Do not spank your children

PsychologyToday: For years, people have debated whether punishing children works, whether it corrects their behaviors without having any negative long-term consequences. Spanking is one such form of discipline. Does spanking children work?
A paper published in the July/August issue of the American Psychologist concludes that physical punishment of children (including spanking) is ineffective, and more importantly, it is harmful―it results in behavioral and mental health problems.1Let us start by by discussing the meaning of punishment, before examining the review’s conclusions about spanking children.Why do parents spank their children? Perhaps because they truly believe that spanking is effective, or because as children they were spanked, too.But spanking has been shown to be correlated with disruptive, delinquent, or aggressive acts in children; these, in turn, often result in more spanking, contributing to a vicious cycle.2
The belief that spanking is effective is not limited only to people without extensive knowledge of psychology. As the authors of the present paper note, a 2016 survey of over 800 members of the American Psychological Association found that 30 percent did not believe that spanking was harmful to children, and 17 percent did not consider spanking a problematic way to discipline a child. Indeed, 14 percent had advised parents who were their clients to use spanking from time to time.
So where is the evidence that spanking is actually harmful? One of the difficulties in proving that spanking is detrimental, is that, as the authors of the present paper note, conducting a true experiment on spanking is unethical.
A true experiment on spanking would require almost the impossible and certainly the unethical: Random selection of pregnant mothers, random assignment of half of them to the condition of spanking their children and the other half to a no-spank condition (to serve as controls), so that we can determine the effects (both short- and long-term) of spanking children.