TO SMACK OR NOT TO SMACK?

Experts are constantly disagreeing on the answer to this contentious question, but a new study may help put an end to it for you. Published in the Journal of Family Psychology last year, the major study covered 50 years of research on more than 160 000 children. It concluded that children who are smacked by their parents are more likely to have mental health issues and antisocial behaviour as adults.

“We also found that although parents use spanking or smacking with the goal of improving their children’s behaviour, it is linked consistently with the opposite outcome. The more children are spanked, the more aggressive and poorly behaved they are,” lead researcher Elizabeth Gershoff said.

As to whether you’re allowed to smack your child, South African law is still a bit murky on this. Although the global lobby group End Corporal Punishment and the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) have been pressuring government to criminalise spanking and other forms of physical discipline, at the time of writing it was still legal to “inflict moderate and reasonable chastisement on a child for misconduct”.

The problem, of course, is that one person’s idea of “moderate” or “reasonable” is very different to another’s, and the SAHRC argues that any allowance of physical discipline opens the door for widespread acceptance of physical abuse of children. Rather just don’t do it.