What spanking does to your child?

Rumour has it that Eric Kirby created the famous fictional superhero the incredible Hulk after being inspired by the story of the mother who lifted a car to rescue her child trapped underneath. Where this serves as a glorifying testimony to the strength that comes from being a parent, it is ironic the same character morphs into a Green Goliath, a seething, raving, raging machine of pure destruction in matter of minutes when irked. Not much different from parents who choose to spank their kids when incensed at their behaviour.



Today, spanking or corporal punishment is deeply entrenched in our conventional parenting routine. We mock those who endorse peaceful parenting and snub them for raising children we deem too ‘affluent and entitled’ for their age. Granted parenting is the single most exhausting job in the world, it still does not make spanking a tantrum-prone child acceptable. There is potentially zero benefit of spanking a child other than moulding them into forced submission, fracturing their personality and knocking points off their IQ scale in the process. Primarily, as behaviour, it reflects more on you as a parent and your vulnerability to tenuous situations, rather than your child’s ability to catch you off guard and victimise you.

If you hit your child because you were fuming and not out of love for them, than spanking was more to your benefit. The need to thrash arises not because your child was behaving out of the line but because after reasoning, cajoling, and gambling fail you, lashing out physically ensures you retain the upper hand in the situation.



To those that argue spanking makes a respecting, obliging, line-toeing person out of their child, if it really was what drummed sense into children, once would have served the purpose, all spanked little kids would have been an epitome of obedience. Spanking creates a vicious circle of bad behaviour because children do not understand the underlying reason of the beating so they do it again. Spanking stops a tantrum for the time being only and teaches children to condone violence.

Hampering your child’s wellbeing

A study published by the Journal of Family Psychology analysing the impact of spanking in a massive cohort of 160,000 children, representing data amassed over five decades, showed spanking was a very likely cause of development of negative outcomes in adulthood, including mental illness. Conducted by Elizabeth Gershoff, an associate professor at the University of Texas and co-authored by Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, the results showed spanking was not related to long term disciplinary compliance in the children which is the parents’ intended outcome of spanking their children. Rather, it was related to 13 of the 17 detrimental outcomes listed by the research duo.

"We as a society think of spanking and physical abuse as distinct behaviours," Gershoff said. "Yet our research shows spanking is linked with the same negative child outcomes as abuse, just to a slightly lesser degree."



According to a 2014 UNICEF report, as many as 80% of parents worldwide resort to corporal punishment as a way of disciplining their kids, despite there being burgeoning evidence to the contrary.

“The upshot of the study is that spanking increases the likelihood of a wide variety of undesired outcomes for children. Spanking thus does the opposite of what parents usually want it to do,” Grogan-Kaylor says.

In another study conducted by Professor Catherine Taylor and her team at Tulane University, it was seen in a cohort of 2,500 children, those who were spanked more often at the age of three were more likely to be aggressive at the age of five.

"The odds of a child being more aggressive at age five increased by 50% if he had been spanked more than twice in the month before the study began," says Taylor. These children displayed aggression even when characteristics such as depression, alcohol and drug use, spousal abuse and whether she considered abortion while pregnant were absent in mothers.

Another analysis conducted by Children’s Hospital in Eastern Ontario, Canada, found spanking caused cognitive impairment in children by reducing the grey matter in the brain, the connective tissue between brain cells. This leads to poor intelligence and dampens learning abilities. It also affects the area of the brain responsible for sensory control, speech, muscular control, emotions and memory.

Spanking is only a quick fix and can be replaced by calling time outs, treating the cause of tantrum and distracting the child by change of scenery. Often, a good cry out does the child better as the bottled up emotion is vented and they begin to understand once the haze of aggression is cleared. But don’t let corporal punishment rob you of a life-long trust and loving bond with your child.