Fifty year study on 160,000 kids confirms why you should never spank your kids
The more children are physically abused for discipline, the more aggressive and anti-social they might become, a study has found.
The study was published in the Journal of Family Psychology revealed that spanking kids for bad behaviour has effects that are similar to those of physical abuse, after observing studies over a 50 year period, including over 160,000 children, as the Independent reports.
“Our analysis focuses on what most Americans would recognize as spanking and not on potentially abusive behaviours,” Dr Elizabeth Gershoff, the study’s lead author, said. “We found that spanking was associated with unintended detrimental outcomes and was not associated with more immediate or long-term compliance, which are parents’ intended outcomes when they discipline their children.”
loading...
The study defined spanking as an open-handed hit on the extremities or the behind. The effects were negative, as kids were more likely to become more ill-disciplined. “The upshot of the study is that spanking increases the likelihood of a wide variety of undesired outcomes for children,” Gershof said. “Spanking thus does the opposite of what parents usually want it to do.”
Around 80% of kids are spanked in the entire world. Adults who were abused as children in this way are more likely to instill this form of punishment on their spawns. “We as a society think of spanking and physical abuse as distinct behaviours,” Gershoff observed. “Yet our research shows that spanking is linked with the same negative child outcomes as abuse, just to a slightly lesser degree.”
Loading...