Parenting Mistakes #8 Abusing your child (physical, verbal/emotional)
#8.1 Corporal Punishment
Young adults often test their parent’s limits and send their parents off the cliff with
their behavior.
Normally, assuming that you were not under the category of a mentally depressed
mother or a drunken father, when parents feel like their children’s behavior is out of
control, and as a means of disciplining their kids, when no sensible approach is
working anymore (a warning, taking away privileges, whatever deemed sensible by
parents) they will often go with the last resort – the famous corporal punishment.
Nevertheless, the act of hitting your children rarely comes out without any emotions
engaged to it. When there is a negative emotion attached to it, the actions magnified.
Most of the time it would be out of temper. Sometimes it could be purely out of stress
that you received on a daily basis (You’re exhausted, just came back from work, and
your teen has an attitude–that sends you off the roof).
From my personal experiences of growing up, I’d dare to say – hitting on young adult
will produce unintended grave consequences, both short & long-term harm than the
intended results. In fact, there have been lots of studies out there confirming to what I
believe & experienced basically.
Research shows that corporal punishment carries multiple risks of harms and has no
shows associations between physical punishment with a wide range of negative
outcomes while no studies have found evidence of any slightest benefits1.
Most of the parents out there beat, slap, and smack their children with a good
intention in their heart – to disciplined them, but sadly your method isn’t working.
What’s more, it’s ineffective in the long run. Not to mention that it will backfire too.
Here’s why.
Say that you hit her today – for whatever mistakes that she has done. In this situation,
when a strong, superior adult exert a physical force towards the defenseless young
adult, her limbic system, part of the brain that deal with emotions (anger, happiness,
fear, as well as memories) goes into an alarm mode. Her brain automatically perceives
physical punishment as a hostile situation, thus responds accordingly.
For the grown child herself, it is an experience of her being small, weak, powerless
and unable to control external overwhelming force – Under this state of mind, she can
learn nothing. Her prefrontal cortex – part of the brain that is responsible for
information processing, reasoning, and judgment, shuts down. Therefore, how she
reacts during & after corporal punishment is not a thoughtful behavior. It’s a reactive
behavior.
If there is anything your teen would remember after you beat her, it’s never going to
be the lesson that you want her to learned. Unfortunately, you don’t get to choose the
1Summary of research on the effects of corporal punishment. Global Initiative to end all corporal punishment of children. April 2013. http:
thing that goes through her head and heart. The hurt, not the learning opportunity,
becomes the message.
Physical punishment delivers other messages–the strongest one being fear. It teaches
her to fear you, not to respect or listen to you. A sense of distrust start to develop in
her – once she feels that she can never trust her parents, it will erode and disrupt any
sort of bonding chances between young adult & parents. It will also lead to her feeling
angry, resentful and retaliate in anger by being uncooperative or talking back mean
words, which causes her parents to lose again, beating her harder than before. (Does
this situation seems familiar to you?).
All the physical punishment in the world will not teach your young adult any
responsibility or obedience, as mom and dad would like to think. If ever, it would
only teach us two things:
• How to lie (“No dad I didn’t do it”)
• How to avoid getting caught.
The truth is physical punishment works only as a temporary solution. It results in an
immediate compliance–it works because it is a form of external control, but in no way
it helps with internal decision-making. While it results with immediate compliance,
13 out of 15 studies shows that physical punishment does not contribute to the child’s
long-term compliance to the desired behavior.
What’s more, isn’t it strange to think that parents keep justifying their act of
punishing as a way to get their children listen, and yet they keep doing it over and
physical punishment is ineffective to curb undesirable behavior in children – for the
long run.
It is interesting to note that certain adult came up with their own series of argument to
justify their actions towards their kid. “ I was spanked as a kid because of XY reason
and I grow up perfectly fine.” – one would claim.
One way to look at this is children learn through parental modeling–physical
punishment gives the message that hitting is an acceptable way to solve problems.
This is how children are wired to learn – they learn attitude and behavior through
observation and imitation of their parents, for good or bad. If a child does not observe
a parent solving problems in a creative & humane way, it can be difficult for him to
learn himself. For this very reason, unskilled parenting often continues into the next
generation.
If he was perfectly “fine” as he would claim, he wouldn’t continue the vicious cycle,
by continuing it, it just proves how bad it is to me.
And as for me personally, I receive corporal punishment as a young adult, teenager
and as a kid, but it is nowhere near fine for me. Even when I was a small kid, I feel
strong that it is morally wrong to hit a defenseless kid. I feel so weird as to why adults
need to opt out for a destructive mechanism when clearly there are other options
available without physically and emotionally hurting us. (Unlike parents, we
teenagers know what method works on us and what doesn’t, because we are at the
What corporal punishment does to your child
Studies show that corporal punishment is emotionally and physically painful to the
receiver. It also links to poor mental health, including behavior disorders, anxiety
disorders, depression, and hopelessness. In fact, the effect may continue into
adulthood – one study found that adults who had experience corporal punishment
while growing up are more likely to develop alcohol-related problems.
Another research made in 2009 shows a strong correlation between corporal
punishment and less gray matter in the prefrontal cortex2,3. Less grey matter in the
prefrontal cortex has been linked with less ability to evaluate rewards and
consequences in people.
2 Sarah Kovac. Spanking the grey matter out of our kids. CNN. http:
//edition.cnn.com/2014/07/23/health/effects-spanking-brain/. (accessed on
24th Oct 2015).
3 Akemi Tomoda, MD, PhD, Hanako Suzuki, MA, Keren Rabi, MA, Yi-Shin Sheu,
BS, Ann Polcari, PhD, and Martin H. Teicher, MD. Reduced Prefrontal Cortical Gray Matter Volume in Young Adults Exposed to Harsh Corporal Punishment. US
National Library of Medicine. http: