In ancient Rome, the family and its members were considered the property of the oldest male, the pater familias. The pater familias had the right to beat, kill, enslave, or imprison wives, children, and servants as he saw fit. This was considered a fundamental property right of the man of the house.

Since then, the world has changed. Slavery has been outlawed in all developed nations. Spouses are protected from abuse and murder under the law. Physical punishment of prisoners in jails is no longer allowed. But the beating of children is still considered a parental right, and is widely accepted – even encouraged – as a method of discipline in many countries, including the United States of America. Teachers and others who supervise children may also have the legal right to use physical assault to punish them, since they are acting as temporary guardians.

Because of the mounting evidence of harm to children caused by corporal punishment, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989, instructed all nations to adopt measures to stop the practice (article 19, paragraph 1). As of this writing, eighteen nations have done so. But in the United States, one of only two nations that did not sign the Convention (along with Somalia), many parents are outraged by the suggestion that they stop spanking their children. They often give the following justifications for corporal punishment:

That corporal punishment “works” to stop bad behavior. Hitting a child does “work” – but no better than other firm, consistent methods of discipline. It is true that when a child is punished with a blow, they do indeed stop doing whatever they are doing ... for the moment. But rather than refraining from repeating the punished behavior, children may soon find other ways of avoiding the unpleasant consequence of punishment, such as concealment, flight, deception, or fighting back. Corporal punishment does not teach why a certain behavior is wrong; it only teaches that it is a mistake to get caught doing it.

Some child experts propose that a spanking be accompanied by an explanation of why the child’s behavior was wrong. But during periods of stress, such the fear of an impending punishment or the pain and anger of its aftermath, rational explanations simply cannot be understood or internalized.¹ If the pain inflicted by an authority figure is the main reason a child is given to avoid a certain behavior, the child will be likely to repeat that behavior if the authority figure is not present, or is no longer considered a threat.

That spanking causes no lasting harm. Being spanked as a child has been associated with low achievement and income, violence and criminality, depression and suicide in adulthood. It would be difficult to prove that spanking causes these effects – children who are frequently spanked may have been troubled to begin with, and their troublesome behavior led to the frequent spanking as well as their problems in adulthood. But examinations of the upbringing of violent felons², most of whom were frequently spanked as children, clearly shows that the discipline didn’t help them. There are some who become law-abiding and successful individuals even though they were spanked as children, but that does not prove that corporal punishment did them any good, or did not do them any harm; those individuals may have had other influences in their lives that contributed to their success.

Despite the lack of clear cause-and-effect evidence, many psychologists find the correlations strong enough to conclude that corporal punishment does cause lasting harm. Behaviorist B.F. Skinner, who pioneered the study of behavior control using punishments and rewards, found that aversive measures may lead not to obedience, but to escape or aggression.³ A 2002 review of the literature on corporal punishment led researcher Elizabeth Gershoff to state that “psychologists cannot respondibly recommend” spanking as a disciplinary method.⁴ And in July 2006, Harvard psychiatrist Alain Poussaint blamed the frequent use of corporal punishment for high levels of crime and violence in black communities.⁵ These are just a few of the scholars who have concluded, based upon the evidence, that corporal punishment does indeed cause significant and lasting harm. The evidence has also been strong enough to persuade eighteen nations⁶ to outlaw hitting children as a method of discipline.

That the Bible endorses corporal punishment. Proverbs 22, 23, and 29 do prescribe using the “rod of correction” on children, but Proverbs 10:13 and 26:3 recommend the same punishment for people of unspecified age who are “fools” or “void of understanding” – and we no longer engage in that practice! In Deuteronomy 21:18, the Bible commands parents to bring their “stubborn and rebellious son” to be stoned to death by their townspeople; anyone who practiced that form of “discipline” would surely be charged with murder! Most Jews and Christians recognize that many portions of the Bible (such as those which require animal sacrifices or forbid the cutting of beards) reflect traditions which existed at the time, and that one can observe one’s religion without adhering to all of them. But even for those who believe every word of their Holy Scripture to be an inviolable mandate from God, the right to practice one’s religion cannot justify the continuation of past practices which are clearly harmful to others.

That it is natural for parents to hit children, and unreasonable to expect them not to. Some proponents of corporal punishment point to nature films in which bears or monkeys keep their children in line with a “cuff” to the head or back. But human beings have abandoned many instinctive behaviors in order to live in a civilized fashion with others. We teach our children to suppress their natural inclination to hit others, no matter how great the provocation. How can it be unreasonable to expect adults to abide by the same rules?

Parents hit children not only because it is “natural,” but because spanking is so widely accepted in our society. But studies of public attitudes in Sweden and Finland, the first two nations to outlaw the practice, found that negative views of corporal punishment among increased dramatically among parents after the practice was banned.⁷ So even if many parents now feel that a ban on corporal punishment would be unreasonable, their feelings might change once they knew that the practice had officially fallen out-of-favor in their society.

That children need to know who’s boss. There are ways of disciplining children without hitting them. Adults will provide better role models for children if they do not demonstrate that the way to deal with someone who doesn’t act the way they should is to hit or physically overpower them. Children need adults they can count on to guide and protect them. Corporal punishment destroys the bonds of affection and trust between parent and child, and can cause the child, at least temporarily, to hate the parent.

Children need to feel that their bodies are their own and that they have the right to be free of unwanted physical intrusions. Can we expect a child to submit obediently to a spanking, but reject unwanted sexual advances from some other adult in authority?

Children need to develop their own conscience. Since they will face new ethical problems throughout their lives, they need to develop the ability to think on their own about what is right and wrong, and how their actions will affect themselves and others. Corporal punishment, which limits the child’s focus to the reactions of authority figures to their behavior, impedes that kind of moral development.

The physical assault of young people by the parents and teachers they should be able to trust more than anyone is a moral outrage that no amount of discipline, tradition or parents' rights can ever outweigh. ASFAR calls on the United States government, and on states and local educational agencies, to outlaw all forms of corporal punishment, putting America's youth and future above the parent's rights of a bygone era.