Some parents believe that physically abusing their kids via spanking is an appropriate measure of discipline, but I do not.

Most psychologists agree that causing any form of physical pain to a child counts as abuse. This is because psychologists are aware of the many ways of teaching and punishing children. Spanking is never necessary, is abusive and only conditions the child in many negative ways.

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If parents use many other scientifically proven methods of discipline and teaching, spanking becomes irrelevant and barbaric. Operant conditioning is a basic methodology of teaching whereby the adult either reinforces or punishes a behavior by their child. If the child does something “good,” the parent will reinforce the behavior with a reward of some sort. This will make the child more likely to repeat this behavior as they know it will warrant a reward. If the child does something “bad,” the parent will punish the behavior, which causes the child to be less likely to repeat the behavior. This is usually an effective method of teaching a kid right from wrong, and timeouts work just fine.

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A passive and painless way of effective punishment is timeouts. If a child breaks a rule or does something bad, they are forced to sit in an area without entertainment or socialization with a timer to deem when they are free. If the child resists by running away, the parent must be resilient and continuously place them in timeout and start the timer over again. Eventually, the child will realize it is a huge waste of time and will abide to the timeout. This will carry over to subsequent behaviors and they will dread the time sink that is timeouts, hopefully preventing bad behaviors. Children will always have defiant moments, but timeouts has proven to be an effective and nonabusive method of pacifying bad behaviors.

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Many parents justify the spanking of their children with statements such as “well my parents spanked me, so it’s fine!” or “this will make them respect me.” Just because someone’s parents abused them does not justify their continuation of the abuse cycle. They should learn from their mistakes and become a better parent than their parents. A child will respect a parent that treats them with appropriate care and discipline.

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There are many negative outcomes and conditioning that occurs when a child is repeatedly punished by spanking. Children who are spanked are more likely to be aggressive, delinquent, have weakened mental health, damaged parental relationships, higher risk of abusing their children and even more likely to be an aggressive adult. It is safe to say spanking is an outdated and barbaric form of punishment that is used merely because of angry and uneducated parents.