The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry defines corporal punishment as “anything done to cause pain or discomfort” in response to a child’s behavior. In schools, that often means a paddling.
There is broad consensus among psychologists that corporal punishment can be harmful to children, but the U.S. has no federal laws banning it in public schools. Instead, it’s up to states and local districts to decide if it can be used, and many states and local districts still require parents to consent.
The most recent data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection, or CRDC, shows almost 32,000 reported instances of corporal punishment being used on K-12 students in the 2021-’22 school year. That’s about 1 reported incident per 2,000 students.
Physical punishment is increasingly viewed as a form of violence that harms children. This narrative review summarises the findings of 69 prospective longitudinal studies to inform practitioners and policy makers about physical punishment’s outcomes. Our review identified seven key themes. First, physical punishment consistently predicts increases in child behaviour problems over time. Second, physical punishment is not associated with positive outcomes over time. Third, physical punishment increases the risk of involvement with child protective services. Fourth, the only evidence of children eliciting physical punishment is for externalising behaviour. Fifth, physical punishment predicts worsening behaviour over time in quasi-experimental studies. Sixth, associations between physical punishment and detrimental child outcomes are robust across child and parent characteristics. Finally, there is some evidence of a dose–response relationship. The consistency of these findings indicates that physical punishment is harmful to children and that policy remedies are warranted.
Pediatricians are a source of advice for parents and guardians concerning the management of child behavior, including discipline strategies that are used to teach appropriate behavior and protect their children and others from the adverse effects of challenging behavior. Aversive disciplinary strategies, including all forms of corporal punishment and yelling at or shaming children, are minimally effective in the short-term and not effective in the long-term. With new evidence, researchers link corporal punishment to an increased risk of negative behavioral, cognitive, psychosocial, and emotional outcomes for children. In this Policy Statement, the American Academy of Pediatrics provides guidance for pediatricians and other child health care providers on educating parents about positive and effective parenting strategies of discipline for children at each stage of development as well as references to educational materials. This statement supports the need for adults to avoid physical punishment and verbal abuse of children.
Corporal punishment leads to more immediate compliant behavior in children, but is also associated with physical abuse. Should parents be counseled for or against spanking?
WASHINGTON — Corporal punishment remains a widely used discipline technique in most American families, but it has also been a subject of controversy within the child development and psychological communities. In a large-scale meta-analysis of 88 studies, psychologist Elizabeth Thompson Gershoff, PhD, of the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University, looked at both positive and negative behaviors in children that were associated with corporal punishment. Her research and commentaries on her work are published in the July issue of Psychological Bulletin, published by the American Psychological Association.
While conducting the meta-analysis, which included 62 years of collected data, Gershoff looked for associations between parental use of corporal punishment and 11 child behaviors and experiences, including several in childhood (immediate compliance, moral internalization, quality of relationship with parent, and physical abuse from that parent), three in both childhood and adulthood (mental health, aggression, and criminal or antisocial behavior) and one in adulthood alone (abuse of own children or spouse).
Gershoff found “strong associations” between corporal punishment and all eleven child behaviors and experiences. Ten of the associations were negative such as with increased child aggression and antisocial behavior. The single desirable association was between corporal punishment and increased immediate compliance on the part of the child.
The two largest effect sizes (strongest associations) were immediate compliance by the child and physical abuse of the child by the parent. Gershoff believes that these two strongest associations model the complexity of the debate around corporal punishment.
“That these two disparate constructs should show the strongest links to corporal punishment underlines the controversy over this practice. There is general consensus that corporal punishment is effective in getting children to comply immediately while at the same time there is caution from child abuse researchers that corporal punishment by its nature can escalate into physical maltreatment,” Gershoff writes.
But, Gershoff also cautions that her findings do not imply that all children who experience corporal punishment turn out to be aggressive or delinquent. A variety of situational factors, such as the parent/child relationship, can moderate the effects of corporal punishment. Furthermore, studying the true effects of corporal punishment requires drawing a boundary line between punishment and abuse. This is a difficult thing to do, especially when relying on parents’ self-reports of their discipline tactics and interpretations of normative punishment.
“The act of corporal punishment itself is different across parents – parents vary in how frequently they use it, how forcefully they administer it, how emotionally aroused they are when they do it, and whether they combine it with other techniques. Each of these qualities of corporal punishment can determine which child-mediated processes are activated, and, in turn, which outcomes may be realized,” Gershoff concludes.
