doors. Shouldn’t there be a stopping point? A place where we as a nation can stand and say, that there needs to be a law about a certain type of parenting; the type that is turning children’s backsides red and damaging self-esteems. Spanking is destroying the emotions and their perceptions of our children.
Parents that spank, say that they are trying to get their children to stop what they’re doing
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Hitting your child, is teaching them that it is okay to become violent when you’re mad, which is not a good lesson to learn. Also, it could result in your child, bringing these lessons to their own children, and maybe even reflect it on their spouse. Why is it seen as correct, to hit a child for hitting someone else? The irony is that you’re doing wrong, just as they are. You need to teach children, that violence is not the correct way to go about things, so they spread that to everyone around them. “The odds of a child being more aggressive, when they are older, increased by 50% if they were spanked,” Catherine Taylor community-health-sciences professor at Tulane University. A child, or an adult being aggressive, does not only affect them, but it affects everyone around them. Their aggression could result in them being more violent towards everyone. This could lead to them being isolated from their friends, and family, and developing disorders or maybe isolated in jail. Showing a child, especially at a young age, that getting violent when you’re angry is okay, could and very may result in your child growing up with perception issues; not knowing the correct definition of violence, and the correct situations you may need …show more content…
Spanking can cause a child’s perception to become confusing. They start to recognize adults as violent, and get scared of them, making them questionable of family, teachers, and other adults. They see their parents hitting them, so they think that it’s okay to hurt others, and they think it’s okay to put their anger on someone else. Spanking teaches a child fear, teaching them that they have to lie so they don’t get struck, causing them to continually lie throughout their life. It’s not right to hit your child, while teaching them not to hurt others, it can often confuse them, and that’s when they start to make up their own rules. “Spanking teaches your child to fear you -- not to listen to you or respect you. He may also be humiliated and resentful, and retaliate by being uncooperative.” Spanking teaches your child that they should fear adults, and if they fear adults, how are they going to advance? How are they going to get guidance from you and family, or teachers in school? Spanking your child affects their whole life, and not in a good way. You have to give your child sympathetic guidance and teach them that mistakes are okay. Parenting is about guiding children to be the best they can, parents need to help them learn in a healthy
Smith states in his introduction “many studies have shown physical punishment — including spanking, hitting and other means of causing pain — can lead to increased aggression, antisocial behavior, physical injury and mental health problems for children.” Throughout the article, many studies show that children do become more aggressive however, there were also studies mentioned that support the use of physical punishment on children between the ages of two and six years old. This does show that his research is thorough however, it still leads to room for error in his broad statement of physical punishment causing harmful effects to
Spanking is the most effective form of discipline when a child knows doing something is wrong, but the child does it anyway. A child who is properly disciplined through spanking is being taught how to control her or his impulses and how to deal with all types of authorities in future environments. Parents can control their child’s future
Did you know that over half of the population spanks their children? The idea of using spanking as a punishment has raised controversy among parents. Spanking is the use of an open hand to strike someone and many parents want it to become illegal. While spanking has some down sides, it should remain legal because making it illegal would be difficult to enforce, and there are already laws against child abuse.
A parent’s right to spank their child has been an issue of great debate for a long time. On one side of the debate are people who feel that to strike a child in any way automatically constitutes abuse. The opposing side believes that parents are within their legal and, more importantly, their moral rights to discipline their child as they see fit. As one can imagine, the former are routinely portrayed to be overly humanistic and ultra-liberal, while the latter are almost always smeared as right-wing bible thumpers and uneducated miscreants.
The use of spanking is one of the most controversial parenting practices and also one of the oldest, spanning throughout many generations. Spanking is a discipline method in which a supervising adult deliberately inflicts pain upon a child in response to a child’s unacceptable behaviour. Although spanking exists in nearly every country and family, its expression is heterogeneous. First of all the act of administering a spanking varies between families and cultures. As Gershoff (2002) pointed out, some parents plan when a spanking would be the most effective discipline whereas some parents spank impulsively (Holden, 2002). Parents also differ in their moods when delivering this controversial punishment, some parents are livid and others try and be loving and reason with the child. Another source of variation is the fact that spanking is often paired with other parenting behaviours such as, scolding, yelling, or perhaps raging and subsequently reasoning. A third source of variation concerns parental characteristics. Darling and Steinberg (1993) distinguished between the content of parental acts and the style in which it was administered (Holden, 2002). With all this variation researchers cannot definitively isolate the singular effects of spanking.
First of all, spanking does not lead to violence. Our surrounding world and media do. "The average sixteen-year- old has watched 18,000 murders during his formative years, including a daily bombardment of stabbings, shootings, hangings, decapitations, and general dismemberment" (Meier 34). It seems unjust to blame parents who are trying to raise their children properly for today's violence. If a child touches a hot stove he does not become a more violent person because of it, he just learns not to do it again because he learned a valuable lesson from the pain (Meier 34).
Educators and parents usually administer spankings to children. Spanking usually refers to a child lying, stomach down, across the educator's lap and the parent or teacher repeatedly swatting the child's backside.
