Smacking Children Should be Banned

Australian pediatricians have called for a ban on smacking children, as they feel the practice is the same as child abuse.

Smacking can have long term effects on a child's development and leads to violent behavior later in life. The pediatricians argue that smacking is not always effective and there are better ways to discipline children.

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The President of Pediatric and Child Health at the Royal Australian College of Physicians, Dr. Gervase Chaney has appealed to the medical fraternity to strengthen its position on smacking and officially support a legal ban. He wrote- it was time to abandon the argument that smacking is acceptable because previous generations of children do not believe it did them any harm.

The Director of the Hospital's Center of Community Child Health, Professor Oberklaid said, "There's a very strong chance that young children hit repeatedly will model that behavior. If children grow up in an environment where they're witness to violence or they're hit themselves, then they learn pretty quickly that the way to resolve disputes is to hit."

Source-Medindia

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