Spanking kids boosts odds of mental illness

People who were hit or smacked as children face higher odds of developing mental ailments as adults, including mood and anxiety disorders and alcohol or drug abuse, researchers said yesterday.

... if 50 per cent of the population has experienced being spanked in the past year, most kids are really resilient

The study, led by Canadian researchers, is the first to examine the link between psychological problems and spanking, while excluding more severe physical or sexual abuse in order to better gauge the effect of corporal punishment alone.

Those who were spanked or hit as kids were between two and seven per cent more likely to encounter mental issues later, said the research in the US journal Pediatrics. It was based on a retrospective survey of more than 600 US adults.

That figure may seem low, particularly since about half of the US population recalls being spanked in childhood, but nevertheless shows that physical punishment can raise the risk of problems later on, experts said.

“The study is valuable because it opens the conversation about parenting,” said Victor Fornari, director of the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System in New York.

The rate “is not dramatically higher, but it is higher, just to suggest that physical punishment is a risk factor for developing more mental disturbances as an adult,” said Mr Fornari, who was not involved in the study.

Previous research has repeatedly shown that children who were physically abused as youngsters suffer from more mental disturbances as adults and are more likely to engage in aggressive behaviour than other children.

But these studies have typically included more serious abuse.

The current study excludes both sexual abuse and physical abuse that left bruises, marks or caused injury. Instead it focuses on “harsh physical punishment”, defined as pushing, grabbing, shoving, slapping or hitting by elders.

While 32 nations around the world have banned corporal punishment of children, the United States and Canada are not among them.

Between two and five per cent of disorders such as depression, anxiety, bipolar, anorexia or bulimia were attributable to physical punishment as a child, the study said.

From four to seven per cent of serious problems including personality disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder and intellectual disabilities were associated with such childhood punishments.

Researchers stressed that the study could not establish that spanking had actually caused these disorders in certain adults, only that there was a link between memories of such punishment and a higher incidence of mental problems later in life.

The survey data came from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions collected between 2004 and 2005,, and included adults over 20.

Participants were asked: “As a child how often were you ever pushed, grabbed, shoved, slapped or hit by your parents or any adult living in your house?”

Those who answered “sometimes” or more were included in the analysis.

Roya Samuels, a paediatrician at Cohen Children’s Medical Centre in New York, said the parents’ genes may influence both their response to raising an unruly child and their likelihood of passing down certain ailments.

“Parents who are resorting to mechanisms of corporal punishment might themselves be at risk for depression and mental disorders; therefore, there might be a hereditary factor going on in these families,” she said.

Future research could shed more light on the issue.

In the meantime, the study offers a reminder that other disciplinary options, such as positive reinforcement and withdrawing rewards, are viewed much more favourably by doctors.

“The reality is, if 50 per cent of the population has experienced being spanked in the past year, most kids are really resilient. It is just that there are better ways for parents to discipline kids than spanking,” Mr Fornari said.

“And for some vulnerable kids, the spanking may increase their risk for the development of mental disturbances. So for those reasons it is important to continually seek to really minimise or extinguish physical punishment.”