Corporal punishment can lead to health risks | The Sun |News

SMACKING or shouting at children boosts their risk of developing cancer, heart disease and asthma, British researchers have claimed.

Psychologists said that punishment in childhood makes kids more prone to serious illness later in life.

They state that hitting or even just yelling at youngsters can trigger a significant chain of biological changes that can damage their future health.

Previous research has shown that stress can cause inflammation to cells, tissues and blood vessels.

In turn, this increases the likelihood of tumours, heart conditions and respiratory diseases like asthma.

The findings will be published in the Journal of Behavioural Medicine by a team of psychologists based at Plymouth University.

Corporal punishment is banned in British schools and public institutions.

But it is not illegal to use physical force to discipline children in the home.

The new study was led by Professor Michael Hyland, who teaches health psychology at the University?s School of Psychology.

His team studied 700 adults in Saudi Arabia.

All of the people who took part were asked if they had been physically or verbally punished as children.

150 of those who took part had asthma, cancer or heart disease.

Those who had cancer were 1.7 times more likely to have been beaten as a child compared to the healthy adults.

Those with heart disease were 1.3 times more likely and those with asthma 1.6 times more likely.

Prof. Hyland said: ?Early life stress in the form of trauma and abuse is known to creating long term changes that predispose to later disease.

?But this study shows that in a society where corporal punishment is considered normal, the use of corporal punishment is sufficiently stressful to have the same kinds of long term impact as abuse and trauma.

?Our research adds a new perspective on the increasing evidence that the use of corporal punishment can contribute to childhood stress, and when it becomes a stressor, corporal punishment contributes to poor outcomes both for the individual concerned and for society.?

Source: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4640046/Cancer-risk-of-smacking-kids.html

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