I have been opposed to corporal punishment for a very long time.
I am opposed both within the family unit and institutionally in schools.
In November 1993, early in my career in mental health, I attended the Sixth National Conference to Abolish Corporal Punishment in Schools in Nashville, Tennessee. While there, I met Dr. Adah Maurer, who was 88 years old at the time and had spent much of her professional life advocating for the abolition of corporal punishment.
She made an impression on me.
It wasn’t simply what she advocated for, but the way she did it. Her scholarship addressed some difficult aspects of human behavior, yet the woman I met was warm, engaging and an absolute delight to talk with. She became one of my early professional influences.
My own professional life would eventually include working with children and families, conducting parental fitness and custody evaluations, and helping parents examine aggressive parenting practices, including spanking and other forms of corporal punishment. Of all the subjects I have discussed with clients, colleagues, friends and family over the years, few have generated as much debate as this one.
People have very strong feelings about spanking.
Some were spanked as children and believe they turned out just fine. Some see spanking as fundamentally different from hitting. Others believe parents have the right—and sometimes the responsibility—to use physical punishment as discipline.
I have never found those arguments particularly convincing.
If the goal of discipline is to help a child gradually develop self-regulation, judgment, empathy and the ability to resolve conflict, hitting a child seems a peculiar way to teach those things.
That was one of the things Adah Maurer understood many decades ago. She wrote extensively about corporal punishment, including its psychological, developmental and societal consequences. Her work was part of a much larger movement asking a question that remains worth asking: What are we teaching children when the person with the most power is permitted to cause physical pain in order to change someone else’s behavior?
When I updated this post in January 2024, I went looking for the date of that Nashville conference. By sheer synchronicity, the first thing I encountered was a news story published that very day about proposed legislation in Tennessee to ban corporal punishment in schools.
Thirty years after I sat in that conference room listening to people argue that children should not be hit in the name of discipline, we were still having the conversation.
Dr. Maurer fought the good fight.
And apparently, the conversation isn’t over.
Ten Reasons Not to Hit Your Kids
I offer my most favorite article on the topic here: Ten Reasons Not to Hit Your Kids by Jan Hunt, M.Sc.
What works?
Gentle instruction, supported by a strong foundation of love and respect, is the only truly effective way to bring about commendable behavior based on strong inner values, instead of superficially “good” behavior based only on fear. Natural consequences should be utilized. Modeling appropriate behavior as a parent or caregiver, and proper use of time-out not as punishment bus as redirection, using the rule of 1 minute per age of the child. These are all attitudes and methods I encouraged when I worked with parents and parent educators.
Additional articles
Spanking is counterproductive and dangerous
Spanking children slows cognitive development and increases risk of criminal behavior, expert says
2021 Research further confirms corporal punishment is harmful
The Influence of Corporal Punishment on Crime
Preparing for a Custody Evaluation?
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