Physical Punishment Pitfalls
To spank or not to spank, that is a parent’s question.
Many parents lose their patience and have to fight hard not to spank their child. Spanking may relieve the frustration of the parent for a moment but this is definitely the least effective way to discipline a child.
Spanking is emotionally harmful to the parent and child. It only teaches the child violence and makes him prone to anger. Plus, it may result in emotional pain and resentment.
In the movies, they always depict psycho killers as those who were punished by their parents when they were younger. In fact, even in real life, there is a connection on how a person was raised to what they can be when they get older. When a person is continuously physically punished, there are side effects.
Parental socialization practices often reflect a person’s behavior. Often times, you see it in the movies or read it in books. The background of the character highly depends on how his parents raised him.
If the person is frequently abused physically, there are a number of consequences or what we’ll regard as pitfalls here in this chapter. We call it pitfalls because a grave action of the parent hurting the children can actually lead to the child hurting himself or hurting other people.
The immediate result of physical punishment on children is the misbehaving stops. It really depends on the child. Some children do have to be spanked in order to know that they are doing something wrong. There are times children forget that their parents are authoritative figures.
In an episode of “Desperate Housewives,” Bree Van De Kamp spanked Lynette Scavo’s misbehaving son Porter. Lynette personally didn’t believe in spanking because their mother hit her and her sister, and she wouldn’t want to do that to her children.
But the Scavo children were way over the line that they had to be disciplined. Lynette couldn’t do it so Bree stepped in.
However, parents must be careful. Sometimes the spanking can escalate to child abuse. A parent must know when their children should be spanked or not. If they do decide that their child deserved to be spanked at that point, talk to him later on why it had to be done.
Sadly, physical punishment cannot teach the appropriate or alternate behavior that we want our children to have. Hitting the child does not assure that he will stop repeating that behavior. With some children, physical punishment can actually hinder, instead of improve, compliance.
There are some parents who argue that in hitting the child, the parent merely undermines reasoning and explanation. Lifting their hand on the kid could only prevent the child from explaining his side further. The child will then feel threatened or worse scared of the parent.
The side effect, if this occurs, is that the child will either be terrified of the parent/s or unleash his emotion to the other direction, which is anger. This is often the result that we see in movies and read about books. Those who were physically abused in their childhood have the tendency to be murderers or psychopaths when they get older.
A conducted research shows that getting hit at home led to the child being more aggressive than the other kids in school. Because they experienced or witnessed getting hit, they perceive that hitting is the way to solve problems.
Know that physical punishment results in distance between parent and children. Not only will it indulge resentment and fear, there will also be a huge gap between the two parties.
Furthermore, the long-range effect of physical punishment is that children fail to take responsibility for their own actions. If they’re young, they will not be able to understand why they were punished in the first place. Their reason for not doing the action is to avoid getting hit, instead of not doing it because it is not proper. This will stunt the child’s maturity in comprehending what is right and what is wrong.
The major risk factors include: low self-esteem and morale, alienation, depression, suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, uncontrolled anger, aggression, abusiveness, spouse battering, child abuse, delinquency, vandalism and lessened education, economic and occupational achievement. It should go without saying that you wouldn’t want these to happen to your child, would you?
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