Spanking has been a topic that has been talked about for some time now. Spanking is a type of corporal punishment involving the act of striking the buttocks of another person to cause physical pain, generally with an open hand. Spanking should be allow as a punishment when dealing with misbehaving children. When spanking children there should be some guidelines of what is not acceptable when spanking children. When it comes to spanking children, there can be a wrong and a right way to do it.
Many parents believe that since they brought this child into the world that have the right to do whatever they believe is right when punishing their own kids. Yes, this may be true, but when you think about it how do social workers or anybody else dealing with children’s well-being figure out what is child abuse and what is not. Is hitting your child in the mouth with your hand when they might have said something that should not have been said the right way to punish them? Is it wrong to hit your child anywhere else but their bottom?
This is a question that cause make spanking something that can be a very hard topic to say if it is a right side or a wrong. Spanking children also can come from a religious background. A third position representing the “spare the rod, spoil the child” perspective is infrequently expressed in the research and academic writings. “A spanking is not going to hurt a child’s personality. If anything, it is going to help the child in the long run: spare the rod, spoil the child. I do not want children who have not been spanked to be our leaders of tomorrow” (Lee, 2000, p. 759).
Most people using this as their reason for punishing their child thinks that if you allow your child to do whatever they want it could possible make your life harder and theirs in the long run. In North America, people believe physical punishment by a parent, as long as it is not severe, is still seen by many as necessary discipline. It is difficult to imagine that a parent would be able to meet all this criteria when administering spanking; indeed, it would likely be both inadvisable and bordering on abusive if parents spanked children following every instance of a given misbehavior. Gershoff)
The reason some people think that physical punishment is abuse is because there has been some cases where individuals have clearly crossed the line like a famous NFL football player has done. With proper guidelines of what is taking this punishment to far, some of those cases might not have occurred. Some parents think it is perfectly fine to spank your child. It is said that this is not child abuse and it is strictly parenting. When a child is misbehaving or have gotten themselves in trouble, a parent is liable to step in and teach them what is right or wrong.
Researchers from this perspective argue that spanking may not have harmful consequences and under some conditions may even have beneficial effects. Larzelere (1994), for example, argues that the evidence is clear that mild or occasional spanking is beneficial for children between the ages of 2 and 6 under certain conditions, and that the effectiveness of important alternatives such as explanation and time-out is enhanced by being backed up with a mild spanking (Larzelere, 1994). With these benefits you could possibly see why doing this helps with right and wrong.
Some see spanking is a good way to get children’s’ attention when they know this is not the correct way to be doing things. “Spanking may trade a brief period of intense distress for longer term guilt and anxiety associated with internalization. Spanking may be used to control the short-term behavior of the child and to reinforce the authority of the parent’. (Baumrind, 1997, p. 177). By this being said you can see that spanking is to make a child realize what his/her has done was not right and should be fixed as soon as possible.
It’s not always about the spanking itself says Kate Morrall, a writer for Parent and Child Magazine, “It’s more about scaring the child out of the act of doing it again in fear of consequences. I was raised to understand that if I did something wrong, I would be punished for it—not coddled, and certainly not allowed to believe it is okay to have a bad attitude or to show a lack of respect. I spank my own children to reinforce the fact that wrongdoings will be punished, not tolerated” (Foss, 2000, p. 759).
Spanking a child could be considered as violence. When you think of an abuse relationship you think of a man hitting a woman. Well some say when you are spanking children it is somewhat of the same affect. If you think about you are hitting your child even thought you might not trying to harm them it could be considered in that manner. Applying guidelines to spanking could really help workers in the field that deal with these types of situations a little bit easier because it would narrow the pool of what is child abuse and what is parenting.
In those field they have to go through so many stages to see exactly what is going on with a child and if they are getting abuse or not and if there are rules and the parents just did not follow them it would be a guaranteed assurance that the person on this job did the right thing and probably would not fell bad at the end of the day debating if whether or not that was the right thing to do and did they make the right decision on a particular case. By creating guidelines it can improve the relationship you might have with your children.
Like with the idea that you might think what you are trying to teach the child and figure out a way to teach them what you mean like right and wrong and make it a conversation than spanking them and they still really do not understand what they have done wrong and what they need to do to not let the situation happen again. Also, when you have restricting on spanking it will most likely make parents find different ways to inform their child. So when it comes to things they know that there are not support to do they know ahead of time and less spanking might even occur.
Some might think spanking is the lazy way to training up your kids because of the fact that you wait till your child does something wrong without knowing better first and they end up getting in trouble for something that was not clearly explained to be wrong to them. The concern of a child’s well-being is also something that could be possibly helped when guideline of what you can and cannot do when spanking. The reason I believe that this would help children when getting a spanking not to get truly harm is the fact that some children could be informed about is appropriate and what is not.
Even though if the kid is to young t know possible if any adult knows the guidelines or rules and regulation that would be used they could inform higher authority of the situation for the children’s sake. Also a rule could be in place if you do spank a child in public it could only be a pop on the hand or something of that nature. Not something that is very aggressive or embarrassing to the child because even though they might be young they still are a human being and have some rights.
It has been said that the reason some spanking is performed is because the parent says “that they live in my house so they have to abide by my rules because they pay the bills. ” With that being said, some parent spank their child in public places and not just at home and another thing is that some children are not old enough for consent to this rule. Parental spanking seems on its face to be a violation of the non-aggression principle, because it depends on one’s will to use physical force or not.
Some phycologist try to argue that spanking is not a violation of this principle with the idea that since the child is somewhat a guest in the parents’ house, the child is subjected to their rules and regulations. In some cases this argument can be true, but in others, a child may be too young to consent, or when they are getting spanked they are not in their home but in public places. Children do not always know what is right and what is wrong and need to be taught in a healthy manner.
The respondents were presented with three different scenarios — child refuses to go to bed at bedtime, child runs into the street without looking, and child hits playmate — and with three different ages — 2, 5, and 8 years old. For all three ages, physicians were least likely to favor spanking for relatively minor misbehavior (refusing to go to bed), and most likely to favor spanking when the child’s misbehavior was dangerous (running into the street). And while a minority of physicians supported corporal punishment in any single scenario, 67% favored spanking in at least one scenario.
While no dramatic differences in attitudes appeared based on the age of the child, this may be due to the fairly narrow age range used. Family physicians were more likely than pediatricians (70% compared to 59%) to support corporal punishment (Flynn). Seeing in this research that most people agree that going in the street is a bad thing so it was the scenario that was picked for spanking. Spanking this child should have gave them the idea that going in the street is not something that they should do again. With guidelines it also could possible make parents want to change the way they discipline their kids.
Knowing that if their anger gets the best of them and they fall outside of the rule that has been put in place for them not to be punished and for their child’s safety. They might not want to take a chance to with that way of disciplining and choose to do it a non spanking approach to the situation. Mild spanking should be used along with other methods of discipline such as “timeouts”, removal of rewards, and “stand in the corner. ”Baumrind says, “mild, nonabusive, physical punishment is not harmful when used occasionally, in a loving relationship, and in conjunction with other methods of discipline, most notably with reasoning”
