Wednesday, April 14, 2021

Pseudoscience: Spanking children may impair their brain development

Caution: Scaremongering! This is not science, but ideology! "This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health" in other words by your tax money!

Shame on Harvard University to promote such pseudoscience in their Harvard Gazette newsletter!

The scientific debate over whether corporal punishment of children is detrimental in some way has been going on for at least five decades! If I am not totally mistaken, then it has been established many years ago that as long as spanking is not excessive and frequent children will not really suffer.
Some red herrings never die!

Has anybody researches whether children that were never spanked have suffered any consequences like neglect or lack of love etc.? I doubt it!

This so called scientific study (see below) appears to make no attempt to actually define what spanking is! Spanking is a very ambiguous term that can have many different meanings (e.g. which body parts, how intense, how often, whether children know their parents love them or not etc.).
It appears, the researchers here relied solely on interviews of children to determine whether a child was spanked or not.

"... These findings suggest that spanking may alter neural responses to environmental threats in a manner similar to more severe forms of maltreatment."

Spanking children may impair their brain development – Harvard Gazette

Here is the link to the underlying research article:

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