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I'm not going to say that spanking isn't an effective way to discipline a child. I can also understand if a 3 year old walks into a street to feel like spanking
by zappo2938 11y ago
I'm not going to say that spanking isn't an effective way to discipline a child. I can also understand if a 3 year old walks into a street to feel like spanking the child. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that other forms of discipline for small children are more effective at correcting behavior and children who are spanked are often more violent towards other children with other developmental and learning problems in school. Also, what we can do is look at how adjusted, happy, and successful people are in life, whether they are a doctor or lawyer with their own practice, divorced, in jail for violent crimes, or if they have a drug or psychological problems and compare that to whether they were spanked or worse as children. What we discover is that people who were not spanked or spanked very sparingly for example only in the case they walked out into the street do much, much better in life. So if you have children and want to play the numbers game, it might be worth while to explore other ways of disciplining your child. Not only do they work, but they have better long term effects on the child.
- dash2 11y agoJust out of interest, what is the overwhelming scientific evidence? Is it causal or just correlational? Because I can imagine tons of reasons why children who are often spanked have more problems in school - not least, reverse causality - that would not imply you should never spank your child.
- danieltillett 11y agoI actually don’t think that there is any evidence of mild smacking being a major problem. Child abuse (beating of children is very bad), but measuring the effects of a rare and relatively minor event in a child’s life is very hard.
- danieltillett 11y agoOK it sounds like you are actually of the belief that spanking should be rare, rather than never. In this I agree, but I do think from personal experience that spanking is a useful "thermonuclear" option to stop dangerous behaviour in young children. To give you an example, I once caught one of my children at the age of two inserting objects into electrical power points. I gave him a good spank on the bottom and he never did it again. It is possible that another solution would have worked, but when you are dealing with a two year old playing with electricity do you really want to take the chance with another options? If spanking is rare children quickly learn that to get a spank means they have crossed a no-go threshold. My limited personal experience of the results of disincline (of all kinds) is that inconsistent or random discipline from a parent is worse than almost all others. Children who live in fear of being disciplined for what appears to them to be for no reason, or where their actual behaviour plays very little role in affecting the discipline they experience, fair far worse. It is really hard as a parent, but being consistent is critically important. No means no.
- zappo2938 11y agoI strongly agree with this author: Spanking and Child Development: We Know Enough Now To Stop Hitting Our Children[1] > Spanking remains a common, if controversial, childrearing practice in the United States. In this article, I pair mounting research indicating that spanking is both ineffective and harmful with professional and human rights opinions disavowing the practice. I conclude that spanking is a form of violence against children that should no longer be a part of American childrearing. My stance is consistent with the recommendations of the American Psychological Association [2] and the American Academy of Pediatrics [3]. The issue is can we have a discussion about it without unfriending each other on Facebook building protective bubbles. [1]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3768154/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3768154/ [2]http://www.apa.org/about/policy/corporal-punishment.aspx http://www.apa.org/about/policy/corporal-punishment.aspx [3]https://www.healthychildren.org/English/family-life/family-dynamics/communication-discipline/Pages/Where-We-Stand-Spanking.aspx https://www.healthychildren.org/English/family-life/family-d...
- danieltillett 11y agoYes this is one of the reasons I spend far more time on HN than Facebook.
- DanBC 11y agoYou subjected your child to violence because you failed in your duty to keep him safe?
- TeMPOraL 11y agoWhen you put it that way, it does sound wrong.
- danieltillett 11y agoDo you have children Dan? In this case I think I would have failed if I had not spanked my son. The reason why spanking is so effective is it ties the action and punishment very close together. Children get pretty used to you yelling at them to stop doing something they want to do, so when they do something really dangerous you need to have someway of getting across to them that whatever they have done should never be done again. Spanking is a tool that should be rarely used, but I have no issue with being used in the appropriate situation.