Study: spanking children harms their social development
Miscellaneous / / April 06, 2023
Such violence has the opposite effect of what parents want to achieve.
new research, published in Child Abuse & Neglect, presents compelling evidence that spanking harms children's social development. Those who were subjected to this kind of violence had a more pronounced externalizing behavior, low self-control and low interpersonal skills (compared to children who have never been beaten).
The author of the study, Jihye Kang, is an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University Old Dominion, tried to take a closer look at the relationship of spanking and changes in social adaptation children. To do this, he did not take into account the possible influence of external factors such as socioeconomic status, race and age of parents.
The analysis was based on the data of a longitudinal representative study of children in the United States, who were followed from kindergarten to elementary school - they were from 5 to 7 years old. Of these, more than 17,000 were whipped regularly (twice or more times a week) and more than 10,000 only recently.
To show the impact of such violence, the researcher excluded the first category of children from the sample. In the second category, the scientist tried to compare children as similar as possible on various covariates: home environment, cultural background, gender and age, parental activities, and so on.
By eliminating the influence of extraneous factors as much as possible, Kang revealed a clear causal relationship: in those children who were beaten even occasionally, had lower self-control and much lower interpersonal skills at age 6-7 years old. And this may indicate a delay in development, the author of the work noted.
The scientist summed up: spanking has "the opposite effect of what parents want to achieve" - they do not discipline children, but simply hinder their social growth.
It is worth noting that this is already far not the first study on this subject, and they all come down to the same conclusion: spanking children does not lead to anything good. Do you agree with this?
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