Corporal punishment can affect your child’s brain, experts warn

By Sade Oguntola

Don’t spank children. That’s the conventional wisdom that has emerged from decades of research linking corporal punishment to a decline in adolescent health and negative effects on behaviour, including an increased risk for anxiety and depression. Now, a new study warns that corporal punishment might impact the bodies’ nervous systems to produce those adverse effects.

Corporal punishment can be simply defined as the “intentional infliction of physical pain by any means for the purpose of punishment, correction, discipline, instruction, or any other reason.” This violence, particularly when inflicted by a parent, evokes a complex emotional experience.

The researchers, led by Kreshnik Burani, MS, and working with Greg Hajcak, PhD, at Florida State University, wanted to understand its implications of the experience on the brain and its downstream consequences.

The study appears in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, published by Elsevier.

It was a longitudinal study on 149 boys and girls ages 11 to 14 from the Tallahassee, FL, area. They were asked to perform a video game-like task and a monetary guessing game while undergoing continuous recorded electroencephalography, or EEG — a noninvasive technique to measure brain-wave activity from the scalp.

Two years later, participants and their parents completed a series of questionnaires to screen for anxiety and depression and to assess parenting style. As expected, children who had experienced corporal punishment were more likely to develop anxiety and depression.

The researchers declared that “we found that corporal punishment is associated with increased anxiety and depressive symptoms in adolescence. However, our study goes further to demonstrate that corporal punishment might impact brain activity and neurodevelopment.”

That was reflected by larger neural responses to error and a blunted response to reward in the adolescents who received physical punishments.

According to them, “Corporal punishment, therefore, might alter specific neurodevelopmental pathways that increase risk for anxiety and depression by making children hypersensitive to their own mistakes and less reactive to rewards and other positive events in their environment.”

Dr Gbonjubola Abiri, a consultant psychiatrist at the Lagos State Teaching Hospital (LASUTH) said of the findings “definitely there is a wild array of mental disorders that can happen from corporal punishment, anxiety is one of them. You tell the child I am going to hit you and the child is already shaking, fearful and worried.”

Abiri added, “A lot of children avoid going to schools where they are beaten because they think they will be beaten. If they are beaten, they are unhappy; they are worried. Even shouting at children, some even end up urinating on themselves. Aside from anxiety and depression, some children will have sleep problems; some will refuse to eat and interestingly some will actually take their own lives.”

Dr Abiri stated that in some instances corporal punishment had caused physical health problems, including broken bones and damaged organs and seizures when some parents hit children or pushed their heads against walls.

She added corporal punishment had affected the psyche or the mind of many children, how they perceive themselves in relation to other people, how they value themselves and the worth that they bring to the world.

But in a preliminary study at the Centre for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, University of Ibadan on the perception of children on corporal punishment, 49 per cent of children interviewed said it made them dislike school and 48 per cent said that it made them hate their teachers. Still, 65 per cent said that it made them angry a lot. Only 60% agreed that it helped to change their behaviour.

In remark, Director, Centre for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, Dr Tolulope Bella-Awusah, said “The negative effects of corporal punishment, mostly from the western world include bullying other children, being aggressive in resolving conflicts, living in fear and poor self-esteem. It has been associated with increased risk of depression, anxiety and personality problems.”

According to her, “There are healthier alternative ways to discipline children. They need discipline. The idea is not to leave them to misbehave. We need to correct and guide them. We need to do it in ways that will protect their physical and emotional health.”

“We know that it is not all young people that are negatively affected; some people manage to pull through without any negative effect. That is why there is the need for more research, especially in our context looking at what differentiates those who experience negative effects from those who don’t,” she added.

Also, Dr Haleem Abdulrahman, a consultant psychiatrist at University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan stated that spanking if to be done at all, should be in such a way that there are no injuries or lasting scars on the child and such a child must also understand that the spanking is a consequence of bad behaviour.

“It should not be abusive but to help build good morals. So, in this case, it’s not because you hate him or you are angry but that you don’t want him to continue doing that thing. And that is also different from using penalties. Recently, we’ve been saying that it is better to give penalties rather than punishments.”

The message sent to children through corporal punishment is one of aggression. A threat to use physical or psychological violence on children is even more than the actual physical punishment. It is not worth it.

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