Spanking is generally associated with parents attempting to correct a child's behavior; ultimately, often out of frustration and/or anger at the child's behavior. In the heat of the moment, most parents do not recognize the long-term psychosocial or behavioral effects that spanking can have on a child. The dangers of these effects arising from the way children think and behave show us that spanking is not an effective form of discipline. Spanking teaches the child that violence is a socially accepted behavior to achieve a desired outcome. To better understand this concept, we must first look at how a child's brain works. From early childhood, children learn through observation and imitation. Studies have shown that infants as young as forty-two minutes old can successfully reproduce simple facial expressions (Metzloff, Decety 492). By eight months, infants can imitate a basic motor movement, even twenty-four hours after the initial movement. At fourteen months, the child can apply imitation to an external situation for up to a week after the initial imitation. (Windell, 67-68, 221). Albert Bandura's Bobo doll experiment is a famous example. Christopher Green of York University helps interpret Bandura's experiment and results: while recognizing that some children may have inherited aggressive personalities, Bandura demonstrated that the majority of personality is acquired. The adult models were escorted into a room and shown various toys to play with while observing children watched from outside the room. Among the different toys was a “bobo” clown doll. During some “play” sessions, the models showed aggression toward the doll by punching, kicking, hitting, and yelling at it. In other sessions, models quietly place ...... middle of paper ...... behavior without the need for spankings. Works Cited Green, Christopher D. "Classics in the History of Psychology." e Classics of the history of psychology. Internet. April 20, 2014. .Hyman, Irwin A. The Case Against Spanking: How to Discipline Your Children Without Hitting. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997. Print. Metzloff, Andrew N. and Jean Decety. “What imitation tells us about social cognition: a rapprochement between developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience.” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences: Decoding, Imitating, and Influencing the Actions of Others: The Mechanisms of Social Interaction 358.1431 (2003): 491-500. JSTOR. April 20, 2014. .Nicholson, Alastair. “Choose to hug, not hit.” Family Court Review 46.1 (2008): 11-36. EBSCO. 20 04 2014.