Controversy Around The Use Of Corporal Punishment In The United States

Corporal punishment of children is the legal form of punishment to deliberately cause pain or discomfort in a response to undesired behavior with fair reason; however, it is debatable over when the use of this discipline technique extends into lines of abuse. The debate around the use of corporal punishment in American parenting is a subject of controversy within the child development and psychological communities, which questions the effectiveness the discipline practice has among correcting misbehavior within children. The courts of the United States have weighed the controversial arguments around the use of this discipline technique into categories of pros and cons that lead to the national epidemic of whether or not the use of corporal

Physical punishment executed upon a child to quickly correct misbehavior may instead attribute to the development of aggressive behavior, which may “exhibit high degrees of antisocial and delinquent behavior in adolescence and criminal behavior in adulthood”(Bavolek 2). Although the method of physically punishing a child is used to quickly restore order within a child’s behavior, children who experience corporal punishment are “destined to continue abuse in our families”(Keyser 2). There is also robust evident that children who are physically punished frequently are automatically put at a higher risk for mental health problems, “ranging from anxiety and depression to alcohol and drug abuse”(Cuddy, and Reeves 2). Corporal punishment used amongst children in which later resulted with problems in the child’s health are arranged in two strong associations with the “immediate compliance by the child and physical abuse of the child by the parent”(Geroff, and Larzelere 1). The use of corporal punishment in parenting a child develops behavioral problems in his or her personality that are resulted from the child's physical and mental health issues; therefore, the child’s skills are damaged from the abusive

Children who frequently experience physical discipline as a correction for misbehavior are at higher risk of academic failure than children of parents who use little or no corporal punishment, which allows them to gain “cognitive ability faster than children who were spanked”(Cuddy, and Reeves 3). Children living in an environment of physical abuse are at a delay of maturing, with cognitive skills lacking normal development in which affects the child’s level of education; there is evidence suggesting “that non-cognitive skills may also be affected”(Cuddy, and Reeves 3). Corporal punishment results in behavioral issues that affect a child’s social life as he or she matures, which suggests the idea that “those children who were spanked more were more likely later to be involved in partner-to-partner domestic violence, face academic and health risks, and fall behind in a whole host of social indicators”(Hanes 4). Although corporal punishment is a tactic used to teach a child right from wrong, it creates several negative outcomes in a child’s development with one being a parent-child relationship based off of obeying over the fear of being harmed, which infers that those