Is it ever OK to smack a child?
In most states and territories in Australia, parents and caregivers are legally allowed to discipline children at home with “reasonable” physical force, even though it isn’t permitted in schools or other education environments.
Multiple studies show that smacking children can result in a wide range of negative outcomes, but attitudes towards corporal punishment differ among generations of Australians. Internationally, 65 countries have implemented bans on hitting children and Australian experts have now reignited calls for legislative reform locally.
Why is smacking bad?
There is now overwhelming research linking physical punishment with negative short- and long-term effects.
One meta-analysis of 75 studies in 160,927 children found that spanking was associated with increased aggression and antisocial behaviour in children, as well as mental health problems and worse parent-child relationships.
“There’s only one positive outcome associated with use of corporal punishment and that is immediate compliance – but even compliance drops off over time,” the director of Australian Catholic University’s Institute of Child Protection Studies, Prof Daryl Higgins, says.
Smacking was also associated with lower levels of moral internalisation, which refers to the “idea that through parenting that we are teaching children to have their own internal rationale for why we do things and why we don’t do other things”, Higgins says.
Sophie Havighurst, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Melbourne, says that hitting children colours they way they view close relationships.
“If that’s what you’re learning from childhood, that your parent – who loves you – uses power and force and physical violence … when they don’t like what you’ve done, it sets kids up to have that understanding of intimate relationships as they go into adolescence and adulthood,” she says.
“We do know there’s a greater risk of a child who’s hit in childhood with later involvement in domestic violent relationships – both being a victim of and perpetrating violence.”
Overseas, bans have led to changes in attitudes and rates of corporal punishment over time, Havighurst says.
In Sweden, the first country to outlaw hitting children, in 1979, the acceptability of corporal punishment has drastically dropped over several decades. In 1965, 53% of the population were in favour of the physical punishment of children, a figure that had dropped to 11% in 1996. In 2000, 86% of Swedish children reported never having experienced physical punishment.
In New Zealand, the first English-speaking nation to ban smacking in 2007, the proportion of people who viewed hitting as acceptable dropped from 58% in 2008 to 19% in 2018. “What’s really interesting is they haven’t had an increase in prosecutions subsequent to changing the law,” Havighurst says.
Calls for legislative change
In Australia, there are clear generational differences in attitudes towards corporal punishment. The Australian Child Maltreatment Study, for which Higgins is also chief investigator, has found that 38% of people aged 65 years and older endorsed the idea that physical punishment was necessary in raising children, a figure more than double that in the youngest cohort surveyed. Among 16- to 24-year-olds, only 15% viewed it as necessary.
“We can see there that attitudes are shifting, which gives me hope that it’s time for us to have our laws catch up,” Higgins said.
Among that same 16 to 24 cohort, however, 61% reported experiencing at least four instances of corporal punishment as children. That figure surprised Havighurst, who expected it to be lower.
“I thought it was actually more like 30% to 40%, and the other research around the world suggests so, but this was not the case. So maybe there’s more smacking in Australia,” she says.
“We also know that if you were smacked four or more times in childhood, you have [nearly] double the risk of anxiety and depression as an adult.”
By allowing spanking to remain legal, Australia is not fulfilling its obligations as a signatory of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Higgins says. “We are in breach, and it’s been pointed out by the UN that we are in breach of it,” he says.
Higgins and Havighurst have reignited a push for legislative reform. Calls to outlaw the corporal punishment of children are not new: in 2013, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians launched a campaign to end smacking.
On how such a ban would be enforced, “the idea is not to become police state”, Higgins says. “It’s about changing attitudes and signalling from the top, from our legislature, that this is not acceptable.”
“We’ve done it in relation to seatbelt wearing,” he points out. “We expect parents or anybody driving a car to have children appropriately restrained … it’s not like we have a roadblock and police going into every car to check, but there are laws and parents are expected to comply.”
Havighurst agrees that “you wouldn’t want to have a focus on policing”, instead emphasising public education campaigns to provide support for parents.
“You need greater reach of parenting programs [to] provide alternatives to hitting children,” she says.
“Ironically, we’re one of the world leaders in developing parenting programs,” Higgins says. “We all need to get onboard with prioritising the rights and safety of children to be free from violence in the same way that adults are.”
