Are verbal actions no longer working for anyone, even warm-hearted women? As per a new study by UNC scientists, nearly 30 percent of North Carolina mothers of kids who are less than two years old admit to having spanked their children in the last year.
Additionally, 5% women who are mothers of three-month-old babies also agree to have spanked their infants. Around 70% mothers of 23-month-old children also accept that they have done such a thing.
“We were pretty surprised by the staggeringly high rate of spanking. We need to do a better job as a society teaching parents how to teach their kids what they need to learn without fear, pain, or coercion,” remarked Adam Zolotor, MD, MPH, lead author of the study, an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine and a core faculty member of the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center.
A total of 2,946 mothers of children born in North Carolina between Oct. 1, 2005 and July 31, 2007 were the participants of the study. They were told to undergo an anonymous telephone survey which took place from Oct. 1, 2007 to April 7, 2008, at UNC’s Survey Research Unit.
According to scientists, the tiny children involved in this study are too small to commit any flaw intentionally. Family doctors, pediatricians, and parent educators have an important task to educate and help parents comprehend child behavior and develop disciple ideas. They believe that spanking has also been linked to many other factors like child abuse victimization, poor self esteem, harmed parent-child relationships, child and adult mental status, substance addiction and behavioral actions.
The study was published in the June 24 issue of Frontiers in Child and Neurodevelopmental Psychiatry.