Jennifer Beeson (FGCU) Corporal Punishment in the US

          In the United States the use of corporal punishment is legal in every state. Personally I believe that the physical punishment of children should be outlawed.            

          As a child I was never spanked. Since my parents do not believe in corporal punishment I have been influenced to feel the same as they do on the topic. Instead of physical punishment my parents used more mental punishment. This included groundings where I would have to sit in my room or not be allowed to play outside with my friends on days I got in trouble. They would also use punishments where I would have to recite or write down what I did wrong until I was told to stop. In my own opinion I believe alternative punishments like time-outs or groundings are more effective than spanking or physical punishments.            

        I think spanking is a pointless way of punishment because if a child does something wrong and gets a spanking in return, although it hurts, the pain only lasts for a couple minutes therefore leaving a short impact on a child’s bad behavior. Time-outs seem to have more of an effect on children because while sitting there they have time to think about what they have done and why they are in trouble. According to a recent study on Parenting and Preschool Child Development, “corporal punishment has a negative effect on children’s social development“. I have friends that grew up getting spanked or hit when being punished and I personally tend to see aggressive behavior from them in certain situations where I find myself being calm. Some studies have shown that mothers who have reported spanking their children are up to three times more likely to using other forms of physical punishment like hitting, shaking, and beating than mothers who reported to not use spanking as punishment.            

       For example, I remember growing up in my neighborhood back home where I had two best friends that lived down the street. I was at their house almost every day and there were numerous accounts when they would get in trouble. Sometimes they would get yelled at but most of the time they would get spanked right there in front of me. I can remember sitting on their couch one evening when their step-dad got home from work and realized my friend left his bike out in the yard. His step dad was not happy with him so he yelled at him and hit him on the butt with a spoon repetitively which in turn made my friend cry and yell. I then remember my friend being dragged by the arm into the other room where I continued to hear cries for him to stop and banging up against the wall. I rushed home and told my parents and I was not allowed to go down to their house for a good while after that. The point of this example is to show that sometimes a simple spanking can escalate to more intense beatings on children because of our human inability to calm down in moments of anger sometimes.            

       In high school I worked at a daycare for about six months so I learned a lot about the “friendly” ways to handle children’s bad behavior and took many workshops on how to approach children positively in a negative situation. For example, instead of saying “No, don’t hit your friend” we were required to say something along the lines of “Why did you hit your friend? Hands are for hugging not hitting, now go hug your friend and tell them you’re sorry”. This technique seemed to work amazingly and the children seemed to really learn from it.

            Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and parents have their rights to how they raise their children but I think there should be a limit to how far parent’s take punishing their children and the way they go about it.

So, how will you go about it?

This entry was posted on 17. April 2009 at 20:46 and is filed under Introduction to Sociology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.