Corporal punishment and children’s mental health: Opportunities for prevention

Many genetic, epigenetic, and social environmental factors play a role in children's emotional and cognitive development and determine critical mental processes, including the ability to regulate emotional states, maintain internal milieu in the face of stressors, and take part in interpersonal relationships. Children experience the environment through observation and participation plus formal teaching and their parents' approach to discipline. In its broadest sense, discipline involves the ways parents help children acquire knowledge of the values and normative behaviors of the society in which they will function as adults. In common parlance, however, discipline is synonymous with punishment, either emotional, physical, or a combination of the two. Many parents continue to have positive attitudes toward the use of physical punishment. Parents' own experiences as children, their mood and sense of stress as adults, and prevailing social norms all influence the likelihood that they will use physical punishment. A number of arguments can be advanced for reducing the use of physical punishment; some are based on views of the rights of children, some are based on the evidence for adverse psychosocial outcomes, and some on the role that physical punishment may play in the overall level of violence in a given society. Studies suggest that the use of physical punishment can be reduced through efforts to change normative parenting behaviors; parenting training seems capable of reducing the use of harsh punishment, and offers parents the opportunity to learn alternatives. There is evidence that parenting training can be delivered effectively in a variety of settings.