Corporal Punishment: The Price Of Temporary Compliance?

Punishments should be avoided because they only aggravate problems, rather than solve them. Decades of studies and research point out that punishments create a series of disputes and show that it is worse to punish than to do nothing at all:

Children who are often punished at home are more likely to behave badly than other children when they are not at home. Punishments teach to win by using force. The child receives an example of the use of power, contrary to reason or cooperation, which can profoundly affect the development of their values.

The child learns that if you do not like how someone acts, you can do something wrong to that person until you stop. If you look at how many children behave, you seem to have learned this lesson too well, surely from us adults.

According to Chieftain, punishments spoil the relationship between the punisher and the punished. When the child sees the adult as a controlling being, hurts or inflicts unpleasant consequences, he will surely be as happy to see that person as an adult when he sees a police car in the rearview mirror. The loving alliance between adult and child, so vital for its future development, is compromised.

This fact, in essence, explains why punishment often accentuates the behavior it intended to improve. To help an impulsive, aggressive or insensitive child to be more responsible, parents would have to see why he behaves that way. This is more likely to occur if the child feels close enough to us to explain how he sees things from his point of view.

Imagine that a child is being assaulted in school by other children. When he is at home, the contained rage and helplessness explode and stick his little brother to the slightest conflict. The parents, angered by their behavior, punish him.

What possibilities does the child have of feeling confident, understood, in order to be able to verbalize and explain to his parents that he suffers in school? How could he receive effective help from adults? The punishment will only deepen the gap and aggravate their behavior.

According to Natural Child, the more punishments a person receives, the angrier they will feel, the worse they will behave. It is an example of a vicious circle that can only come out by changing the punishments for good treatment.

Punishments hinder the child's ethical development. A child threatened with an "adverse consequence" for failing to satisfy someone's wishes or standards is likely to ask, "What do you want me to do, and what if I do not?" Surely, parents prefer their children to ask themselves, "What kind of person do I want to be?" If they do not steal or kill, it is not because they are afraid of jail but because they are moral beings, they know that it is wrong and they can imagine how those actions affect other people.

Some advocates of corporal discipline claim that the child should experience the consequences of their actions but they almost often refer to the consequences that this action has for the child. It all focuses on what will happen to the child if he breaks a rule. They assume that the child will behave properly if he knows that he will suffer some negative consequences if he does not.

On the contrary, ethical development consists in knowing how one should behave on one's own sense of dignity and for consideration for others. Punishment serves no purpose at all for any of these things. It even lowers positive values by emphasizing self-interest.