Although spanking has become less socially acceptable in the United States in recent decades, it's still used in many American households. In a 2012 survey, about 70 percent of Americans agreed that "a good, hard spanking" is sometimes necessary to discipline a child.

Unlike earlier meta-analyses on the topic, Gershoof and Grogan-Kaylor looked at outcomes associated only with spanking, which they define as "hitting a child on their buttocks or extremities using an open hand." They also made sure that all the studies they analyzed were methodologically strong.

Specifically, to be included in their meta-analysis, Gershoof and Grogan-Kaylor made sure each study met these criteria: It had to be peer-reviewed. It had to separate out the effects of spanking from other, harsher forms of parental punishment. It had to control for non-spanking-related factors that might have affected the children's outcomes. And it had to have findings with statistical strength.

They set these requirements to address two criticisms of previous meta-analyses on the topic: 1) that the large number of studies in which spanking was found to be harmful had conflated spanking with harsher types of parental physical punishment and 2) that the handful of studies that had found no harm had been poorly designed".https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SplolEfRw1EAS1SSOQMmzPkyrAwkQ_5R_lB0uTeozzg/edit

Children who were spanked were, for example, more likely to be aggressive, to display antisocial behavior, to have more mental health problems and to have more negative relationships with their parents. They were also more likely to have low self-esteem and to have lower cognitive abilities.

The spanked children were also at greater risk of being physically abused by their parents, the research revealed.

The study found no evidence, however, that spanking improved the behavior of children.

Spanking's negative effects also followed the children into adulthood. Adults who received spankings as children were more likely to display antisocial behavior and to have mental health than their peers who were raised in non-spanking homes, the meta-analysis found.

Those adults were also more likely to spank their own children.https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SplolEfRw1EAS1SSOQMmzPkyrAwkQ_5R_lB0uTeozzg/edit

"Parents who use spanking, practitioners who recommend it, and policymakers who allow it might reconsider doing so given that there is no evidence that spanking does any good for children and all evidence points to the risk of it doing harm," Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor conclude in their paper.

Somebody might want to mention that to Senator Cruz.https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SplolEfRw1EAS1SSOQMmzPkyrAwkQ_5R_lB0uTeozzg/edit

"I'm from a tiny town...so my parents knew the principal and knew if I was getting paddled, I deserved it," Leesville resident Dani Mellendorf said. "I'm for it in smaller towns. Leesville is much too big and there's not really a relationship between principal and parent like there was at my hometown."

"I would have no problem letting select people at my son's school paddle his behind," said Ashley DeKeyzer, of Alexandria. "I think it would straighten him, and others, out if they knew there were real consequences to their actions. Unfortunately, our (private) school does not use this type of punishment."When he was a child, Shreveport resident Brian Mitchell remembered seeing a paddle at his school. He also got "knuckle treatment" from his teacher, who used a Husky brand pencil on students who misbehaved."The fear of the paddle, which took on a legend of its own, kept many of us in line," Mitchell said. "It was an effective way to manage the class to put an end to some disruptive activity. To this I must add, the teachers at that school were superb, and the principal was an extremely kind-hearted man."

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ksLuJhA_iRZNOUoimsy0aBgb9oFLpX3ixjgYUV6PnAs/edit