The American Academy of Pediatrics upgraded their long standing policy discouraging spanking, harshly condemning the practice of corporal punishment as not only ineffective, but also as exacerbating aggressive behavior and potentially causing mental illness. Although psychologists and scientists have continually condemned the practice as an unproductive shortcut obstructing actual parenting, corporal punishment has remained widely accepted and used in private.
The AAP is correct though. Parents who care about their children, specifically conservative parents who want to raise self-sufficient and individually ambitious children, should never spank their children. At best, it’s lazy and ineffective. At worst, it’s actively destroying your child’s mental health
The behavioral theory behind discipline goes something like this: as an inherent animal, man must be incentivized with rewards for good behavior and punishments for bad. But to develop a sustainable civilization, the reasons for right and wrong must be internally coded. Fear alone isn’t a good motivator for long-term behavior. Instead it trains children to wager the odds that they’ll get caught, rather than whether what they’re doing is right.
Spanking doesn’t teach kids to reason effectively and discipline themselves, but rather that discipline is transactional. Perhaps a minute of pain can be exchanged for a minute of pleasure, and vice versa. While controlled studies documenting spanking are obviously limited, the science has come to a clear conclusion: spanking makes bad behavior worse, most likely because of this transactional teaching but also because physical violence undermines the relationship of unconditional trust a child feels for his parents.
A meta analysis studying 88 scientific papers on spanking over 62 years found “strong associations” between corporal punishment and 11 negative behaviors including worse mental health, aggression, criminal or antisocial behavior, and worse parental relationships. Even though a meta analysis alone cannot definitively ascertain whether these effects are causational, that not a single study has found a negative correlational relationship between spanking and bad behavior indicates that spanking indeed leads to bad behavior.
Many in the pro-spanking camp cite the fact that plenty of people have been spanked as children and turned out just fine. Plenty of people also smoke cigarettes and don’t develop cancer, but why would you want to test those odds when so many viable alternatives to discipline already exist? And if you note that it’s because spanking is easier than actually having to treat your child like a human being, you might want to consider whether you have the temperament to be a parent. It’s not as though alternative — and more effective, but less emotional — forms of discipline don’t exist, such as time outs and other forms of withholding attention. Advocates of science merely ask that in the face of fairly convincing evidence, parents adopt slightly less immediate and lazy forms of discipline.
Furthermore, the majority of parents condone spanking as a means of punishment, and kids still aren’t disciplined. Many parents still poison their children with fatal rates of sugar (the American Heart Association found that the average American child consumes 21 teaspoons of sugar per day, triple the recommended amount). Many parents still let their children fail to achieve academic mediocrity. Just look to the success across the board of Asian-American students in academics, a triumph directly due to cultural mores in parenting.
Most significantly, children and teenagers are failing to become independent adults. Disciplining them with the most negative and emotional forms of reinforcement must hardly help. When kids or even teenagers act out, they want attention. Spanking is fueled by the same hysterical, emotionally charged attention that also motivates adolescent snowflakery. Parents would be far better off instituting hard lines at an early age than responding with the easiest and creepiest impulse.
