Spanking children may worsen their social behaviors and have a detrimental impact on their social development, according to researchers at Old Dominion University.

What to know:

• Corporal punishment may alter social development of children in a number of different metrics, including higher externalizing behaviors, lower self-control, and lower interpersonal skills in childhood, which can affect them later in life. 

• In total, 61% of the children aged 5-7 who were studied had been spanked at some point in their lifetime, while 28% had been spanked in the last week.

• Children who had been spanked had lower self-control and lower interpersonal skills at ages 6-7, suggesting a stunted development that occurred rapidly after the punishment.

• The study suggests that it does not take a significant number of times for corporal punishment to be delivered for it to be problematic in its long-term effects on a child.

• Half of US parents admitted to spanking their children in the previous year and one third spanking them in the previous week.

This is a summary of the article, “Spanking and children’s social competence: Evidence from a US kindergarten cohort study” published in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect on October 22, 2022. The full article can be found on sciencedirect.com.

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