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Should Children Be Allowed To Spank Children

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The United States as a nation predominately believes in spanking. According to Prof. Elizabeth Gershoff of The University of Texas at Austin, by the time a child reaches high school in the late 2000’s, 85 percent of them will have been subjected to physical punishment by their parent or guardian (Hanes 2015), with 90 percent of children being spanked before the age of two. (Hanes 2015) Is subjecting our children to physical punishment at such a young age doing more harm than good? According to researchers at John Hopkins’s University, the answer is yes. "Spanking children under the age of 2 puts those children into a higher risk group for behavioral problems later," says Eric P. Slade, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and co-author of a study appearing in this month's issue of Pediatrics. (Lallanilla2015). …show more content…

Spanking also humiliates the child, which may cause them to lash out as a way to rectify the humiliation, for example, a parent spanks a child in front of a sibling, so the child breaks the sibling’s toy as “revenge” for them witnessing their embarrassment. It also causes anger and resentment in children, which may cause them to behave aggressively. There is evidence that hitting children encourages them to become hitters themselves, in fact there is a direct correlation between being spanked in childhood and aggressive and violent behavior in teenage and adult years according to The Natural Child Project (naturalchild.org). This is because children are naturally inclined to imitate the actions they

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