Corporal Punishment As Negative Discipline

There are many critical issues in education psychology that are important to education. These critical issues are barriers that are elements in the way of better opportunities for students. In this paper, I will talk about spanking and aggression as a method of correcting children’s behavior. This critical issue I am concerned about should not be continued as a form of discipline for children. Parents giving ineffective disciplines to their children are hurting them and not delivering good emotional, cognitive ad social development for their future. There is a lot of research that has been examined with spanking. The five articles I bring up in this paper describe this critical issue in detail.

The first research article by Gershoff (2013) explains how spanking is a form of violence and should no longer be a thing. The author of the article says and explains how we now have research to determine that spanking is ineffective. In this article spanking means hitting a child on the bottom with an open hand as punishment. The parents are trying to reduce the likelihood of the behavior again by spanking their children. This discipline is a punishment that is a form of violence which can be quite confusing for the child. Research has shown how the children who are spanked more likely to behave aggressive in future interfaces. There was a research done by (Robert & Powers, 1990) and a research team who did experiments comparing spankings and time out. The participants were children who disobeyed and got put in time out or got spanked. The results were that spankings were not found to be more effective than time outs. There is a lot of research to show parents should use alternative forms of discipline and not spanking or violence because it is ineffective.

The Spanking Debate is over is an article that explains how most American parents spank as a punishment and think they are being effective, but they are wrong (Shpancer, 2018). The author (Shpancer, 2018) said there is conclusions where spankings predicts negative development outcome for the child after the spankings has begun. The author talks about a social learning theory expressed by Bobo Doll experiments saying children who see aggression by role models are more likely to copy the behavior and increase aggression (Shpancer, 2018). Ecobiodevelopmental theory claims how spanking is a childhood stressor which can affect psychological problems in adulthood. These perspectives show that spanking information has addressed many negative problems when it comes to outcomes of the children.

The third reference The Debate about Spanking Children is Over. It’s just wrong. brings up a lot of interesting points on spanking and where it continues (Thomas, 2014). I had no idea before I started researching this topic that there is corporal punishment in schools. There are 19 states where public schools are allowed corporal punishment and the other 31 states have banned corporal punishment. Parents and educators think it helps children’s behavior although there is no clear evidence of that. Children’s Defense Fund collected some data where 838 children were hit on average each day in public school (Thomas, 2014). All individual districts have their own guidelines on punishment but I will never think corporal punishment in public schools is right. Teachers are hired to teach and show kids the appropriate ways to behave but using corporal punishment like spankings will show children violence is acceptable. Corporal punishment needs to be banned for public schools everywhere because its harmful to children’s health.

Another article talks about new studies where people can educate parents on corporal punishment to where their positive views towards spankings changes. George Holden and a child psychologist, did a research to see results on the study of parents who are less likely to spank after reading briefly about its links to problems in children. The participants for the study were parent and non-parents who read and got educated on spankings research. The researchers found attitudes were significantly altered after the parents and non-parents participated. Exposure to studies over spankings and corporal punishment reduced positive attitudes toward that punishment. Parents all have their own opinions on disciplining their child but after researching you will discover how physical punishment of children is not useful for their upbringing. Parents should be encouraged to find alternative ways to discipline.

An article by (LaMotte, 2017) is about people who experienced spankings or something at a young age then having relationship violence in their future. The author talked about many different studies but Jeff Temples, University of Texas psychiatry professor, results in his study stuck out to me. The professor asked hundreds of kids how often they got spanked when they were younger and the kids who experienced spanking were more likely involved in relationship violence. There are so many similar studies with results exactly like this giving some evidence of how children who experience corporal punishment use violence in their future lives.

This article Effective Discipline for Children justifies how discipline is about changing behavior not punishing children physically. Discipline is very important for children because that is one of the things that will determine what kind of person they will grow up as. Positive discipline will help teach and guide children to raise them maturely. Parents or educators need to use rules and boundaries to encourage effective discipline. This article also gives effective techniques that can help guide the correct way when it comes to discipline. Some examples of effective techniques are time-out and disciplinary talking.

Spanking and other corporal punishments has been an issue going on for several decades. This negative discipline causes more problems than it solves. A lot of the things I read while researching this topic are quite eye opening. I was never spanked or gone through any experience like that so I have never really had a huge opinion on this issue until I started researching about it. After reading about spanking and educating myself on why it is harmful for children, why it should be banned from public schools, how it is ineffective and a bunch of other things I don’t agree with. In my opinion, corporal punishment should be banned at home and school as well because it is a bad influence for their life. First, it has no place in school because that is their temple of knowledge. We should want to teach our kids peace, love and nonviolence in this messed up society we have today. We all know violence is wrong yet we repeatedly hurt children for a punishment and they start thinking it is acceptable which is unacceptable.

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