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Balbina Guerra Garcia
John Helton
WRC 1023
12 April 2019
Corporal Punishment on Children
Parenting is one of the most difficult tasks that most parents will ever have to face and
have in common. It’s about balancing the now with the future, while teaching the right habits and
hoping that children grow up to be great. Discipline in society pertains to the method in which
people use youths misbehaviors, which means the practice of training people to obey rules or
code of behavior and using punishment to correct the child. However, the correct meaning of
discipline means to teach, instruct and prepare the child to achieve competence self-control, sub
direction and to be cared for others. There are various methods that as parents, they can use to
discipline their children, which include timeouts, grounding, loss of privileges, lectures, tours, or
simply reward of positive behavior. Of all the types of disciplinary methods, none is more
controversial as the use of physical punishment. Physical punishment is intended to cause
physical pain in any person, including spanking, paddling, smacking, slapping, punching and
caning. According to statistics, “More than 70% of Americans agreed in 2012 that, ‘it is
sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking.’ (Cudy and Reeves 1)., but
what they don’t know is the mental health effects that can be caused on a child. When a big kid
hits a little kid on the playground, he’s called a bully. Five years later, he punches a woman for
her wallet and is called a mugger. Later still, when he slugs a fellow worker who insulted him,
he’s called a troublemaker, but when he becomes a father and physically harms his child for
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being disrespectful or disobedient, he’s called a disciplinarian. This is so wrong in many ladders
of interpersonal violence regarding the last example so differently from the rest. One of the
concerns of utilizing physical punishment as a means of discipline is the parent losing emotional
control. A person hurting another as a result of temporary loss of emotional control isn’t
punishment, but violence. Parents should not physically punish their children because even
though it may stop their bad behavior, it will cause negative developmental outcomes, affect
their relationships with others, and their relationship with parents in the long term.
Using corporal punishment against a child is not the way it should be done. They are kids
who are still learning and can’t understand things as well as adults do. Disciplining children by
hitting them to learn their lessons causes them to be scared of their parents, causes anxiety, and
depression. Children fear to come home knowing that there might be a possibility of getting
punished by normal mistakes that they do as little kids. Home is a place where you should feel
safe, where parents teach you the wrong from right, but it shouldn’t be by inflicting physical
pain. A child should not experience th...
