Smacking your child can affect their brain development by altering neural responses to their environment, a new study warns.
Harvard University researchers investigated the effects of smacking, known as corporal punishment, on the brains of 147 children.
They found it may affect a child’s brain development in similar ways to ‘more severe forms of violence’ and maltreatment.
Children who had been smacked had a greater neural response in multiple regions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), including in regions that are part of what’s known as the ‘salience network’ (SN).
These regions respond to cues in the environment that tend to be consequential, such as a threat, and may affect decision-making and processing of situations.
Smacking is legal in the US, while in the UK, Scotland completely prohibited corporal punishment of children in 2020, and Wales is set to follow in 2022.
In England, however, a ‘reasonable chastisement’ defence allows parents to legally smack their child unless it causes bruises, grazes, scratches, minor swellings or cuts.
This defence has been criticised as it effectively means children can be smacked if it doesn’t leave evidence.
This could mean parents target areas that don’t leave a mark, such as the head, potentially causing even more serious injuries that aren’t easily detected.
Smacking could alter a child’s neural responses to their environment in similar ways to a child experiencing more severe violence (stock picture posed by models)
An NSPCC spokesperson said: ‘There is clear evidence that physical punishment damages children’s wellbeing and is linked to poorer outcomes in childhood and adulthood.
‘We would encourage parents to use alternative methods to teach their children the difference between right and wrong, with a positive parenting approach such as setting clear and consistent boundaries.’
The new research from the Harvard team builds on existing studies that show heightened activity in certain regions of the brains of children who experience abuse in response to threat cues.
‘We know that children whose families use corporal punishment are more likely to develop anxiety, depression, behaviour problems, and other mental health problems, but many people don’t think about spanking as a form of violence,’ said study author Katie A. McLaughlin at Harvard’s Department of Psychology.
‘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.’
McLaughlin and her colleagues analysed 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.
Map shows the countries that have outlawed all forms of corporal punishment of children (highlighted in red). Wales is set to follow in 2022
Each child lay in an magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, which uses strong magnetic fields and radio waves to produce detailed images of the inside of the body.
As they did so, they watched a computer screen that 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 the images were analysed 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,’ the researchers say in their paper, published in the journal Child Development.
‘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 believe the study is a first step towards further analysis of spanking’s potential effects on children’s brain development.
Corporal punishment has already been linked to the development of mental health issues, anxiety, depression, behavioural problems and substance use disorders.
However, the relationship between spanking and brain activity had not previously been studied.
‘While we might not conceptualise 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.
‘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.’
Parents and policymakers should work toward trying to reduce corporal punishment, the researchers add.
The argument against criminalising smacking seems to stem from concerns over the state’s growing interference in family life.
Campaigners have suggested it undermines parents’ ability to decide how to bring up their children – and will result in needless criminalisation.
But when Scotland outlawed smacking children last November, Minister for Children Maree Todd said that the ‘justifiable assault’ defence was ‘outdated’ and had ‘no place in a modern Scotland’.
‘The removal of this defence reaffirms that we want this country to be the best place in the world for children to grow up,’ she said.
In 1979, Sweden became the first country in the world to explicitly prohibit all forms of corporal punishment of children.
Since then, more than 60 countries or territories have followed suit, including Brazil, Spain, France, New Zealand, Portugal, South Korea – but not England or the US.
In the US, approximately half of parents reported spanking their children between the ages 0-9 in the year prior, according to a 2019 study.