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School Corporal Punishment Effects on Children

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Corporal Punishment in U.S. Public Schools

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Abstract

Although a substantial literature has shown that corporal punishment by parents is linked with increased behavior problems, increased mental health problems, and decreased school performance (Gershoff in Psychological Bulletin 128:539–579, 2002; Gershoff in Report on physical punishment in the United States: What research tells us about its effects on children. Center for Effective Discipline and Phoenix Children’s Hospital, Coloumbus, 2008; Gershoff in Law and Contemporary Problems 31:31–56, 2010; Gershoff in Child Development Perspectives 7:133–137, 2013), corporal punishment by school personnel has been almost entirely unstudied. Only a handful of correlational studies have linked corporal punishment in schools with children’s developmental outcomes. We know very little about the effects of school corporal punishment on children’s behavior or performance in school, and thus, while this chapter covers the most important concern related to school corporal punishment, there is very little data on the key question of what effects school corporal punishment has on children.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Human Development and Family Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Elizabeth T. Gershoff & Igor Holas

  2. Department of Human Sciences, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Kelly M. Purtell

Authors
  1. Elizabeth T. Gershoff
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  2. Kelly M. Purtell
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  3. Igor Holas
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Correspondence to Elizabeth T. Gershoff .

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Gershoff, E.T., Purtell, K.M., Holas, I. (2015). School Corporal Punishment Effects on Children. In: Corporal Punishment in U.S. Public Schools. SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14818-2_4

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