Spanking may affect the brain development of a child
April 12, 2021
Science Daily/Harvard University
Spanking may affect a child's brain development in similar ways to more severe forms of violence, according to a new study led by Harvard researchers.
The research, published recently in the journal Child Development, builds on existing studies that show heightened activity in certain regions of the brains of children who experience abuse in response to threat cues.
The group found that children who had been spanked had a greater neural response in multiple regions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), including in regions that are part of the salience network. These areas of the brain respond to cues in the environment that tend to be consequential, such as a threat, and may affect decision-making and processing of situations.
"We know that children whose families use corporal punishment are more likely to develop anxiety, depression, behavior problems, and other mental health problems, but many people don't think about spanking as a form of violence," said Katie A. McLaughlin, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, director of the Stress & Development Lab in the Department of Psychology, and the senior researcher on the study. "In this study, we wanted to examine whether there was an impact of spanking at a neurobiological level, in terms of how the brain is developing."
According to the study's authors, corporal punishment has been linked to the development of mental health issues, anxiety, depression, behavioral problems, and substance use disorders. And recent studies show that approximately half of parents in U.S. studies reported spanking their children in the past year and one-third in the past week. However, the relationship between spanking and brain activity has not previously been studied.
McLaughlin and her colleagues -- including Jorge Cuartas, first author of the study and a doctoral candidate in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and David Weissman, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology's Stress & Development Lab -- analyzed data from a large study of children between the ages of three and 11. They focused on 147 children around ages 10 and 11 who had been spanked, excluding children who had also experienced more severe forms of violence.
Each child lay in an MRI machine and watched a computer screen on which were displayed different images of actors making "fearful" and "neutral" faces. A scanner captured the child's brain activity in response to each kind of face, and those images were analyzed to determine whether the faces sparked different patterns of brain activity in children who were spanked compared to those who were not.
"On average, across the entire sample, fearful faces elicited greater activation than neutral faces in many regions throughout the brain... and children who were spanked demonstrated greater activation in multiple regions of PFC to fearful relative to neutral faces than children who were never spanked," researchers wrote.
By contrast, "(t)here were no regions of the brain where activation to fearful relative to neutral faces differed between children who were abused and children who were spanked."
The findings are in line with similar research conducted on children who had experienced severe violence, suggesting that "while we might not conceptualize corporal punishment to be a form of violence, in terms of how a child's brain responds, it's not all that different than abuse," said McLaughlin. "It's more a difference of degree than of type."
Researchers said the study is a first step towards further interdisciplinary analysis of spanking's potential effects on children's brain development and lived experiences.
"These findings aligned with the predictions from other perspectives on the potential consequences of corporal punishment," studied in fields such as developmental psychology and social work, said Cuartas. "By identifying certain neural pathways that explain the consequences of corporal punishment in the brain, we can further suggest that this kind of punishment might be detrimental to children and we have more avenues to explore it."
However, they noted that their findings are not applicable to the individual life of each child.
"It's important to consider that corporal punishment does not impact every child the same way, and children can be resilient if exposed to potential adversities," said Cuartas. "But the important message is that corporal punishment is a risk that can increase potential problems for children's development, and following a precautionary principle, parents and policymakers should work toward trying to reduce its prevalence."
Ultimately, added McLaughlin, "we're hopeful that this finding may encourage families not to use this strategy, and that it may open people's eyes to the potential negative consequences of corporal punishment in ways they haven't thought of before."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210412161850.htm
Spanking linked to increase in children's behavior problems
November 16, 2017
Science Daily/Association for Psychological Science
Children who have been spanked by their parents by age 5 show an increase in behavior problems at age 6 and age 8 relative to children who have never been spanked, according to new findings. The study, which uses a statistical technique to approximate random assignment, indicates that this increase in behavior problems cannot be attributed to various characteristics of the child, the parents, or the home environment - rather, it seems to be the specific result of spanking.
The study, which uses a statistical technique to approximate random assignment, indicates that this increase in behavior problems cannot be attributed to various characteristics of the child, the parents, or the home environment -- rather, it seems to be the specific result of spanking.
"Our findings suggest that spanking is not an effective technique and actually makes children's behavior worse not better," says psychological scientist Elizabeth T. Gershoff (University of Texas at Austin), lead author on the study.
Historically, trying to determine whether parents' use of spanking actually causes children to develop behavior problems has been difficult, because researchers cannot ethically conduct experiments that randomly assign parents to spank or not.
"Parents spank for many reasons, such as their educational or cultural background or how difficult their children's behavior is. These same reasons, which we call selection factors, can also predict children's behavior problems, making it difficult to determine whether spanking is in fact the cause of behavior problems," Gershoff explained. "We realized that the statistical method of propensity score matching could help us get as close to an experiment as possible."
Gershoff and coauthors Kierra M. P. Sattler (University of Texas at Austin) and Arya Ansari (University of Virginia) examined data from 12,112 children who participated in the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. When the children were 5 years old, their parents reported how many times they had spanked their child in the past week (if any). The researchers classified any child whose parent provided a number other than zero as having been spanked.
The researchers then matched children who had been spanked with those who hadn't according to 38 child- and family-related characteristics, including: the child's age, gender, overall health, and behavior problems at age 5; the parent's education, age, and marital status; the family socioeconomic status and household size; and factors related to parenting quality and conflict in the home.
Pairing the children in this way yielded two groups of children whose main difference was whether their parents had spanked them, effectively accounting for other factors that could plausibly influence the behavior of both parent and child. This approach allowed the researchers to approximate the random assignment of participants to groups, a hallmark of experimental design.
To gauge children's behavior problems over time, Gershoff, Sattler, and Ansari examined teachers' ratings when the children were 5, 6, and 8 years old. Children's teachers reported the frequency with which the children argued, fought, got angry, acted impulsively, and disturbed ongoing activities.
The results were clear: Children who had been spanked at age 5 showed greater increases in behavior problems by age 6 and also by age 8 when compared with children who had never been spanked.
Gershoff and colleagues conducted a similar analysis with only those children who had been spanked by their parents, comparing children who had been spanked in the week before the study (which suggests frequent spanking) and those who had not. Children spanked in the past week at age 5 also experienced greater increases in problem behavior at age 6 and 8 compared with children not spanked as frequently.
"The fact that knowing whether a child had ever been spanked was enough to predict their levels of behavior problems years later was a bit surprising," says Gershoff. "It suggests that spanking at any frequency is potentially harmful to children."
"Although dozens of studies have linked early spanking with later child behavior problems, this is the first to do so with a statistical method that approximates an experiment," she concluded.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171116132702.htm