Many parents have asked what effects spanking has on a child and whether any physical discipline works. While there are many studies that show that spanking and physical discipline are harmful to children—for example, check out the American Psychological Association’s article here—let’s look specifically at how physical discipline creates harmful narratives in children.
It's worthwhile to note that spanking still occurs—a lot! In a 2012 study (click here for link) it was found that nearly 80% of mothers spank their child between kindergarten and third grade.
Parents who spank their kids—or use some form of physical punishment when disciplining—often do so for various reasons: perhaps they were disciplined in this way when a child, or they’re wanting to teach the consequences of behavior and respect of parents, or as in many cases, parents are pushed to the brink and find themselves using corporal punishment despite their best intentions.
The point here isn’t to judge parents or their choices but to explain how young kids try to understand what’s happening when they are spanked. And given their understanding, what kinds of life-long narratives start to form as a result?
Let’s start with the child’s experience when he’s spanked.
The child’s experience
(First a trigger warning: a spanking is coming up, and includes a fair amount of detail so that we can understand the nuances of what’s happening…)
To set the scene, let’s say a four-year-old is angry because he wanted spaghetti for dinner but instead got chicken. He’s furious and out of control, and he shoves his plate of food off the table. His father calmly explains he can’t waste food like this, lifts the boy and places him across his lap. The boy screams and struggles, and the father tells him he better behave or he’ll “get it even worse.” The boy tenses up and waits as his dad gives him four hard spanks on the boy’s bottom. Satisfied, the dad releases him, and the boy runs into the other room, crying.
In this scenario, the dad isn’t losing control. In his view, he’s delivering a consequence to teach his son a lesson. But what is the child’s perspective?
Keep in mind that when a child is physically punished—or knows that a physical punishment is on its way—the child is overwhelmed by his own feelings and isn’t able to understand things rationally. In this example, the boy can’t process the intellectual idea that wasting food is bad because he’s so overwhelmed by his feelings. Here’s what might be going on inside the boy in the moments at the dinner table:
Oh no. No, no, no! He’s grabbing me. I have to get away but I can’t. I can’t do anything. I have to hold still or it’ll be really bad. I can’t move. Now there’s noise everywhere. Everything is swirling. Like I’m exploding and shrinking. Now I’m standing. I have to run, to get away.
And afterwards, when the boy has run off crying and has had time to think:
I hate being small. I hate being little. One day I’ll have my turn. I’ll be the big one.
Notice that the child isn’t doing any intellectual thinking. He hasn’t learned anything about controlling himself or how his anger got him in trouble. He’s not explaining to himself why he was spanked. The idea of cause-and-effect that the dad was trying to teach is missing in the child’s mind. He hasn’t actually learned anything because his intellect was swamped by the emotional intensity of the spanking. You could say that the spanking actually negated any rational learning that might have happened! Unknowingly, the dad undermined himself and everything he was trying to accomplish.
Instead, the kid’s take-away is all about feeling small and scared. It’s about being controlled and hurt by someone bigger than he. It’s also confusing for him because in the child’s view, rather than taking care of him, his father is trying to hurt him.
Also keep in mind that in this example, the father is using the spanking in a pretty unemotional way. For him, spanking is a tool. This is a best case scenario, because most of the time when kids get hit, it’s because parents have lost control of themselves. When this is the case, parents not only become terrifying, but the child’s world starts to crumble because the parent is no longer reliable and in charge. It’s like flying in a plane which has somehow lost its pilot.
How narratives then form
Recalling our diagram from the post, “Childhood Narratives: How They Impact Kids for a Lifetime,” a narrative forms around a child’s emotions and intellectual misperceptions of an experience:
There are multiple ways this child might react, but let’s look at some possibilities:
*Fear is a universal response when kids are hit. But their intellectual misperceptions—the bottom circle—can vary between kids. Here’s a chart of various responses kids might have and the corresponding narratives that would then form.
Intellectual misperception | Resulting narrative |
I did something terrible. | I am terrible. I do terrible things. |
The fear was too big. Don’t ever be spanked again. | Being small is scary and dangerous. Don’t be small, be big. |
I can’t understand why this happened. | I can’t control what happens. I’m afraid of things (my dad) because they are (he is) unpredictable. Always be on alert! |
My dad doesn’t love me. He must hate me. | I’m not loveable. I don’t deserve his love.
|
You can see how harmful narratives start to form as a result, and any additional spankings will reinforce the previous narratives such that they will become the child’s unquestioned beliefs.
Being big vs. being small
When parents hit a child, it underscores the child’s already existing fear of being small. (For more on this, see the post, “How Feeling Small Surprisingly Affects a Child’s Behavior” in the Kid’s Mindset section.) It teaches kids that being big brings the power to hurt others. It makes being small dangerous and scary.
Physical punishment also presents the child with a problem: should she imitate the parent and do what the parent does—even though she knows what it’s like to be hit—or does she do the opposite? This black and white thinking is how young kids work (see the post, “The Reasons Young Kids Generalize So Much,” for more on this). In this case, neither option looks especially good—she can either be the one who hits or the one who gets hit.
When put in this extreme, black/white way, many kids choose to be the one who hits because they know firsthand how terrible it is to get hit. After all, they’d rather be big than small. This is when we see kids start to bully their peers.
The bully’s goal is not a physical one but an emotional one. The bully wants to feel big by making another kid feel small. This is how the boy in the above scenario might deal with his own fears and emotional pain from being hit by his father. By physically hurting others, he’ll not only feel big, but he can become like his father, and in this way closer to his dad by doing what his dad does.
He’s also more likely to discipline his own kids through spanking because this is how his father taught him to deal with misbehaving children. It’s likely the boy’s father was also hit as a child, and therefore didn’t have—or feel that he needed—tools other than spanking to teach his kids to behave.
Unless someone breaks this cycle, behaviors and harmful narratives will continue to be passed down from one generation to the next.
Related Posts
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The All-Important Link Between Feelings and Behavior
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