Harvard study: Spanking or more serious forms of violence affect children's brain development

I often hear the older generation say "a filial son is born under a stick".
If a child does something wrong, he can't understand why he is reasonable.
Only by letting the child try a bit of hardship can he remember.

But can the problem be solved only by beating and scolding? Spanking a child is likely to cause safety problems, including spanking! The ass is the most popular place for adults to spank.
They think that spanking does not hurt the body, but in fact it's the opposite! Today, a Harvard University research team published a study in Child Development showing that spanking may be a more serious form of violence that affects children’s brain development.

In the past, there are many research evidences on the enhancement of reaction activity in certain areas of the brain of children who have experienced corporal punishment.
This research is further analyzed on the basis of these studies.

The researchers analyzed 147 children between the ages of 3 and 11 who had been spanked.

Each child lay in the MRI machine, watching different images displayed on the computer screen, the images made "horror" and "normal" expressions.

The scanner captures the child’s brain activity in response to each face and analyzes these images to determine whether these faces trigger different patterns of brain activity compared to children who have not been spanked.

Through analysis, it is found that children who have been spanked have strong neural responses in multiple areas of the prefrontal cortex (PFC).

These areas will respond to certain factors in the environment, so as to affect the individual's decision-making and handling of daily life situations.

The brain regions of spanked children have significantly greater stimulus activities.
Studies have observed that compared with children who have never been spanked, spanked children are in dACC (a key node in the saliency network).
The fear face’s response is increased, which means that these children have a greater neural response to fear emotional stimuli.

The difference in the neuroreactivity to fear between children who have been spanked and children who have never been spanked.
In addition, it has also been observed that the activation of large areas of the medial PFC and bilateral frontal poles in children who have been spanked has increased.

These areas are part of the default model network, which participates in a wide range of social cognitive processes, including autobiographical memory and other aspects of mentalization, mental theory, and broader social information processing.

Because the scary expression is a signal of potential danger in the environment.

Therefore, this model can reflect that spanked children are more alert to potential threats in the environment and use more attention sources to deal with the psychological state of fear.

This increased vigilance seems to be beneficial in the short term because it increases the prominence of threatening emotional information and may make it easier for children exposed to violence to identify potential threats and mobilize defensive responses to avoid harm.

However, in the long run, high vigilance may promote increased emotional responsiveness, difficulty in emotional regulation, bias attributable to hostility, and increased risk of psychopathology.

The lead author of the study, Dr.
Jorge Cuartas from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said that although everyone knows that spanking can cause anxiety, depression, behavioral problems, and other mental health problems in children, many people do not regard spanking as one.
This is a form of violence.
The findings of the study are also a warning to parents who feel that spanking does not affect them.

Original document: Jorge Cuartas, David G.
Weissman, Margaret A.
Sheridan, Liliana Lengua, Katie A.
McLaughlin.
Corporal Punishment and Elevated Neural Response to Threat in Children.
Child Development, 2021; DOI: 10.
1111/cdev.
13565