Spanking is bad for children: study

Washington: The more you spank your kid, the more he goes against you.

A new meta-analysis of 50 years of research on spanking by experts at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan has found that spanking leads children's increased anti-social behavior, aggression, mental health problems and cognitive difficulties.

The study looks at five decades of research involving over 160,000 children.

The researchers say it is the most complete analysis to date of the outcomes associated with spanking, and more specific to the effects of spanking alone than previous papers, which included other types of physical punishment in their analyses.

Gershoff and co-author Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work, found that spanking, defined as an open-handed hit on the behind or extremities, was significantly linked with 13 of the 17 outcomes they examined, all in the direction of detrimental outcomes.

They tested for some long-term effects among adults who were spanked as children. The more they were spanked, the more likely they were to exhibit anti-social behavior and to experience mental health problems.

They were also more likely to support physical punishment for their own children, which highlights one of the key ways that attitudes toward physical punishment are passed from generation to generation.

The researchers looked at a wide range of studies and noted that spanking was associated with negative outcomes consistently and across all types of studies, including those using the strongest methodologies such as longitudinal or experimental designs.

As many as 80 percent of parents around the world spank their children, according to a 2014 UNICEF report.

Gershoff notes that this persistence of spanking is in spite of the fact that there is no clear evidence of positive effects from spanking and ample evidence that it poses a risk of harm to children's behavior and development.

Both spanking and physical abuse were associated with the same detrimental child outcomes in the same direction and nearly the same strength.

The study has been published in Journal of Family Psychology.