Why Do Parents Use Corporal Punishment
Why Do Parents Use Corporal Punishment
Corporal punishment, defined as the use of physical force to cause pain with the intention of correcting or controlling behavior, remains a controversial child discipline technique utilized by parents and guardians around the world. Understanding the motivating factors behind its continued use can help inform discussions around more effective and ethical behavior management strategies.
The Desire to Assert Control and Dominance
One of the most fundamental reasons parents resort to spanking or other forms of corporal punishment is the belief that inflicting physical pain grants them the ability to immediately control their child’s behavior. Unlike more passive disciplinary tactics, hitting children provides an instantaneous way for parents to communicate their disapproval and assert dominance.
Key factors driving this tendency include:
- Frustration with children’s defiance or perceived “disobedience”: Parents can become angry and irritated when children ignore instructions or talk back, turning to corporal punishment as a rapid way to force compliance and obedience.
- Seeking control in stressful situations: When parents feel overwhelmed by screaming, fighting, or other chaotic behavior from children, hitting them can seem like the quickest path to restoring calm and order.
- Asserting hierarchical authority: Corporal punishment allows parents to unambiguously establish themselves as the dominant figures with absolute power over children’s bodies and behaviors.
By providing a fast, unambiguous way to control children’s actions, corporal punishment can wrongly seem like an optimal tool for frustrated, stressed parents seeking behavioral compliance from defiant kids. However, research consistently shows it fails to teach self-discipline and often damages the parent-child relationship.
Reflexive Repetition of Their Own Upbringing
Another driving factor behind parental use of corporal punishment is that it gets passed down as a reflexive disciplinary tactic from generation to generation. When parents were hit as kids, they are far more likely to hit their own children.
Key patterns around this transmission of violence include:
- Normalization of violence: When parents grow up being regularly spanked or hit for misbehavior, corporal punishment becomes normalized as an inevitable part of childhood. They enter parenthood regarding physical domination as a normal method for controlling kids.
- Unresolved trauma: Parents abused as children can subconsciously inflict pain on their own kids while unaware it repeats patterns of violence that still hurt them internally. Breaking this cycle requires self-awareness and therapeutic processing of childhood trauma.
- Lack of alternative models: Without having seen effective, non-violent disciplinary tactics as children themselves, parents mimic corporal punishment approaches not because they endorse them entirely, but because they know no other models for correcting behavior.
By reflexively copying parenting styles from their own upbringing without conscious examination, adults transmit violent disciplinary methods across generations. Making corporal punishment culturally unacceptable and demonstrating positive behavior management strategies can help break this cycle.
Belief in Biblical Support or Cultural Tradition
Though research defies the idea that corporal punishment is an effective form of discipline, some parents continue utilizing it due to ingrained cultural or religious beliefs systems affirming physical domination of children. Their devotion to certain texts or traditions persists even amid evidence of psychological harms.
Key beliefs driving this adherence include:
- Scriptural literalism: Some parents feel Biblically justified to “spare the rod and spoil the child” based on interpreting religious texts word-for-word rather than allegorically. Though condemned by many theologians, Biblical literalism continues allowing violence against children.
- Familial and cultural norms: Even where corporal punishment is legally banned, social norms around hitting children persist in certain cultural lineages and community system. Loyalty to familial or cultural patterns can supersede deference to laws or evidence against physical discipline.
- Divine paternalism: Conceptions of God as a domineering father figure approbate parents’ attempts to achieve obedient submission from children through violent force rather than moral suasion, compassion and reason.
The sense that divine will and spiritual tradition justifies violence against children allows some parents to defend corporal punishment even amid repudiation from both scientific and theological ethics. Reform requires cultural shifts and reinterpretation of religous texts for symbolic resonance with ethical evidence.
Lack of Knowledge Around Developmental Stages
Harsh physical discipline also often arises from parents carrying unrealistic behavioral expectations, constantly punishing children for age-appropriate conduct requiring empathetic guidance, not punishment.
Key areas where unrealistic expectations manifest include:
- Early childhood: Parents become enraged at toddlers for normal boundary-testing conduct like grabbing, kicking, or having emotional meltdowns, reacting with counterproductive corporal punishment.
- Emerging independence: Around ages 8-12, children secure growing senses of personal identity, creativity and agency. Parents insensitive to these developmental tasks unjustly perceive normal questioning and exploratory behaviors as defiance, disrespect or laziness.
Pre-teen maturation: As youth undergo rapid neurological changes around puberty including increased risk-taking and emotional reactivity, parents fail to understand brain-based challenges in behavioral self-regulation. Kids subsequently face violence when acting precisely how expected given immature cognitive control mechanisms.
In all stages, resorting to physical discipline damages the trust and secure attachment children require for healthy psychosocial maturation. Non-punitive support appropriate to each phase of youth development provides the scaffolding kids need to gain self-discipline as their minds grow.
Lack of Training in Alternatives
While multiple factors drive continued use of corporal punishment, a fundamental barrier preventing its abolition is that few parents receive training in evidence-based disciplinary alternatives. Without skills to implement techniques shown to positively develop children’s behavior, ineffective and damaging violent patterns continue by default.
Key alternatives that parents need active coaching and practice in include:
- Positive reinforcement: Strategically praising good behaviors to incentivize children intrinsically without demanding submission or asserting dominance.
- Logical consequences: Imposing reasonable, proportional outcomes tailored to fit specific misbehaviors to help children see how their actions impact themselves and others.
- Mindfulness and emotion coaching: Helping children grow awareness of how anger, frustration and other emotions affect their behaviors so they gain capacity for self-regulation.
- Restorative justice: Resolving conflicts by facilitating children’s abilities to empathize with people their actions harmed and formulate plans to repair relationships through moral redemption.
Without hands-on guidance to implement such methods, parents deprived of supportive resources as children themselves continue violent practices by default, transmitting harm across generations.
Conclusion
Multiple complex psychological, cultural and theological factors continue driving corporal punishment by parents amid increasingly definitive evidence of its inefficacy and detriments. Children will fail to gain ethical maturity though punitive control. Promoting non-violent discipline requires active societal commitment toward incremental reform across familial relationships, legal systems and faith communities until gentle guidance fully replaces the intergenerational cycle of violent domination. But through compassion and firm intention, more ethical and effective child development can be normalized.