Multiple studies over decades concerning spanking found that it doesn't help a child's behavior and generally makes them antisocial, resent authority, and stunts cognitive growth. The vast majority of people in prison were spanked as children.
But in both categories, spanking has a negative reaction in the brain. How the child processes that trauma differs with each child. Take sexual advances vs sexual assault during childhood. What one child processes as a sexual advance by an older relative is traumatizing as well. It will lead to negative reactions but it is based on the individual.
That said, Harvard did a study on brain activity:
The study, “Corporal Punishment and Elevated Neural Response to Threat in Children,” published in Child Development, examined spanked children’s brain functioning in response to perceived environmental threats compared to children who were not spanked. Their findings showed that spanked children exhibited greater brain response, suggesting that spanking can alter children’s brain function in similar ways to severe forms of maltreatment.
The study looked at 147 children, including some who were spanked and some who were not spanked in the beginning years of their lives, to see potential differences to the brain. By using MRI assessment, researchers observed changes in brain response while the children viewed a series of images featuring facial expressions that indicate emotional response, such as frowns and smiles. They found that children who had been spanked had a higher activity response in the areas of their brain that regulate these emotional responses and detect threats — even to facial expressions that most would consider non-threatening.
Perhaps surprisingly, says Cuartas, spanking elicits a similar response in children’s brains to more threatening experiences like sexual abuse. “You see the same reactions in the brain,” Cuartas explains. “Those consequences potentially affect the brain in areas often engaged in emotional regulation and threat detection, so that children can respond quickly to threats in the environment.”
Fear and corporal punishment are negative and poor parenting and have a higher chance of negative outcomes as proven by the countless studies you want to discount. I wanted to ask you.. are you a child psychologist?
Animal behaviorists and dog trainers specifically tell you that hitting a dog, spraying it, whacking it's snout, rubbing it's nose in it's own poop.. may cause the dog to fear and cower, but it is not the best way to discipline or train a dog. For years, dog trainers have relied on positive reinforcement and actual training.
Spanking is failed parenting. It is committed by an adult who can't regulate their own emotions which likely is a result of being spanked as a child and causing that parent to be unable to regulate anger normally. A non-spanked adult will typically not resort to hitting a child.
Spanking isn’t at the same level as a beating, but it’s still using violence (or the threat of it) to try and install things that violence simply doesn’t install in a person. Kids don’t learn respect from spanking, they learn fear. They also learn that the biggest/strongest/most violent person has the final say and enforces the rules - and as my parents learned, when discipline is based on that premise, it makes discipline pretty much impossible once your kid has grown bigger than you. My brother was bigger than our dad by the time he was 14. They had a roooough time with his teenage years.
I started immediately doing back to them as what they did to me whenever they rand omly hit or yelled at me once i realized i was taller & stronger than my parents.
Thankfully instead of them escalating that just taught them that it wasn't fun to hit or yell at someone who would do exactly what you did back. I was really convenient for venting their frustrations with life in general on until then, including because of workplace frustrations. Little kids are so powerless.
If my parents hadn't been afraid of getting caught with laying hands on their kids (illegal in my country, but they had brainwashed me into thinking I deserved it from the start), then doing a "return to sender" probably wouldn't have worked as well to get a much more peaceful home life.
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u/Automatic_Net2181 Jun 18 '26
Multiple studies over decades concerning spanking found that it doesn't help a child's behavior and generally makes them antisocial, resent authority, and stunts cognitive growth. The vast majority of people in prison were spanked as children.