The meta-analysis also demonstrates that the frequency and severity of the corporal punishment matters. The more often or more harshly a child was hit, the more likely they are to be aggressive or to have mental health problems.
While the nature of the analyses prohibits causally linking corporal punishment with the child behaviors, Gershoff also summarizes a large body of literature on parenting that suggests why corporal punishment may actually cause negative outcomes for children. For one, corporal punishment on its own does not teach children right from wrong. Secondly, although it makes children afraid to disobey when parents are present, when parents are not present to administer the punishment those same children will misbehave.
In commentary published along with the Gershoff study, George W. Holden, PhD, of the University of Texas at Austin, writes that Gershoff’s findings “reflect the growing body of evidence indicating that corporal punishment does no good and may even cause harm.” Holden submits that the psychological community should not be advocating spanking as a discipline tool for parents.
In a reply to Gershoff, researchers Diana Baumrind, PhD (Univ. of CA at Berkeley), Robert E. Larzelere, PhD (Nebraska Medical Center), and Philip Cowan, PhD (Univ.of CA at Berkeley), write that because the original studies in Gershoff’s meta-analysis included episodes of extreme and excessive physical punishment, her finding is not an evaluation of normative corporal punishment.
“The evidence presented in the meta-analysis does not justify a blanket injunction against mild to moderate disciplinary spanking,” conclude Baumrind and her team. Baumrind et al. also conclude that “a high association between corporal punishment and physical abuse is not evidence that mild or moderate corporal punishment increases the risk of abuse.”
Baumrind et al. suggest that those parents whose emotional make-up may cause them to cross the line between appropriate corporal punishment and physical abuse should be counseled not to use corporal punishment as a technique to discipline their children. But, that other parents could use mild to moderate corporal punishment effectively. “The fact that some parents punish excessively and unwisely is not an argument, however, for counseling all parents not to punish at all.”
In her reply to Baumrind et al., Gershoff states that excessive corporal punishment is more likely to be underreported than overreported and that the possibility of negative effects on children caution against the use of corporal punishment.
“Until researchers, clinicians, and parents can definitively demonstrate the presence of positive effects of corporal punishment, including effectiveness in halting future misbehavior, not just the absence of negative effects, we as psychologists can not responsibly recommend its use,” Gershoff writes.
The American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC, is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States and is the world’s largest association of psychologists. APA’s membership includes more than 155,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 53 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance psychology as a science, as a profession and as a means of promoting human welfare.
Currently, US education is under one of the most intense eras of criticism—although there has never been a moment over the past century and a half absent cries of education “crisis.”
Notably during the accountability era begun in the early 1980s, permanent (and manufactured) education crisis has been further eroded by the education marketplace and fads promising to end that crisis.
One enduring tension in the field of education as well is between calls for high-quality and narrowly “scientific” evidence for educational practices [1] and the pervasive embracing of education fads that promise more than research supports.
Two of the current examples of this “gap” [2] between research and practice are growth mindset and grit theories and interventions.
I am now revising a chapter on the current research on growth mindset and grit, and offer here an overview of what educators should know before embracing or continuing to embrace advocacy for both theories and interventions that promise to address student achievement.
In short, the research does not support claims by advocates for growth mindset and grit. Here is a list of what we currently do know about both:
Advocates for growth mindset and grit significantly overstate the casual relationship between these theories/interventions and student achievement.
Research published and cited by advocates is often plagued by flawed research design and/or population concerns, expectancy bias, and reporting errors (including financial conflicts) (Macnamara & Burgoyne, 2023).
Advocates tend to acknowledge that implementation of both growth mindset and grit is often suffers from oversimplification, misunderstanding, and reducing the theories and interventions to slogans and isolated lessons.
Meta-analyses and high-quality independent studies tend to have mixed results with weak effectiveness measures that may not be significant. Increasingly, research on both is negative, in fact (see chart below).
Despite the lack of evidence to support either growth mindset or grit, both continue to be implemented in many schools; some scholars raise concerns that this support is driven by ideology (deficit ideology, bootstrapping/ rugged individualism/ meritocracy) and racism/classism.
Scholars also warn that overemphasizing growth mindset and grit allows educators and policy to ignore the more significant impact of out-of-school factors [3], and as a result, often messaging and interventions manifest as “blaming the victims.”
