I was invited to contribute this essay to the winter edition of the U.S. Alliance to End the Hitting of Children’s newsletter.

Violence toward children is often justified as discipline, tradition, or cultural necessity. From a developmental and clinical perspective, however, hitting a child represents a profound disruption of bonding at the very stage when the human mind is organizing itself around safety, meaning, and trust. The effects of this disruption do not end in childhood; they shape how violence is transmitted across generations.

Bonding is often misunderstood as something inherently gentle. In fact, bonding simply refers to how human beings register one another through contact. A handshake is a form of bonding—brief, reciprocal, and regulated. A hug conveys warmth and containment. Striking a child is also a form of bonding, but one organized around fear, domination, and pain. The developing nervous system of a child does not sort experience by intention or justification. It records only that connection and threat have been fused. When harm comes from a caregiver, bonding itself becomes dangerous.

Bonding is not sentimental; it is foundational. Through repeated experiences of being protected, soothed, and responded to, the child develops an internal expectation that distress can be communicated without fear of annihilation. This expectation becomes the basis for empathy, self-regulation, and moral restraint. When a caregiver strikes a child, that expectation collapses. The very figure upon whom survival depends becomes a source of threat, and the developing mind must adapt under conditions of fear.

The period from birth to approximately age three is especially critical. During these early years, the child is tasked with integrating feeling, thinking, and emerging language into a coherent system for understanding inner and outer reality. This integration is fragile and highly dependent on the caregiving environment. In violent households, chronic stress overwhelms the immature nervous system, preventing feelings from being translated into thought or words. Lacking symbolic means of expression, the child falls back on action. What cannot be thought or spoken is acted out.

Clinical experience shows that children who are hit do not simply “learn limits.” They internalize a relational template in which intimacy and violence coexist, power replaces understanding, and vulnerability invites attack. Hitting also disrupts symbolization—the capacity to use language and reflection to process emotional experience. In adulthood, this often appears as chronic anxiety, with individuals turning to compulsive self-soothing behaviors—overwork, substances, rigid control, or aggression itself—in misguided attempts to manage internal states that were never safely held or named.

If bonding in the home or school is physically violent, society itself will be violent. For a healthy society with fully functioning citizens, hitting and slapping must disappear, with adults learning to contain their own anger rather than discharging it onto children. Ending the hitting of children is therefore not only a child-protection imperative; it is also a primary violence-prevention strategy—one that lies at the core of the Alliance’s mission.

US-Alliance-Newsletter-WINTER-2026-1 Screenshot of the edited version published in the winter newsletter of the U.S. Alliance to End the Hitting of Children.

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