The nation’s largest pediatrics group has called for a ban on spanking.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, which represents about 67,000 doctors, said Monday that spanking, hitting, and slapping were harmful for children and don’t work.
“There’s no benefit to spanking,” Dr. Robert Sege, one of the authors of the policy, said in a statement. “We know that children grow and develop better with positive role modeling and by setting healthy limits. We can do better.”
To bolster its position, AAP pointed to studies suggesting a correlation between spanking and aggressive behavior, and others that suggested children who have been spanked develop mental health issues during their teens.
The latest policy statement, which will be published in the December issue of the journal Pediatrics, is stronger than the last one AAP released on the subject in 1998. At that time, pediatricians recommended encouraging parents to come up with ways other than spanking “in response to undesired behavior.”
The group recommended that pediatricians advise patients against spanking and said its members should advocate in cities and states against spanking.
“The good news is, fewer parents support the use of spanking than they did in the past,” Sege said. “Yet corporal punishment remains legal in many states, despite evidence that it harms kids — not only physically and mentally, but in how they perform at school and how they interact with other children.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics has said since 2000 that it opposes spanking in public schools, but the practice is still allowed in 19 states.
AAP’s policy statement on discipline also addresses the harms of punishing a child verbally through methods like shaming and humiliation, which they said cause mental health problems as children become teens. These methods change the brain’s architecture, the group said, and raise stress hormones.
For discipline, AAP recommended parents use “limit setting, redirecting, and setting expectations,” which it said will help children take responsibility and practice self-control.
Instead of spanking, parents should reward children when they do something right, set clear rules, lead children to pay attention to something else, and sometimes ignore bad behavior, the group said.
AAP also recommended the “time-out” method, in which kids have to be alone for a few minutes after they do something wrong. It cited another disciplinary scenario of letting children know their toys will be taken away for the remainder of the day if they don’t obey instructions to put them away.
“It’s best to begin with the premise of rewarding positive behavior,” Dr. Benjami Siegel, co-author of the policy, said in a statement. “Parents can set up rules and expectations in advance. The key is to be consistent in following through with them.”
About four in five people believe that spanking children is “sometimes appropriate,” according to a 2013 Harris poll.
