Is corporal punishment an effective discipline technique for families Essay

Is corporal punishment an effective discipline technique for families or does the evidence show it does more harm than good to cihildren discuss - Essay Example This is because the main idea behind 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 on 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. However, even though all these criterions are met, most of 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, fails (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 development is to take behavior and attitude as their own internal development, and not be driven by anticipation of external consequences such as from 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 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 relation. According to the attribution and social control theory posed by Burt et al. in Gershoff (2002), corporal