IELTS Essay # 26 - Many people agree that children can be physically punished when they do something wrong, to correct and discipline them. Others disagree with this approach, because it can cause trauma. They believe that parents should speak with their children and explain why they should not make that mistake again. Discuss both views and give your personal opinion.

Essay # 26

Many people agree that children can be physically punished when they do something wrong, to correct and discipline them. Others disagree with this approach, because it can cause trauma. They believe that parents should speak with their children and explain why they should not make that mistake again. Discuss both views and give your personal opinion.

Parents everywhere use various methods to discipline their children and prevent them from doing wrong things. However, it is being debated nowadays whether corporal punishment is an effective system of correcting children, or should authoritative techniques be adopted. This essay shall discuss both these methods and give a reasonable stand.

The use of corporal punishment is strongly rooted in our society and is passed on through generations. It is the use of physical force causing pain, but not wounds, as a means of discipline. It may have been effective in the past, but disciplinary methods need to change with time. This is because there have been many reports suggesting corporal punishments end up causing trauma rather than constructing a child’s behavioural issues. The most common issues that have been revealed are that it lowers children’s self-esteem, promoting a negative view (using violence to solve problems), it creates barriers in parent-child communication (mainly due to fear), and children feel sad and abandoned. These kinds of feelings are definitely not supposed to be encouraged in childhood.

Disciplining a child doesn’t necessarily mean to target the child, but the act he did. Explaining the gravity of the wrong-doing and its consequences to the child will have a deeper and effective impact on his psyche, rather than punishing him physically. Mostly children are unlikely to be able to make any connection between their behaviour and physical punishment. They will only feel the pain of the hit. Therefore the new methods being promoted nowadays are grounding the children (not doing anything apart from their basic necessities), taking away their privileges for the time they realize their mistake, and using logical consequences (if the child comes late at night, he is made to go to without dinner).

I personally feel the non-physical disciplinary methods are better than the corporal ones. The children of the new generation are of a sharp and restless mind. They quickly grasp the behaviour of their surroundings therefore it is not ideal to use violence on and around them. It cannot be denied that corporal punishment did have functional results and a lot of our parents and grandparents have been a witness of that. But I feel the need to be flexible in this situation has arisen and we need to understand and accept that.

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