New Study Warns Of The Dangers Of Spanking Children

AUSTIN, Texas (CBS) – There's new research that shows spanking children won't get them to behave and only leads to more serious problems down the road.

Experts at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan recently looked at 50 years of studies on spanking, involving over 160,000 children.

Spanking frequently "does the opposite of what parents usually want it to do," one researcher said.

"The more children are spanked, the more likely they are to defy their parents and to experience increased anti-social behavior, aggression, mental health problems and cognitive difficulties," the report stated.

People who were spanked as a child are more likely to use physical punishment on their own kids, an analysis found.

"We as a society think of spanking and physical abuse as distinct behaviors," professor Elizabeth Gershoff, of the University of Texas at Austin, said. "Yet our research shows that spanking is linked with the same negative child outcomes as abuse, just to a slightly lesser degree."