Should Spanking Be Used in the Home?

Should spanking be used in the home?

As parents we want what is best for our children. We are expected to teach a vulnerable, curious child to be an intelligent and self-sufficient adult. Teaching through punishment is a necessary and unavoidable technique; which is why the method of spanking has been scrutinized and studied by numerous scholars. What is spanking? To some this means to discipline your child with physical force, using a variety of items such as your hand, belts, shoes, paddles, bats, brooms, or whatever is handy. This is wrong. No child deserves such severe punishment. Spanking, as it should be defined, is a series of smacks with the open hand on a child's bottom. Hitting a child on the face or any other part of the body other than the buttocks is not spanking. So why is spanking necessary? What are reinforcements? What myths are the anti-spanking establishments using to push to convince parents that spanking is inhumane? When should spanking be used?

We start teaching our children through punishment at a very young age. The anti-spanking society would encourage parents to use timeouts and other long term punishments. There is a problem with this. Young children quickly forget why they are in time out, grounded, or in quiet time; they loose interest with crying and begin to play and entertain themselves, leaving the parent frustrated that their punishment is not working. This teaches nothing. The child is often too young to understand that the sentence they are serving is for a particular offense. Then the next time they commit this crime they don’t know why they are being yanked up and deprived of what they want to do, they become angry with their parent. However, with a light spanking, and an explanation the child is educated in their wrong acts; not to mention that the offense is often avoided next time as the child connects pain with this wrong action. If the fire is pretty and I want to touch it, but it hurts, I won’t likely try to do this again. This is a primary concept learned even in early toddler years (T. Dorsey, personal communication, October 1, 2006).

Through positive and negative reinforcement we mold our children to be good and to be honest, polite, hard-working, dependable, and caring. How do we encourage and discourage certain behaviors? A principle called the Law of Effect says behaviors that are followed by pleasant consequences are more likely to occur in the future while behaviors that are followed by unpleasant consequences are less likely to occur in the future (Thorndike, E. L., 1927, p 213). So if we want our children to be polite, we should give them something pleasant after they act politely. If we want them to stop throwing tantrums, we should give them something unpleasant after they throw a tantrum. Positive reinforcement could be as simple as a smile, a “Thank You”, or a hug. Some effective punishments are scolding, time-out, loss of privileges, grounding, and spanking. As children grow older they begin to internalize the lessons they have been taught and require less punishment. They learn to control their own behavior by following the rules we have taught them. However, even older children need to know there are consequences for disobeying our rules.

Some claim that spanking teaches children what not to do, but it does not teach them what to do. This is true, but it is true of all punishment. Yet this does not mean that punishment is useless. It is important for children to learn what not to do. When a parent is administering punishment, she can tell her child how she expects her to act the next time. Thus, it is vital that a parent talk with her child before the spanking. But as long as this is done, then the criticism that spanking does not teach children what to do is moot.

Anti-spanking organizations lead parents to believe that spanking is abusive. Not so.* Spanking is not abusive. First, abusive parents often do not love their children. They abuse their children because they regret having them; the children remind them of someone else, and so on. But for most parents, spanking is done out of love and care for the child. Second, abusive parents lash out at their children in anger, not caring if they injure the child or not. But parents that spank do not want to injure their children. Yes, spanking hurts, but it is done so as not to cause lasting damage. That is why spankings are given on the bottom, for the posterior does not contain any vital organs. Do some parents spank too hard and cause welts and bruises? Yes, and they have gone too far. Properly done, spanking causes no lasting damage.

Some researchers have reported correlations between the number of spankings a child receives and depression and anti-social behavior later in life (Baumrind, D., Larzelere, R. E., & Cowan, P. A., 2002, p580-589). However, these studies are suspect on several