George Stewart's teacher in Jamaica used to wait by the school door with a switch to punish tardy pupils. His parents whipped him, too. Now he lives in the Bronx and refuses to hit his own children. "I don't think beating works," he says. "It instils in them a cruelty that they pass down, generation to generation." Ample evidence backs his view, say Richard Reeves and Emily Cuddy of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. Nearly 30 studies from various countries show that children who are regularly spanked become more aggressive. They are also more likely to be depressed or take drugs, even after correcting for other factors. Smacking is effective in the short run: it stops children pulling their sisters' hair. But in the long run it has all sorts of bad effects. A study in 20 American cities found that young children in homes with little or no spanking showed swifter cognitive development than their peers. Other studies find that children in physically punitive schools perform worse.
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