Whether to spare the rod or not is still a controversial topic up to this day. Authoritarian parents believe that children need to experience corporal punishment in order to gain discipline. However, more lenient or positive parents believe any form of physical punishment is detrimental to the emotional development of children. Nowadays, most child development researchers agree with the latter idea, and they are incessantly calling for the banning of physical punishment in children. Here are the reasons why:

1. Hitting children encourages them to become aggressive and to exhibit violent behavior, especially when they reach their teenage and adult years. Take note that virtually all dangerous law violators and hardened criminals experienced some form of physical abuse when they were children.

2. Punishment is a blight to the relationship between a child and a parent. Remember that human nature prevents us from loving someone who hurts us. Parents can expect full cooperation from their children only when these kids respect them. While hitting produces what seems like respect, in reality, it is only good behavior based on fear.

3. Physical punishment endorses the dangerous message that it is okay to hurt someone else so long as they are weaker than you are. Hurting a child also gives the message that physical punishment is an appropriate means of letting other people know how you feel and that it is an acceptable way of solving problems.

4. Hitting produces anger and it also endangers a child’s self-esteem. Children see their parents as the authority in everything. Meaning to say, children use their parents’ perception of them as a way to measure their self-worth. Hitting makes children feel hated. In return, children will be harboring feelings of anger until they grow up.

5. Parents are also hurt when they spank their kids. Parents who hit their children will feel guilty and they will also feel powerless because spanking as a method of discipline simply does not work. Parents should learn how to confidently raise their children based on respect, not on fear.

6. Spanking is an out-of-date style because it evolved from the practices of hierarchical societies. It simply doesn’t belong to the modern world, where the rights of both the authorities and the subjects, the strong and the weak, are recognized. There are now so many positive ways of parenting a child without having to depend on physical punishment.

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