The Consequences of Spanking

Spanking is commonly associated with parents attempting to correct behavior in a child; ultimately often out of frustration and/or anger with the child’s behavior. In the heat of the moment, most parents do not associate the long term psychosocial or behavioral effects the act of spanking can have on a child. The dangers of these effects derived from how children think and behave show us that spanking is not an effective form of discipline.

Spanking teaches the child that violence is a socially accepted behavior to attain a desired result. To better understand this concept, we must first look at how a child’s brain works. From infancy, children learn through observation and imitation. Studies have shown that infants as young as forty-two minutes can successfully replicate simple facial expressions (Metzloff, Decety 492). By eight months, infants can imitate basic motor movement, even after twenty-four hours have passed since the initial movement occurred. At fourteen months, children can apply an imitation to an external situation up to a week after the initial imitation. (Windell, 67-68, 221). A famous example of this is Albert Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment. Christopher Green of York University helps interpret Bandura’s experiment and results: While acknowledging that certain children may have inherited aggressive personalities, Bandura demonstrated that the majority of personality is learned. Adult models were escorted to a room and shown various toys to play with while child observers watched from outside the room. Among the various toys was a clown “bobo” doll. In some “play” sessions, the models demonstrated aggression toward the doll by punching, kicking, hitting and yelling at it. In other sessions, the models quietly pla...

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...ehavior without the need for spankings.

Works Cited

Green, Christopher D. "Classics in the History of Psychology." n.d. Classics in the History of Psychology. Web. 20 04 2014. .

Hyman, Irwin A. The Case Against Spanking: How to Discipline Your Children Without Hitting. San Fransico: Jossey-Bass, 1997. Print.

Metzloff, Andrew N. and Jean Decety. "What Imitation Tells us About Social Cognition: A Rapprochment Between Developmental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience." Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences: Decoding, Imitating, and Influencing the Actions of Others: The Mechanisms of Social Interaction 358.1431 (2003): 491-500. JSTOR. 20 04 2014. .

Nicholson, Alastair. "Choose to Hug, Not Hit." Family Court Review 46.1 (2008): 11-36. EBSCO. 20 04 2014.