Physical punishment of children is damaging psychologically and physically. Much has been written about physical punishment and the efforts to stop it (e.g., Elizabeth Gershoff, Murray Straus, and many others). Seventy countries have now banned physical punishment of children. The United States hasn’t banned it, and 16 states still allow physical punishment in schools.

But I would like to take a different approach. I would like to suggest that we can make some headway by considering that human behaviors are caused by their feelings, and if we can put words to the feelings (verbalization), we will go a long way to stopping physical punishment.

In order to explore how putting feelings into words can change behaviors and decrease physical punishment, I will turn to three important figures…

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

When we think of Darwin, most of us recall his remarkable contributions to the understanding of evolution and his book The Origin of Species, published in 1859. Interestingly, there are almost no detailed discussions of humans in that book: He focused on animals, plants, insects, sea life, land masses, and so on.

Darwin dealt in detail with humans and evolution in 1871 with The Descent of Man. Then, in 1872, he published a remarkable book on emotions, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. He studied various feelings and emotions among humans and animals, paving the way for understanding various feelings and how they were expressed: surprise, fear, joy, anger, shame, shyness, anxiety, grief, contempt, and many more.

This study of emotions—their triggers and expressions—helped set the stage for the 20th-century explosion in psychology, treatment, and understanding the role of feelings on human actions, and why physical punishment of children........

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