Why is the most popular form of corporal punishment, spanking, a controversial means of modifying children's behavior?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The use of corporal punishment (in the form of spanking) is controversial for at least two reasons. First, surveys indicate that many parents use it because they believe that it is an effective means of controlling a child's behavior. Yet lobbying groups, like the National Coalition to Abolish Corporal Punishment in Schools, contend that it is not effective as a way to suppress undesired behavior and have worked for decades to persuade state and federal officials to outlaw the practice.
A second reason is that researchers have drawn different conclusions about what the research literature means because they use different definitions of corporal punishment. Elizabeth Gershoff, for example, reviewed eighty-eight studies conducted over the past sixty years and concluded that the use of corporal punishment resulted in low internalization of moral rules, aggressive behavior, delinquent and antisocial behavior, low-quality parent-child relationships, and physical abuse. Diana Baumrind, Robert Larzelere, and Philip Cowan argued that Gershoff's conclusions were distorted by the fact that she used a broad definition of corporal punishment that led her to include studies whose forms of punishment were more severe than most parents would administer. When Baumrind and her colleagues used a more narrow definition, they found a much weaker, but still positive, relationship between the use of corporal punishment and negative outcomes.
A third possible source of controversy is the fact that the studies Gershoff reviewed yielded correlational and not experimental data. But despite the fact that one cannot logically draw a cause-and-effect conclusion from correlational data, many people do so, and thereby believe that corporal punishment is the main or sole cause of the negative outcomes found in the studies reviewed by Gershoff.