Jada Jordan-DaSilva 

4/26/2020 

English 110 

Rational  

Spanking teaches children dangerous lessons 

Most people are familiar with the age old saying ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’. It is an age-old proverb that most people believe and apply to their lives. So, for many years’ parents have spanked their children and most believe that it is an effective way of discipline. Spanking is non-injurious, and it is used to modify a child’s behavior. Parents use openhanded hits on a child’s bottom to cause immediate and long-term compliance. Although spanking has been normalized it is ineffective and has a negative effect on childhood development. The purpose of my project is to quickly let parents know why spanking is ineffective and harmful to their children.  

The author of my project is me, Jada Jordan-DaSilva. I am credible because I am a college student that is studying psychology to get into pediatrics. I have been studying psychology since I was in high school and have taken a large interest in studying children and childhood development. I have also done a lot of my own research on children, how they develop and what positively and negatively affects them. My audience for this piece is mostly parents but, it is also for anyone else who is happens to come across it and read it. The importance of my message is to get parents out of the mentality that since they were spanked, and they turned out fine that it’ll be the same for their children. This rational is invalid. Spanking causes maladaptive behaviors, promotes anti-social behaviors, and affects their mental health. I want to inform parents about the damage that spanking does to their kids.  

The two genres I used for this project are advertisement and images. I used informative language to let my audience understand the undesirable and unintentional outcomes that spanking has and I set up my poster to advertise a parenting workshop to go further into detail. I also used language that I thought would help provoke some shock and emotions from the audience in order to help further drive my message. My stance on this topic is that people shouldn’t physically discipline their children. Physically disciplining them does more harm than good and gives results that are harmful and unwanted. The medium I used for this project is a poster. I chose this so that way the message reached my audience quickly and effectively. I also chose this because it would most likely be put up in a place where parents would have to walk by it constantly so that way it would subconsciously stick in their head. This making my message more effective and clearer without the audience having to even think about it. The rhetorical situation was that since I work in childcare, I see the results firsthand and since conducting my small research study I was able to understand the results even more. Since seeing this and learning about the negative effects that spanking has, I was always wondering what the world would be like if it was banned and if no one got spanked at all. 

In conclusion I used posters and images to portray my message. Within the poster I also used five different rhetorical terms to help with the message as well. This topic is very important to me because I see the negative effects firsthand and I want parents to be aware of what they are doing to their children and what they can do to fix the next generation of people.