The intellectual and mental development of the child who is subjected to punishments and beatings can be affected, as published in a study carried out by the Medical Association of Canada. These types of actions, usually carried out by guardians or parents, can make children aggressive. Find out more information below.
How can punishment make them more aggressive?
After analyzing various investigations that have been carried out at least in the last 15 years, and that are related to physical or corporal punishment, says Joan Durrant, who is a doctor in the Department of Family Social Sciences at the University of Manitoba, and Ron Emson, from the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, observed that there is an increase in aggressiveness towards parents, siblings and other children, and later their partners, on the part of those who in childhood are punished with blows.
“With virtually no exception, these studies revealed that physical punishment is associated with higher levels of aggression. Corporal punishment has a direct causal effect on the externalization of behavior, whether through a reflexive response to pain, modeling (one type of behavior is encouraged by example) or coercive family processes , ” say the researchers.
The study also indicates that physical punishment is associated with mental problems such as depression, anxiety, and drug and alcohol use. One theory is that physical punishment can change areas in the brain linked to performance on IQ tests and increases vulnerability to drug and alcohol dependence.
Researchers from the University of London, in a previous study published in Current Biology, had already pointed out that children exposed to domestic violence or abuse show changes in their brains similar to those of soldiers who have participated in combat. If the child becomes more aggressive, he will have more problems than solutions and his future will be possibly damaged. Therefore it is necessary to avoid physical punishment, there are truly effective ways to educate children to avoid these traumas and problems in the future.
This situation is highly frequent, especially in environments where education is usually diminished and it is of great importance to understand that punishment and violence cannot teach anything, on the contrary, they can become a vice and a breeding ground to generate more violence in the future, affecting the development of the child who will take the example, will assume that the blows are the solution to any problem, and his best tool to solve them.