Smith, B. L. (2012). The case against spanking. American Psychological Association, 43(4), 60. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/04/spanking.aspx
"Spanking doesn 't work, and it just makes kids mistrustful and aggressive. What we 're teaching them is fear rather than responsibility and problem-solving." said Kimberly Sirl, a clinical psychologist at St. Louis Children 's Hospital (Blythe). This is important because parents need to understand spanking doesn 't work and it results that the child becomes aggressive and mistrustful. Parents are trying to teach their child a lesson but instead making them fearful. Children will be aggressive and think violence is the answer to everything. The point of spanking is to teach the child what they did was wrong but kids don 't get that message when they get physically abused. It teaches them the wrong lesson and they think that it 's okay to spank kids so when they get older they will probably do the same thing. Corporal punishment of a child by a caregiver is legal in every state, but it crosses the line to abuse when a child is injured. Doctors and teachers are required to report to authorities any marks, bruises, cuts or other injuries inflicted on a child (Blythe). Anyone who is a caregiver of a child is legally allowed to hit the child. It only becomes an issue or problem when the child is left with bruises, marks, and injuries. If a doctor or teacher were to see any type of bruise on the child they are required to report it. There is spanking a
I personally do not advocate spanking. I could not imagine losing my temper to a point where I thought I needed to spank my child. While I do anticipate that having children will be a real test of patience, I do not expect that I will lose my patience so much that I will spank my children. I find spanking to be a real contradiction to what most parents tell their children. Most parents do not allow their children to hit, whether they are angry or not. Even when kids think another kid did something wrong, or bad, they are still not allowed to hit. If a parent tells a kid this, and then turns around and spanks the kid when they do something wrong, how will the kid ever learn that hitting is wrong? In my opinion, there has to be a better way to discipline children. I think that sending a child to a room where they cannot interact with anyone else, and then taking away a privilege would be a better way of handling discipline. Also, when I was a child, I can remember that when I was angry, my dad would come in to my room after I had time to cool down and talk to me about why I was angry. I can remember these as really fond times with my dad. It helped me identify why I was so angry, and most of the time it was at my mom for not letting me have my way. When I could identify why I was angry, my dad and I could come up with a solution to solve the problem. I think that rather than spanking, this is a good way to discipline children.
Some people believe spanking a child is child abuse, and that it causes the child to grow up aggressive and violent. This would mean that every child that is spanked during their developmental stages will grow up to be an example of bad behavior. However, there is no actual data or information that can confirm that spanking a child will cause a child to grow up to be violent or too aggressive. Children have been trained to obey rules or a set code of behavior for centuries. It is the best way to mold a child to be a respectable adult, and they can pass on the behavior to their future children. It may not always happen, but its pretty effective.
The children could get aggressive over time and start hitting his/her parents. A 2002 study found that across time periods and across countries children that were spanked regularly were found to be more aggressive from childhood to adulthood (brookings.edu). According to several studies done in 1987 and 1990, the more children were hit, or spanked, by their parent or an adult the more likely they were to hit others including peers, siblings, and their spouse later in life along with their future children (handinhandpartenting.org). According to CNN, children that have been regularly spanked have what is known as hostile attribution bias (CNN.com). This means that their brains just automatically expect people to be mean to them or spank them. This makes children essentially hostile towards everyone. If someone is coming towards them like they are going to hit them, then they are going to “bull up” and fight them back. Facts prove that spanking your kids makes them more hostile and more defensive towards others. They don’t always have to be in danger or have others being mean to them for the children to get aggressive and dis the payment back out. It is a proven fact that children who are more aggressive as children are more aggressive as adults. Other sources show that if your child was spanked at school, then they are more aggressive and hostile towards other kids. This is because the protective region in the brain “fires up” and puts them into protective mode. They then tend to mistreat teachers and children when they feel threatened. The more kids are spanked the higher the risk for them to commit Juvenal crime suck as assaulting others, and constantly beating people. Some studies show that adults that were spanked as kids will handle high stressful tension with aggression towards others. Studies also show that children tend to be meaner to their friends as a way of showing their
There is a lot of violence in the world today, but think about this: what if these people were once beaten and physically abused as children? In the article, Parents and Experts Split on Spanking, an expert, Dr. Spock, states that the reason there is a lot of violence in the world could be because of all the spanking that the parents do to their children (1). This statement could possibly be true. As children grow up, they’re always told that it is not nice to hit others. Furthermore, they’re told that if they do, there will be consequences. But if you think about it, how are these children suppose to follow the “no hitting” rule if they are constantly being spanked for their misbehaviors? In the end, it leads me to believe that if children are spanked after misbehaving, they will continue to grow up believing that violence is ultimately the answer.
The first thing to look at is the immediate effect physical force has on the child. Seasoned child care provider, author, and host of the international hit television series Supernanny, Jo Frost points out in her latest book that “inflicting pain on a child shuts down the good-judgement part of the brain which then reverts to basic primitive processing, fight-or-flight.” Instead of the child processing what they did that was wrong and learning from the experience, the child’s instincts are instead frantically attempting to protect itself from pain. As many parents who implement corporal punishment will attest, the effect is an immediate halt of the unwanted behaviour. As Frost pointed out, the child, while compliant, is not having a positive learning experience. Without trust and learning, it is likely the child will try harder not to get caught which in turn, creates distance in the parent/ child relationship. While there are plenty of people quick to explain just how “fine” they turned out, there are plenty more who can testify how a swat on the bottom can intensify to a sore rear end, escalate to welts on the back, and in some cases become bruises and bloodied noses. Duke University professors Jennifer Lansford and Kenneth Dodge concluded from
First of all parents feel that the children are theirs, and they can spank them when they misbehave. There are many factors that lead to physical punishment: parents were to young and not ready for children, parents are going trough a divorce and need to take out their anger on something or someone, or parents do not know another way to punish their children. These children grow up to be aggressive and often abusive towards others. Although parents think this is the only way of educating their children there are many other alternatives.