Short answer, yes. The American Academy of Pediatrics reviewed decades of research and landed on a clear position.
Is Spanking Harmful to Children?
It wasn’t always this settled. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, a well known developmental psychologist named Dr. Diana Baumrind ran one of the more thorough studies on the topic, and it complicated the picture for a while. She was responding to a real methodological problem, the fact that two things being correlated doesn’t prove one causes the other. Kids who get spanked more also tend to show more aggression later, but that alone doesn’t tell you spanking caused the aggression. It could be that harder to manage kids draw more spanking in the first place, which is closer to what Baumrind’s data actually suggested once she accounted for temperament.
Her conclusion at the time was that mild, occasional spanking, used alongside other discipline and never rising to abuse, didn’t show clear harm in her sample of middle class families. For years, that research got cited as a reason spanking might be fine in moderation.
Since then, the evidence base has grown a lot, and it points the other way. Larger, longer running studies have tracked outcomes for thousands of kids, not hundreds, and the pattern holds up even after controlling for the same factors Baumrind raised. That’s what pushed the American Academy of Pediatrics to update its official policy and state plainly that parents and caregivers must never use spanking, hitting, slapping, or verbal shaming.
Why Spanking Fails
- It only stops bad behavior for a short time.
- It teaches children that hitting is an acceptable way to solve problems.
- It’s linked to higher rates of anxiety, depression, and long-term aggression.
Positive Alternatives
- Positive reinforcement. Praise children when they behave well.
- Clear limits. Set firm, fair rules ahead of time.
- Redirection. Guide the child toward a different, acceptable activity.
- Time-outs. Remove the child briefly from a stimulating environment to calm down.
If you want real scripts for using these in the moment, not just the theory, our article Do You Spank Your Children? walks through exactly what to say and do instead, from a parent educator who works with families on this every day.
A few more places worth reading if you want to go deeper. NPR covered the policy update well when it came out. Nemours KidsHealth has a solid overview of healthy discipline strategies. And the Cleveland Clinic lays out the clinical reasoning in plain language.
Parenting is hard, and nobody gets it perfect. If you’re working through other tough moments with your kids, you’ll find more of our parenting articles here. If you’ve spanked before, that doesn’t make you a bad parent, it just means there’s a better tool sitting right there waiting to be used instead.
