Most of us know someone who says it with a shrug: “I got spanked and I turned out fine.” It’s a comforting story. It’s also one of the most thoroughly tested claims in child development, and it doesn’t hold up.

Hitting children to correct them is still legal in the home in every U.S. state. It’s still legal in public schools in 15 states, where a principal can paddle a child with a wooden board.¹ That makes this more than a private parenting debate. It’s a question about what we, as a country, are willing to do to kids in the name of teaching them.

Fifty years of research, one answer

In 2016, researchers Elizabeth Gershoff and Andrew Grogan-Kaylor pulled together five decades of studies covering more than 160,000 children. Spanking was linked to 13 of the 17 harmful outcomes they examined, including more aggression, more antisocial behavior, more defiance toward parents, mental health problems, and lower cognitive ability. It was not linked to better behavior, either right away or over time.²

A 2021 review in The Lancet looked only at studies that followed children over time, the kind of research best suited to separating cause from coincidence. Across 69 studies, not one found that physical punishment improved children’s behavior. Instead, it predicted worse behavior. The harm showed up regardless of the child’s sex or ethnicity, and regardless of how warm the parents were otherwise.³

That’s the core problem. Spanking can stop a behavior in the moment, because a child is scared or hurt. But fear isn’t learning. Plato made the point more than two thousand years ago: nothing taught by force stays in the soul. What sticks is the lesson that bigger people get to hit smaller people when they’re angry.

Spanking behaves like an adverse childhood experience

Our work at Stop Abuse Campaign centers on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), the forms of childhood adversity that research ties to poorer health across a lifetime. Spanking isn’t on the original ACE questionnaire. A growing number of researchers think it should be.

In 2017, a team including researchers from the CDC analyzed responses from 8,316 adults in the second wave of the original CDC-Kaiser ACE study, which surveyed more than 17,000 adults. Spanking clustered with physical and emotional abuse, not apart from them. Even after accounting for abuse, adults who were spanked as children had higher odds of moderate to heavy drinking, street drug use, and suicide attempts.⁴

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) points to similar findings. In its 2018 policy statement, it noted that children spanked more than twice a month at age 3 were more aggressive at age 5 and had lower vocabulary scores at age 9. Hitting, yelling at, or shaming children can raise stress hormones and change the architecture of the developing brain.⁵

The paddle is still in the classroom

Thirty states and Washington, D.C., have explicitly banned corporal punishment in public schools. Fifteen states still have laws that allow it. Federal data counted almost 32,000 instances in the 2021–22 school year, and nearly all of them happened in eight states, mostly in the South. Mississippi has the highest rate, and Arkansas is second.¹ Because not every district reports, the real number is likely higher.

Who gets paddled isn’t random. According to the AAP, Black boys are physically punished at school nearly twice as often as their white peers, and Black girls more than three times as often. About 16.5% of students who are paddled have disabilities.⁶ These are the children who most need patient, skilled support, and they’re the ones most likely to be hit.

A child can’t be expected to feel safe asking questions, making mistakes, or telling an adult something is wrong in a building where adults are allowed to hit them.

What works instead

The good news is that parents are already moving on. In 1993, about half of U.S. parents reported spanking their children. By 2017, that had dropped to 35%.⁸ The tools that replace it are simple, and they’re backed by evidence.

At home

The CDC’s guidance for parents of young children recommends:⁹

• Positive attention. Praise, hugs, and high-fives for the behavior you want to see more of.
• Ignoring minor misbehavior. Taking away attention from small, attention-seeking behaviors.
• Logical consequences. Losing a privilege that connects to what went wrong.
• Time-out. A short, calm break somewhere without attention or distractions.
• Clear warnings. An “if-then” warning, followed through right away, then back to warmth.

The AAP adds that setting expectations ahead of time and staying consistent matter more than any single technique.⁵

At school

Schools that have dropped the paddle rely on approaches like Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), restorative practices that emphasize accountability and repair, conflict resolution, mentoring, and counseling.⁶ These teach children how to handle conflict, rather than teaching them to fear adults.

None of this means going soft on children. It means holding them to high standards in a way that works and doesn’t leave them carrying the costs into adulthood.