How Hitting Can Affect Your Child's Brain?

Hitting can have serious impact on the brain development of children. Read on to learn more about how hitting can affect your child’s brain.Back in the olden days, corporal punishments in school were unavoidable. But now, spanking and hitting a child has been linked to serious consequences on a child’s physical, emotional and psychological health. Children who are spanked on a regular basis have ended up with poor brain health and leads to a tendency to develop depression, addiction and other mental disorders in later life.Spanking, in reality, does not tell the children to behave but instead brings up problems like aggression, delinquency, hostility and mental health problems since they have known no other way to redeem their injured pride. So, what could be the other effects of spanking your child? In this articleHitting Becomes Acceptable to ChildrenSpanking Leads to Unawareness of Alternative BehaviourHitting Can Lead to Substance AbuseSpanking in Front of Peers Can Aggravate the ProblemDamages the Relationships with Parents Forever1. Hitting Becomes Acceptable to ChildrenParents are children’s models. When you hit your child, you are automatically sending a message to your child that hitting is the only alternative when you want things to go your way. Such children may grow up to become bullies in school and hit on younger and weaker students, since this is the only way they know to retain their authority. Further in life, they might start hitting their own children for simple mistakes and thus it becomes a vicious cycle of pain and anger.2. Spanking Leads to Unawareness of Alternative BehaviourResearch has proved that children who come from homes that encourage hitting are more likely to develop aggression as they remain preoccupied with feelings of anger and revenge. Thus, he or she does not learn about self-control and alternative ways of showing his or her emotions. He or she can go on to develop an egoistic attitude and thus not know the meaning of valuable relationships in life. Needless to say, spanking does bring ‘good behaviour’ temporarily which can have dangerous consequences in adolescence and adulthood.3. Hitting Can Lead to Substance AbuseWhen abused children become teenagers, they become extremely detached to the society due to diminished self-esteem. They may take to addiction of different substances and become juvenile delinquents in the long run to take out their revenge and passion against the hurt and anger they had to face in childhood. Some of them also go on to have mental illnesses such as depression, mood and personality disorders since memories of rigorous beating can haunt their memories for years.4. Spanking in Front of Peers Can Aggravate the ProblemSpanking your child at home is bad enough, but slapping him or her in front of friends can lead to shame and embarrassment in front of his or her friends. He or she might be laughed at by his or her friends, which will damage the friendship itself just because the parent could not think of other ways to handle the child’s bad behaviour at home. Moreover, slapping a child’s head can use gradual damage to the brain or nervous system, though they might be not visible at the moment.5. Damages the Relationships with Parents ForeverSpanking with the intentions of disciplining children can seriously damage the parent-child relationship. The bond between a parent and child should ideally be based on love and mutual respect, but spanking can make the child insecure and secretly hostile against the parent instead, which can lead to revenge later on. Punishment can only promise you superficially good behaviour, but breeds fear or hatred.Therefore, it is important to give quality time to your child and take care of both their physical and emotional needs. Alternative ways of handling bad behaviour have been thoroughly discussed, and you shall get help by reading parenting books or take the help of interne to search for good parenting tips. Bringing up a child is hard business and as such the psychology the child should be kept in mind by parents.What are the ill effects of hitting children? Why should parents avoid hitting children? How can brain development in children get affected due to hitting? Discuss here.