Should parents spank their children?

   I once visited my aunt whose son is 4 years old. When I just came to the living room, I saw my aunt with the cane in her hand hitting strongly my cousin although he cried, shouted and apologised to her so much. Seeing the bowl full of soup on the table, I guessed that he must have been lazy to eat. I ran to him, hugged him tightly and asked my aunt to stop hitting him so that I would help her to feed him. After being spanked, he seemed scared to eat all the soup in just  5 minutes and fell asleep after that. Looking my innocent cousin, I wondered why parents always use spanking to punish their children like that. Don’t they know  spanking can effect to their children’s physical and mental development and even form a bad habit and bad behaviour in their children?

   Spanking is not a good way to discipline children when they make mistake because it affects not only physical development but also mental development. Children are always spanked by their parents because of being lazy to eat, to study and because of making a mess, having the bad behaviour. However, should parents always use spanking as the only way to correct their mistakes? The answer must be NO. According to some researches, spanking can affect badly to children's physical development. We all know that children are very easy to be haunted something bad happen in their life so that they will be very easy to keep everything about being spanked in their mind. And sleeping is the time to remind of these things so that children cannot sleep well at night because of scaring to be spanked. Cannot sleep at night means that children lose their chance to be taller and that is one of the reason for spanked children not to develop as good as the others in physical development. Moreover, some American scientists said that children's mental development can be worse when they are hit too often. It is proved in IQ figure: spanked children from 2 to 4 years old will have 5 marks lower than children who are not punished like that too often. That means spanking can stop children from being more intelligent, one of the sign of mental development. We all cannot deny that spanking can help parents to stop their children from doing wrong things, but it is a very high price for parents to teach their children by spanking because spanking can be too easy to limit their children in physical and mental development.

  Spanking can form bad habit and wrong behaviour in children. Children who are punished by hitting too often tend to tell lie and become more violent in their action. My cousin’s situation is an example for this opinion. I came back my aunt’s house lately and saw my cousin was eating by himself very well. Talking with my aunt, I finally recognised that she had stopped using coporal punishment with her son after taking him home from psychological hospital. She said that: “The more she hit him, the worse behaviour he get”. Spanking made him scared just at that moment, he would have done the same thing in the next time if she hadn’t reminded him of it. To be much more worse, he seemed to tell lie very often with everyone because he wanted to protect himself from being punished by physical discipline. And he didn’t want to share with her anything happening around him such as the colour he liked, the friends he played with, the activities he liked to join because he was scared of his mom’s punishment if something went wrong. He was also very violent in playing with his friends, he was easy to hit friends if someone did not do something he liked because he thought that hitting was the only thing to make other follow to him. Day by day, he became more and more violent and much more worse in behaviour, no one wanted to play with him and he fall into lonely situation and had to go to the hospital to treat his problem. My aunt also told me many different cases like my cousin in the hospital because of being spanking. Although spanking can help parents to form their children behavior in the good way, they don’t know that it can be affected in the bad side. Imagine using spanking like taking a kind of medicine, it will harm to our health if we use it too much or in the wrong way. Spanking is also form a bad habit like telling lie and the bad behaviour like being more violent for children which are opposite with the ones their parents expect.

  Spanking which affects badly in children’s physical and mental development, in their behaviour are being used too often in many families in Vietnam. Parents who use spanking as a way to train their children send a message for their children that violence is the only way to solve problems in life. And it is not a good way to teach children by violent way if we don’t want them to become a bad people who are ready to hit others without any serious reason. In conclusion, we should teach children by other ways like talking with them to show them know what they should do or not, give them  good advice to solve problems and always stand by them whenever they are in trouble to help them become a good person in life instead of using violent punishment like spanking.