Free Custom «To spank or not to spank» Essay Paper

Spanking is not good for a child. Here are the reasons why you should not spank your child:

Spanking models                            

Parents who spank their children are teaching them to do the same thing to other children. This is why such parents might wake up to a rude shock one morning to find their five year-old son spanking their two-year old daughter. The same discipline techniques that you employ on your son or daughter are the same ones that the child will employ on his own children once they become parents. Children who are used to being spanked all the time always use aggression to resolve conflicts when they become adults.

It is easy to predict the type of relationships that a child who is always spanked will get into fights all the time while in the company of his peers. Fights are likely to characterize almost all relationships that a child gets into with other children, spouses and colleagues.

A good parent is one who shows compassion to a child such that the child never develops the fear of the parent with time. In most cases, spanking is the result of the emotion of anger. When you spank your child while you are angry, you are teaching him to respond to emotional outbursts in aggressive ways.

Physical punishment on children leaves a permanent mark on their lives. Parents who spank their children leave a permanent park in their lives. These parents perceive this mark to be a sign of improvement which it is not. Spanking instills more fear than discipline in all children.

Hitting devalues your child

Your child feels much devalued every time you hit him. The negative psychological effects are even more far-reaching when no explanation is given for the spanking. The self-image of the child suffers an additional blow every time he is spanked. This is because of the confusing message that spanking communicates to the child. Children should be helped nurture a sense of value in their inner selves. Giving the child a hug after the spunk will not help things. Therefore, the best option is to avoid all forms of spanking altogether.

Hitting may easily lead to child abuse

Punishment can easily escalate into a form of child abuse. Once you have formed a habit of spanking your child, this may be very difficult to stop. In this case, you are likely to end up abusing the child without ever realizing it. When you catch the child doing the wrong things, the first impulse is to hit her. Once you hit the child, she is distracted from doing what he was doing. Your emotion of anger subsides. Since the child has not been told why he was spanked, he continues with the unwanted action and another, harder spank follows the first time. Within not time, the child is abused rather than punished.

Spanking does not result in improvement of behavior

Hitting leads to a cycle of actions involving parent and child instead of improvement in discipline. The child does wrong, he is spanked and he feels irritated and repeats the wrong action. He is spanked again and feels more irritated and therefore swears to express his anger by doing things that will anger the parent even more. As spanking becomes harder the child continues to dissociate the concept of spanking and instillation of discipline.

Spanking is way of promoting anger in parents and children alike

Children always think that punishment is not a good thing for them and can take every available opportunity to resist corporal punishment more than any other form of disciple. In most cases, spanking is done by parents in the context of emotional rage. By doing this, you are encouraging your child to act on harmful emotions such as anger. Since children do not have any sense of fairness that is innate in them, with time, they learn that spanking is a fair way of dealing with ones emotions in the quest of “fairness”.

Spanking rekindles bad memories among children at the expense of good ones

Children who are often spanked are more likely to go through traumatic psychological experiences later in life. This is because the sting of the spank last long after the children has forgotten all about why he was spanked in the first place. Such memories block pleasant memories in a very disturbing way. This is not good for the mental and emotional development of the child. The long-term negative effects of hitting such as egocentricity and aggression can be so severe that dealing with them becomes impossible. Therefore, it is better to do away with spanking as a form of discipline.

No studies have shown that spanking is an effect disciplinary technique

Although many researchers have been researching on the importance of spanking as a disciplinary technique, none of them has proved that spanking is indeed an effective way of discouraging negative behavior (Pollard-Sacks, 2003). Additionally, majority of parents have been noted to do away with their spanking behaviors as their parenting experience increases.

According to an article by Orentlicher (1998), entitled: Spanking and other corporal punishment of children by parents: overvaluing pain, undervaluing children, spanking reduces the social distance between the parent and child. The child always feels a sense of insecurity rather than security once a spanking parent is around. This negatively affects children’s natural process of development in which case they would ordinarily be expected to look up to the parent for a sense of emotional and physical attachment.

In conclusion, parents should refrain from spanking as a form of discipline in order to prepare their children for a violence-free future that is free from ugly, negative emotional outbursts.  By doing away with spanking, the parents will be closing the social distance that this type of punishment brings about.