Why Corporal Punishment is Not the Best Way to Discipline A Child
Corporal punishment or physical punishment is a form of disciplinary measure that many parents use to discipline their children. In a culture that I grew up in, some of our elders say that physical punishment is an effective way to raise their children with fear and respect for them. Children are mostly given a physical punishment when they try to reason out with their parents, when they misbehave and when they are disobeying their parents’ rules. Physical punishment can be from simple pinching, hitting using belts, hangers, sticks, or even spanking, or worst beatings towards a child. Some parents are defending that they have good intentions in giving physical punishment. Yet, little, do they know that physical punishment has a lot of adverse effects on their children. Corporal punishment can seem to be harmless to others, but it has a short- and long-term impact on children, especially when these punishments lead to frequent maltreatment and abuse. During my childhood, I remember that physical punishment also brought shame to me and caused me to have low self-esteem. I also remember when I was in elementary school back in the Philippines, our teachers would give us minor physical punishment for us to learn our lessons from misbehaving. I believe that there are more best ways of disciplining their child, and using physical punishment is not one of them. Physical punishment does not encourage a disciplined behavior to a child but would only leave them scarred in their childhood.
One of the hazardous effects of corporal punishment is a toxic stress that harms the emotional and mental health being of a child. Children are more likely to develop anxiety due to the frequency of punishment. According to Gershoff (2016), when the children are under stress, they experience an upsurge in heart rate, stress hormones secretion, amplified blood flow to the brain, as well as a heightened vigilance feeling and fear. In this Aspect, such physiological reactions trigger the fight‐or‐flight response of the body, activating the children in responding to that threat in their immediate environment. However, if such a stressor is no longer overwhelming, where the children are lucky to have very caring parents or guardians, they are in a position to regulate their real distress, hence learning how to cope with their stress response at present and in the future. In these cases, any stress hormone levels usually return to normal as the brain can recover from any short‐term brain harm through a process known as allostasis, whereby a child adapts to environmental encounters and return to normal. Further, if the children suffer adverse experiences triggering the associated allostatic to load early in their brain development, long‐term functional and structural changes to their brains are likely to occur, resulting in the conception that early stresses become “biologically embedded” permanently in the children (Gershoff, 2016). The toxic stress that can be caused by corporal punishment may result in permanent alterations in children’s behavior, brain functioning, as well as physiological responses to such pressure, which may precipitate to higher levels of chronic diseases that are stress‐related.
Font & Cage (2018) suggest that corporal punishment is directly associated with a child’s lower competence and cognitive functioning in children, such as low receptive vocabulary scores and child disruptive behavior in the classroom. Furthermore, relatively current meta-analyses studied cognitive development as a result of an act and found that corporal punishment a significant undesirable effect on child cognitive development and abilities. Particularly, the famous research in this field of sociology has focused on a narrower issue of child cognitive development, more than a general school outcome set. Obviously, cognitive abilities ought to impact school performance. Still, school performance is also probable to be affected by a series of other aspects that can be differently affected by physical punishment, including school socialization and engagement. However, Font & Cage (2018) state that the meta-analytic works, which usually offers the most robust evidence of such effects, tend to categorize cognitive development with shared academic competencies together with other alleged processes.
In the case where Gershoff (2016), considers physical punishment as a toxic stress source, physical punishment can be a child stressor since it is adverse, chronic, and uncontrollable. In a research that was conducted to examine whether a physical punishment history can be connected to distress, a large sample of ten‐ to sixteen‐year‐olds who responded to the question on how often they had been slapped, hit, or spanked, by their parents and their overall psychological distress was used. The research found that while the reported physical punishment frequency increased, the children’s distress levels also increased. It is significant to note that such association was above and over the physical abuse associated with more distress, signifying that physical punishment can be linked with a child’s general distress levels independent of any identifiably detrimental physical abuse experience.
In due course, physical punishment is evident that it inflicts some volume of pain with the parent’s hope that a child will change behavior to evade extra physical punishment. This disciplinary response type does not provide the child with a chance to learn, through reasoning and explanation on suitable practices. In contrast to child physical punishment, parents can alternatively opt to support children process their behaviors and actions. By the parents doing so, a child exercises cognitive functioning through receiving information while employing reasoning in an effort to identify their behavior source and how to rectify it for betterment in the future.
References
Font, S. A., & Cage, J. (2018). Dimensions of physical punishment and their associations with children’s cognitive performance and school adjustment. Child abuse & neglect, 75, 29- 40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2017.06.008
Gershoff, E. T. (2016). Should parents’ physical punishment of children be considered a source of toxic stress that affects brain development?. Family Relations, 65(1), 151-162. https://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12177