Below, I include a chart of recent public commentary and a research overview of growth mindset and grit. I also provide the references after the chart with a few key quotes in some of the more powerful studies.
Positive Dweck, et al. Dweck & Yeager, 2019 Hecht et al., 2021
Mixed Haimovitz & Dweck, 2017 Miller, 2019 Sisk et al., 2018 Tipton et al., 2023 Yeager et al., 2022 Yeager & Dweck, 2020
Negative Brez et al., 2020 (Burnette et al., 2018; Dixson et al., 2017; Sisk et al., 2018; Schmidt et al., 2017) Burgoyne et al., 2020 Ganimian, 2020 Li & Bates, 2019 Macnamara & Burgoyne, 2023
Cushing, I. (2021), Language, discipline and ‘teaching like a champion.’ British Educational Research Journal, 47(1), 23-41. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3696
Dudley-Marling, C. (2007). Return of the deficit. Journal of Educational Controversy, 2(1), 1–13.
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of freedom: ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Thomas, P.L. (2023). The “Science of Reading,” education faddism, and the failure to honor the intellectual lives of all children: On deficit lenses and ignoring class and race stereotyping. Voices in the Middle, 30(3), 17-21. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/vm202332439
Brez, C., Hampton, E. M., Behrendt, L., Brown, L., & Powers, J. (2020). Failure to replicate: Testing a growth mindset intervention for college student success. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 42(6), 460–468. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2020.1806845
“The pattern of findings is clear that the intervention had little impact on students’ academic success even among sub-samples of students who are traditionally assumed to benefit from this type of intervention (e.g., minority, low income, and first-generation students)” (p. 464)
Burgoyne, A. P., Hambrick, D.Z., & Macnamara, B.N. (2020). How firm are the foundations of mind-set theory? The claims appear stronger than the evidence. Psychological Science, 31(3).https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619897588.
Burnette, J. L., Russell, M. V., Hoyt, C. L., Orvidas, K., & Widman, L. (2018). An online growth mindset intervention in a sample of rural adolescent girls. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 88(3), 428–445. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12192
Dixson, D. D., Roberson, C. C. B., & Worrell, F. C. (2017). Psychosocial keys to African American achievement? Examining the relationship between achievement and psychosocial variables in high achieving African Americans. Journal of Advanced Academics, 28(2), 120–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/1932202X17701734
Ganimian, A. J. (2020). Growth-mindset interventions at scale: Experimental evidence from Argentina. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 42(3), 417–438. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373720938041
Haimovitz K., & Dweck, C.S. (2017). The origins of children’s growth and fixed mindsets: New research and a new proposal. Child Development, 88(6), 1849–1859. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12955
Hecht, C. A., Yeager, D. S., Dweck, C. S., & Murphy, M. C. (2021). Beliefs, affordances, and adolescent development: Lessons from a decade of growth mindset interventions. In J. J. Lockman (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (Vol. 61, pp. 169–197). JAI. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.acdb.2021.04.004
Li, Y., & Bates, T. C. (2019). You can’t change your basic ability, but you work at things, and that’s how we get hard things done: Testing the role of growth mindset on response to setbacks, educational attainment, and cognitive ability. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(9), 1640–1655. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000669
Macnamara, B. N., & Burgoyne, A. P. (2023). Do growth mindset interventions impact students’ academic achievement? A systematic review and meta-analysis with recommendations for best practices. Psychological Bulletin, 149(3–4), 133–173. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000352
“Taken together, our findings indicate that studies adhering to best practices are unlikely to demonstrate that growth mindset interventions bene t students’ academic achievement. Instead, significant meta-analytic results only occurred when quality control was lacking, and these results were no longer significant after adjusting for publication bias. This pattern suggests that apparent effects of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement are likely spurious and due to inadequate study design, awed reporting, and bias” (p. 163)
Petrik, R. L., Vega, J., & Vindas-Meléndez, A. R. (2022). A reflection on growth mindset and meritocracy. Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, 12(1), 408–421. DOI: 10.5642/jhummath.202201.3
Schmidt, J.A., Shumow, L., & Kackar-Cam, H.Z. (2017). Does mindset intervention predict students’ daily experience in classrooms? A comparison of seventh and ninth graders’ trajectories. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 46(3), 582–602. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-016-0489-z
