Is Corporal Punishment an Effective Discipline Technique for Families - Essay Example

In this paper, I will seek to analyze and give evidence of instances where corporal punishment is effective, and then analyze its long-term effects on a child.

Corporal punishment has the short-term effect of eliciting immediate suppression of unwanted behavior from a child when administered. This is because the main idea behind the punishment of a child is to discourage unwanted behavior immediately; corporal punishment is usually effective in achieving this goal (Holden et al., 1999). According to Gershoff 2002), the prime objective that most parents have while administering corporal punishment to their children is to stop them from being disobedient at once. Corporate punishment is effective if and only if it is administered after a transgression and must be immediate and should not be discriminated against. However, even though all these criteria are met, most parents fail to achieve the desired results from the child, hence in the end; corporal punishment tends to lose meaning and purpose. The common ground and goal, which is to ensure that the child gets meaning from the punishment, fail (Larzelere, 2000).

Corporal punishment has failed to allow children to develop moral internalizations on their own since instead of promoting better social behavior corporal punishment hinders this attribute. This is because even though corporal punishment achieves this in the short term, the moral internalization of a child is affected (Gerdshoff, 2002). They further state that the long-term socialization goal for a child's development is to take behavior and attitude as their own internal development, and not be driven by anticipation of external consequences such as corporal punishment. Clearly, a child needs to be given room and space to develop mentally and make judgment calls for their actions, without being driven by the consequences of corporal punishments (Afifi, 2012).

Moreover, corporal punishment has the impetus of encouraging antisocial and aggressive behaviors among children in the end. This is true since the administration of this form of punishment negatively affects parent-child relations. According to the attribution and social control theory posed by Burt et al. in Gershoff (2002), corporal punishment inhibits a child’s ability to internalize values and decreases a child’s ability to internalize the parent’s value, and in turn inputs resentment towards the parent by the child. This means that in the event of punishing a child, the child may not learn a lesson and, they may as a result develop antisocial and aggressive behavior towards others including their parents and caregivers (Straus, 1991).

In conclusion, corporal punishment can cause more harm than good to a child’s psychological growth.