Scientists talked about the destructive effect of flogging on the child's psyche

For the last 10-15 years, psychologists, neurologists and pediatriciansSpanking Is Ineffective and Harmful to Children, Pediatricians' Group Says all over the world are trying to convince parents that flogging is not the best form of punishment for children. If someone does not agree with this yet, then perhaps a new report from scientists from Harvard will be able to finally convince you.

StudyHow spanking may affect brain development in children university publishedCorporal Punishment and Elevated Neural Response to Threat in Children in Child Development magazine, showed that spanking can do even more harm than previously thought. Scientists have found that physical abuse as a way of maintaining discipline can change the development of a child's brain in the same way as much more serious forms of abuse.

Corporal punishment causes arousal in areas of the brain involved in threat perception and directly alters decision-making. Such changes in brain development could have serious consequences in the future.

In their study, scientists tried to figure out the consequences of flogging at the neurobiological level. For this, the brains of 40 children who were subjected to corporal punishment and 107 children to whom they were not used were studied. Each child was asked to explain whether they had been beaten in the past or not, and assessed whether they had experienced serious sexual or physical abuse.

After being divided into groups, all the participants were placed under an MRI scanner and the faces of the actors showing different emotions for different periods of time were shown. So scientists were able to evaluate and compare the brain activity of each child.

As a result of these tests, it was found that children who were flogged were more nervous when looking at "frightened" faces, and this was also observed in children who were more severely abused. There were no differences in brain activity in these groups. In their development, such children are very different from their peers, who are not at all familiar with corporal punishment.

As with many studies, there were limitations. It is impossible to assess how severely and how often children were punished by flogging, and how this affected their self-esteem. However, the researchers emphasized that differences in the development of children in families with different parenting styles can question the current notion of whether corporal punishment is very different from outright violence.