Sisk, V. F., Burgoyne, A. P., Sun, J., Butler, J. L., & Macnamara, B. N. (2018). To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement? Two meta-analyses. Psychological Science, 29(4), 549-571. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617739704
Tipton, E., Bryan C., Murray J., McDaniel M., Schneider B., & Yeager D.S. (2023, March/April). Why meta-analyses of growth mindset and other interventions should follow best practices for examining heterogeneity: Commentary on Macnamara and Burgoyne (2023) and Burnette et al. (2023). Psychological Bulletin, 149(3-4), 229-241. doi: 10.1037/bul0000384
Yeager, D. S., Carroll, J. M., Buontempo, J., Cimpian, A., Woody, S., Crosnoe, R., Muller, C., Murray, J., Mhatre, P., Kersting, N., Hulleman, C., Kudym, M., Murphy, M., Duckworth, A. L., Walton, G. M., & Dweck, C. S. (2022). Teacher mindsets help explain where a growth-mindset intervention does and doesn’t work. Psychological Science, 33(1), 18-32. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211028984
Yeager D. S., & Dweck C. S. (2020). What can be learned from growth mindset controversies? American Psychologist, 75(9), 1269–1284. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000794
Allen, R.E., Kannangara, C., & Carson, J. (2021). True grit: How important is the concept of grit for education? A narrative literature review. International Journal of Educational Psychology, 10(1), 73-87. https://doi.org/10.17583/ijep.2021.4578
Barcza-Renner, K., Shipherd, A. M., & Basevitch, I. (2024). An examination of the relationship between burnout and grit in college athletes. Asian Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 4(3), 138–143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajsep.2024.10.007
“This study was one of the first to examine the relationship between burnout and grit in student-athletes. The results indicated that student-athletes who were high in grit, also self-reported symptoms of burnout and that this relationship was strongest during the first two years of college. It is plausible athletes who are grittier are also more likely to persevere through stress and challenges, including burnout symptoms. Athletes higher in grit may also be investing more effort into their sport, which could be increasing symptoms of burnout, as well.” (p. 142)
Credé, M. (2018). What shall we do about grit? A critical review of what we know and what we don’t know. Educational Researcher, 47(9), 606-611. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X18801322
“For all its intuitive appeal, the grit literature is currently characterized by a number of serious theoretical and empirical challenges ranging from a lack of construct validity, discriminant validity, and predictive validity. At present there is no empirical support for the idea that grit is the combination of perseverance and passion or for the claim that grit adds to our understanding of success and performance. Indeed, the best available evidence strongly suggests that grit is largely a repackaging of conscientiousness—a widely studied personality trait” (p. 610)
Credé, M., Tynan, M.C., & Harms, P.D. (2017). Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(3), 492–511. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000102
Cushing, I. (2021), Language, discipline and ‘teaching like a champion.’ British Educational Research Journal, 47(1), 23-41. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3696
Goodman, S. (2018). It’s not about grit: Trauma, inequity, and the power of transformative teaching. Teachers College Press.
Gorski, P.C. (2016). Poverty and the ideological imperative: A call to unhook from deficit and grit ideology and to strive for structural ideology in teacher education. Journal of Education for Teaching, 42(4), 378-386. DOI: 10.1080/02607476.2016.1215546
Kohn, A. (2014). Grit? A skeptical look at the latest educational fad. Educational Leadership, 74, 104–108.
“Make no mistake: Duckworth is selling grit, not dispassionately investigating its effects” (para. 6).
Stahl, G. (2024). “Pedagogies of the poor” to “pedagogies on the poor”: Compliance, grit, and the corporeal. In P.P. Trifonas & S. Jagger (eds) Handbook of curriculum theory, research, and practice. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_39
Tewell, E. (2020). The problem with grit: dismantling deficit thinking in library instruction. Libraries and the Academy20(1), 137-159. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pla.2020.0007.
“The ideal of meritocracy, much like grit and growth mind-set, assumes that the best and brightest rise to the top based on their hard work and determination, without regard for the historical and present-day subordination of many groups….Deficit models view students as perpetual lacking and at fault. This belief is neither healthy nor accurate. Instead, we need to remain open to broader ways of engaging students and of thinking about their lives, consider what power they really have to effect change, and where we share some responsibility. It is essential to examine how issues of access and equity shape our students’ experiences and to question how success is defined and attained” (p. 150)
[3] Maroun, J., & Tienken, C.H. (2024). The pernicious predictability of state-mandated tests of academic achievement in the United States. Education Sciences, 14(2), 129-142. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14020129
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 