George Stewart's teacher in Jamaica used to wait by the school door with a switch to punish tardy pupils. His parents whipped him, too. Now he lives in the Bronx and refuses to hit his own children. “I don’t think beating works,” he says. “It instils in them a cruelty that they pass down, generation to generation.”
Ample evidence backs his view, say
Richard Reeves and Emily Cuddy of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank.
Nearly 30 studies from various countries show that children who are regularly
spanked become more aggressive themselves, as both children and
adults. They are also more likely to be depressed or take drugs, even
after correcting for other factors.
Smacking is effective in the short
run: it stops children pulling their sisters’ hair. But in the long run it has
all sorts of bad effects. A study in 20 American cities, published in the
American Academy of Pediatrics in 2013, found that young children in homes
with little or no spanking showed swifter cognitive development than their
peers. Other studies find that children in physically punitive schools perform
worse.
Still, 81% of American parents
believe that spanking is sometimes necessary (see table). That is more than in
many other rich countries, 20 of which have banned spanking even by parents. In
America Republicans spank more than Democrats; southerners more than
north-easterners; and blacks more than white.
American teachers are still allowed
to spank children with a paddle (a wooden bat only a little shorter and thinner
than a cricket bat) in 19 states, mostly in the South—a practice that is banned
in over 100 other countries. More than 216,000 pupils were beaten at school
during the 2008-09 school year, according to the Department of
Education. Children who were poor, black, disabled and male
disproportionately received the most blows.
edtited from The Economist
