Spanking children for misbehaving is a very controversial and surprisingly common form of discipline practiced in the United States to this very day. Since children seek autonomy at a young age, they frequently disregard their parent’s standards of behavior. These parents are then faced with a plethora of disciplinary actions to take. Spanking is the primary method of physical punishment used today by parents. Spanking a child is considered coercive discipline. Coercive discipline is where a parent uses punishment as motivation for their child to behave in some way. It is crucial that if parents choose spanking as their child’s form of discipline, they practice this coercive discipline in the right mindset following the correct procedures.…show more content… In the study, the data show stable and amplifying transactional processes playing out between physical discipline and children’s aggression once they get set in motion, which may be easier to prevent than to alter (MacKenzie, M. J., Micklas, E., Brooks-Gunn, J., &Waldfogel, J., 2015). Increasing our understanding of these early stable family dynamics will improve our capacity to model the transition to the adolescent period and the potential for cascading effects spilling over from aggression into other domains of youth functioning and psychopathology (MacKenzie, M. J., Micklas, E., Brooks-Gunn, J., & Waldfogel, J., 2015). Parents tend to be more likely to spank their children if they were also physically disciplined as…show more content… W. (2010), there is a correlation between condoning spanking as punishment and having been spanked as a child. When asked to select the best discipline method, children who had a medium level of direct exposure to spanking were about twice as likely to endorse spanking as the best method compared to children at the low or high level (Vittrup, B., & Holden, G. W., 2010). Spanking is considered to be more of a normative behavior to those who have been exposed to periodic spanking. It is regarded as less acceptable to those children who were rarely spanked, and also to those who were spanked too frequently. This supports the idea that when spanking, parents need to be certain that don't go overboard with the