Corporal PunishmentEssay Preview: Corporal PunishmentReport this essayCorporal punishment is a form of punishment or discipline that uses physical force with the intention of causing a child to experience pain, but not injury, for the purpose of correcting or controlling the childs behavior (Straus 1971). Corporal punishment has been a very controversial issue concerning discipline toward children. There are many questions that may come to mind concerning the uses of corporal punishment. Like should parents discipline their children by using corporal punishment techniques, such as spanking? Or is a nonphysical approach more helpful to raising mentally and emotionally healthy children? Also, should corporal punishment be permitted in public schools? Distinguishing the difference between corporal punishment and child abuse present even more concern. Like does spanking become abuse when it leaves bruises or red marks on a childs buttocks? Or what if the marks appear on the childs arms or face? Also, is using a stick, belt or cane to spank a child more abusive than spanking with an open palm? Although this paper is about the use of corporal punishment, most of what I want to point out is the effects of punishment or discipline including, of course, physical punishment in the home and school.
First, punishments give pain and therefore teach children that, at least under some conditions; it is all right to give pain to others. Skinner (1971) said, “Punishment is designed to remove awkward, dangerous, or otherwise unwanted behavior from a repertoire on the assumption that a person who has been punished is less likely to behave in the same way again. Unfortunately, the matter is not that simple. Reward and punishment do not differ merely in the direction of the changes they induce. A child who has been severely punished for sex play is not necessarily less inclined to continue. Punished behavior is likely to reappear after the punitive contingencies withdrawn.” (pp. 61-62)
According to Straus, “The most frequent forms of corporal punishment are spanking, slapping, grabbing, or shoving a child roughly (with more force than is needed to move the child). But should hitting a child with an object such as a hairbrush, belt, or paddle be included? Traditional cultural norms permit that. On the other hand, hitting with an object poses a significant risk of causing an injury which may require medical treatment and from that point of view might be considered physical abuse rather than corporal punishment”. Parents can of course be charged with physical abuse if the hitting exceeds the frequency and severity of violence allowed by cultural norms for disciplining children. But in fact, parents are rarely held accountable by the courts for excessive corporal punishment. The reason is that child protective services rarely have the resources to attend to such cases, and moreover the norms are not clear (1971). Parents who use corporal punishment believe that they have every right to discipline their children that way, in as much as it is perhaps the best way to teach children the difference between right and wrong and that pain is probably the most effective form of discipline. Many parents also believe that young children best learn from their mistakes if some degree of physical discomfort comes to be associated with them. Most parents believe physical abuse is not inflicted by an aggressive parent whose behaviors are not contingent on the childs behaviors; however, most physically abusive events begin as corporal punishment intended to discipline a child but that escalate to the point of injury.
The process of teaching children how to behave has often been called discipline (Christophersen 1992; McCormick 1992). Christophersen (1992: 397- 98), in advising pediatricians, notes that parents may have a variety of reasons for using discipline, including to terminate undesirable behavior, to teach the child a lesson, to teach desirable behavior, and to help children internalize societys values. Based upon our understanding of learning principles, the purpose of punishment, as a component of the discipline process, can only be to decrease undesirable behavior. Punishment does not serve the purpose of teaching desirable behavior. If a child does not learn desirable behavior, decreasing undesirable behavior will be unlikely. Therefore, behavioral clinicians first focus on how to teach children desirable behavior, then focus on decreasing undesirable behavior (Forehand and McMahon 1981). Notably, for discipline to be effective, parents must focus on both increasing desirable behaviors and decreasing undesirable behaviors, and they must view discipline as a teaching process that evolves over the long term. Because punishment (functionally defined) is a necessary component of effective discipline, behavioral clinicians emphasize the importance of the effectiveness of discipline responses. Effective punishment is characterized by being used contingently for targeted misbehaviors and by parental persistence in the discipline episode rather than giving in, to avoid negatively reinforcing aversive child tactics. Patterson and other behavioral parent trainers have made the effective use of time-out an essential component of parent training (Patterson 1982: 111). Further, behavioral parent-training programs emphasize maximizing the effectiveness of mild punishment, such as timeout, in contrast to more severe punishers, such as corporal punishment. Mild punishers are preferred over severe punishers for humane reasons and to minimize the effect of habituation (that is, the tendency for a frequently repeated punisher to decrease in effectiveness with repetition). Hitting children can negatively affect their emotional and psychological development. There are no good reasons for a parent to spank his or her child, since almost any other disciplinary method is more effective and carries far less risk of negatively affecting the child psychologically.
Bandura (1965), while recognizing that learning occurs through direct experience, emphasizes that learning can take place by observing the example of others. Based on the principle of modeling and imitation, a child who observes a person (model) perform an act is more likely to behave in a similar manner (imitation). Repeated trials may be unnecessary; the child can learn the behavior merely through observation. If a child watches a dummy being kicked and is placed in the room with the dummy, it is more likely that the child will kick the dummy than if she or he had not seen it kicked, even if the child is not rewarded for kicking it and has not seen the model rewarded; however, reinforcement of the model or the child, while it created no new learning, did increase the frequency of the childs performing the act. The child needs to be attentive to what the model does,
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In any given environment, the child’s response to a situation is very specific, with no rule specifying any particular behavior in any particular way–i.e., any given stimulus can be selected for the child through an appropriate strategy. There is, however, an important difference between actions, each of which must be chosen in its own right. For example, in situations that involve imitation, imitation works in a similar way as well, with the child only beginning to understand the behavior when the “expert” is chosen. When a child does this, she should ask: “Do all your people know what a toy is? Do you know what a car is? Do you know that it can run, ride, run, run? Do you know what a dog is? Do you know what a big dog is? Do you know that you can walk on it? Do you know that you can touch it?”
The child and the model need to have an open and trusting relationship. This is critical to children’s well-being, so that they will be motivated not to learn the behavior they have yet learned (such as that the model was only observing the behavior that is the same as the behavior seen by the child on the tape)–a very different situation than those situations for which modeling is required. And this is often the case in scenarios like the present, where the parents’ behavior can cause a child to behave in a relatively normal manner that can help her to succeed. In reality, this role is different–rather than role-playing with the model as it might normally be, it becomes an interaction.
It is perhaps surprising that the current research on the role of modeling in children’s behavior is concerned with adult behavior and not adult training and not adult role-playing. This emphasis on adult role-playing should stop the development of the general view that modeling is necessary, and the general conception of modeling to be in the best interest of children. If modeling and imitation are to be seen as distinct parts of the same developmental process and must be seen as part of a greater developmental process, then the development of model-learning would have to be affected by a particular kind of learning, as the child and parent interact and may want some more of a parent-centered approach to model-learning. In this respect modeling has many important implications.
In contrast to the current research, many factors — both physical and cognitive — are important for model-learning. Because models create a space without models, there is a tendency toward an inability to imagine the interaction–at least in the real world–that is important for model-learning. The problem is, there is neither an adequate or adequate way to capture the interaction at a time and place where the model exists. Rather than an effective way to capture the interaction, models should be perceived by children and parents as being the primary part of the learning process–and that will eventually lead to the creation of an individualized learning process that will help children experience their own behaviors as best as possible.
If modeling and imitation are two distinct activities, their integration will have to include both physical and the model-learning context, i.e., as well as being able to be seen as both aspects of the same developmental process and to create the kind of feedback and action that children need. It is much easier to create a school for children through modeling alone, but with direct input from parents. A more