Spanking raises risks of anti-social behavior, 50-year study finds

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While kids may not immediately defy their parents after a spanking, they're more likely to be aggressive later, to have a worse relationship with their parents, and to grow up to have alcohol and substance abuse problems, the new study shows.

The team at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan focused on open-handed spanking — not beatings. They wanted to see if the time-honored practice really works as well as people believe it does. It doesn't, they report in the Journal of Family Psychology.

"The upshot of the study is that spanking increases the likelihood of a wide variety of undesired outcomes for children. Spanking thus does the opposite of what parents usually want it to do," said Andrew Grogan-Kaylor of the University of Michigan School of Social Work, who worked on the study.

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"Spanking was also significantly associated with lower moral internalization, lower cognitive ability, and lower self-esteem. The largest effect size was for physical abuse; the more children are spanked, the greater the risk that they will be physically abused by their parents."

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