Conflict and Corporal Punishment in Families

Another form of family violence that is also related to conflict but that is not always related to the intensity of the conflict is corporal punishment (Holden, Miller, & Harris, 1999).

Despite the theoretical distinction between corporal punishment and other forms of family violence, the outcomes for children are remarkably similar (but see Baumrind, Larzelere, & Cowan, 2002). In an extensive review of the existing literature on corporal punishment, Gershoff (2002) found that while corporal punishment results in the desired short-term compliance, other outcomes of corporal punishment for children include increased aggression and delinquent and anti­social behaviors, as well as decreased moral internalization, lower quality of parent-child relationships, and mental health problems for children. Negative effects of corporal punish­ment that follow children into adulthood include increased risks for adult criminal and antisocial behavior and for abusing one’s own children (Gershoff, 2002; Straus, 1994). Other research has linked corporal punishment to increased externalizing behaviors (MacKenzie, Nicklas, Waldfogel, & Brooks-Gunn, 2011) and delayed cognitive development (Straus & Paschall, 2009).

One explanation for the finding that violent family conflict and corporal punishment have similarly negative outcomes for children could be that regardless of the parents’ intensions, the emotional intensity with which parents experience the conflict between themselves and their children determines the use of cor­poral punishment.

Another explanation for the similar out­comes of violence and corporal punishment could be that even though they are distinguish­able by the parents’ motivation, behaviorally the distinction between violence and corporal punishment is less clear. Straus’s (1994) defini­tions of both corporal punishment and vio­lence illustrate this ambiguity. Straus defines corporal punishment as “the use of physical force with the intention of causing a child to experience pain, but not injury, for the purpose of correction or control of the child’s behav­ior” (p. 4), whereas violence is defined as “an act carried out with the intention, or perceived intention, of causing physical pain or injury to another person” (p. 7). Thus, for Straus the distinction between corporal punishment and violence is the intention of the parent to inflict injury, even though from the outside, and more important from the children’s per­spective, these two are indistinguishable on the behavioral level. This suggests that while the parents might be able to distinguish between violence and corporal punishment in terms of their intention, the children might not be able to make this distinction because they necessar­ily rely on their own inferences and attribu­tions when assigning intent to their parents’ behaviors (Sillars & Canary, 2012).

A final explanation for why the negative effects of corporal punishment mirror those of family violence in general focuses more directly on functional correlates of corporal punishment. For example, Straus and Yodanis (1996) argued that the use of corporal punish­ment tends to preclude the opportunity for parents to utilize other, more socially useful methods of behavior control, such as reason­ing and reflection and, therefore, results in children’s truncated development of conflict resolution skills. The more parents rely on corporal punishment, the less opportunity a child has to witness and to participate in and, therefore, to learn nonviolent modes of influ­encing their own and other’s behavior, leaving them to rely on physically violent strategies for conflict resolution. In other words, like other types of violent family conflict, corporal punishment teaches children problem resolu­tion and conflict skills that they cannot suc­cessfully use in their relationships outside the family and that therefore impede their social competence and functioning.