Is corporal punishment the best way to establish parental authority and raise physically and psychologically resilient children? No, that's not true: Various studies have repeatedly shown that educational methods involving physical punishment have a negative impact on human development. The evidence also suggests that such methods do not reduce defiance or aggression and do not promote long-term positive behavior in children, which would be their intended goal.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published on TikTok on June 30, 2024. The person in the video describes a situation in which a child does not listen to a parent a few times and says that corporal punishment is the best way to discipline the child and establish parental authority. He says in Czech, translated by Lead Stories staff:
If you smack that little boy of yours on the ass in this particular moment, he will remember it a thousand times better than if you explain it to him for an hour, and as a parent you will have authority, respect and esteem, and also the certainty that he will not do it again. Similarly, I am convinced that if you take this path in the child's upbringing, you have a much higher probability that your offspring becomes mentally and physically resilient; an individual who will not collapse mentally at the first sign of some serious problem that he will have to solve.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Fri Jul 5 07:05:55 2024 UTC)
The TikTok post above refers to the fact that the Czech government is preparing an amendment to the Civil Code that would ban corporal punishment as an inappropriate parental method but would not criminalize it. The draft of the bill, which also streamlines divorce proceedings, was approved by the government in June 2024 (archived here) and still has to be approved by parliament. The draft can be viewed here (archived here). The changes in the part that includes punishment for children are at § 858(1)(a) in conjunction with § 884(2) of the draft. The draft of the bill adds this sentence in Czech, translated by Lead Stories: "The human dignity of the child shall be affected by corporal punishment, infliction of mental hardship or other humiliating measures."
The screenshot below shows the draft text in Czech from the Czech parliament website.
(Source: www.psp.cz screenshot taken on Tue Jul 9 07:05:55 2024 UTC)
The government commissioner for human rights (archived here) Klara Simackova Laurencikova spoke to Cesky Rozhlas, a Czech state radio broadcaster, about the amendment on July 2, 2024 (archived here), and said that Czech parents themselves often perceive a routine use of physical punishment as "appropriate, normal, as something that belongs to upbringing." She also said in the interview that while the new bill does not criminalize such acts, it is important to state that society does not tolerate any form of corporal punishment or degrading treatment of children and does not want to continue to see it as the norm.
There are several studies and various research as found on a Google Scholar search carried out on July 8, 2024, (archived here) using the phrase "corporal punishments by parents child behaviors," showing that such methods can lead to detrimental results for the children's long-term development, including inducing anti-social behavior. The studies also found that corporal punishment does not lead to more compliance from children and does not increase parental authority. According to a 2012 article published on CMAJ, the Canadian Medical Association Journal available on the National Library of Medicine website (archived here), which also cites several studies showing the negative effects of corporal punishment, "a professional consensus is emerging" that parents should learn other nonviolent forms of disciplining children.
One of the most comprehensive analyses of spanking outcomes to date, a study published in the Journal of Family Psychology in 2016 (archived here), also says that spanking does not lead to more compliance from children when used by parents. The analysis that looked at 50 years of research, involving over 160,000 children, found that spanking was associated with "unintended detrimental outcomes," rather than "immediate or long-term compliance," which was the parents' intended outcome when they disciplined their children, as also explained in an article from Science Daily (archived here).
According to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, which also refers to an "ever-growing body of research" (archived here), corporal punishments of children can lead to a range of adverse health and behavioral outcomes, including poorer mental health, cognitive development, and educational outcomes. The UN Committee also stresses that adults who suffered corporal punishment as children are more likely to accept and experience violence or be involved in violent or criminal behavior as grown-ups. Ending all forms of corporal punishment on children is thus "key" to reducing violence in society as a whole, according to the UN Committee.
According to research conducted by the First Faculty of Medicine at Charles University in Prague, in the Czech Republic, from June 2023, the use of physical punishment as an educational "tool" is still prevalent among parents, even though it has been proven to have long-term negative consequences. The approval of such methods among parents also depended on the intensity and the frequency of their use, but according to the study mentioned above that involved 1013 respondents, almost 70 percent approved using such methods in exceptional cases or only in case of serious problems (archived here).
