Don’t spank your kids — it can change their brains and doesn’t work, pediatricians say

Spanking a child makes them more aggressive, changes the shape of their brain and doesn’t really work, according to a new policy statement Monday from the American Academy of Pediatricians.

The new policy — which wades into the controversial subject of corporal punishment — uses a variety of older studies to show the downsides of spanking a child and offers other solutions for parents who are looking to discipline one of their kids without spanking.

It’s not the first time an organization has condemned spanking. In 2006, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child said that physical punishment like spanking is “legalized violence against children,” according to the Sun. The American Psychological Association warned against the practice of spanking in a 2012 article, warning the practice can cause “physical injury and mental health problems for children.”

And this new policy from the American Academy of Pediatricians reviewed a deluge of studies that suggest spanking is ineffective or damaging.

One 2014 study, for example, found that 73 percent of children who were spanked continued the bad behavior just ten minutes later, while The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study — research of around 5,000 children conducted between 1998 to 2000 — found a tie between spanking and an increase in aggressive behavior in children, according to the policy directive from the pediatrician group.

In fact, the policy statement notes, a follow-up study on that data found that children who are spanked are more likely to act out, thus leading their parents to spank them again in a “negative spiral.”

A study in the journal Neuroimage found that children who experienced “harsh” spanking had a reduction in gray matter in the brain’s prefontal cortex, which deals with planning, personality and impulse control, and also experienced a reduction in performance IQ, which gauges how a child deals with verbal cues, according to the new policy statement.

Dr. Robert Sege, first author of the policy statement, told CNN in an interview that this new directive is an update to the organization’s 1998 guidance on spanking, which advised that parents should be “encouraged and assisted in developing methods other than spanking in response to undesired behavior.”

“In the 20 years since that policy was first published, there’s been a great deal of additional research,” he told CNN, “and we’re now much stronger in saying that parents should never hit their child and never use verbal insults that would humiliate or shame the child.”

A 2017 poll from ABC News found that 65 percent of Americans approve of spanking a child, although 67 percent agree that it shouldn’t be school teachers doing the spanking. Fifty-percent of parents say they spank a child currently in their home.

So how else can a family discipline an unruly child?

The American Academy of Pediatrician’s new policy says timeouts are one way to make a child rethink their actions without resorting to spanking, as seen in a 2008 study in the journal Pediatrics which found “it was possible to teach parents to use time-outs within the constraints of an office visit.”

In his interview with CNN, study author Sege suggested that timeouts are useful for toddlers and preschoolers, while for babies “the best thing to do is just pick them up and move them somewhere else.”

As for older children, Sege suggests giving them a “natural consequence” like holding a parent’s hand if they don’t look for cars before trying to cross the street.

“So if they run out in the street, you don’t want the natural consequence to be that they get run over by a car,” he said, according to CNN. “But a natural consequence might be that they have to hold your hand when they’re in the street or they can’t go out on their own past a busy street until you’ve observed them always looking both ways.”

For Elizabeth Gershoff — a leading researcher into physical punishment at the University of Texas at Austin, which reviewed 50 years of research on spanking for a 2016 meta-analysis — the scientific evidence against corporal punishment is clear.

“I can just about count on one hand the studies that have found anything positive about physical punishment,” she said in a press release from The American Psychological Association, “and hundreds that have been negative.”

This story was originally published November 5, 2018 at 12:28 PM.