It is my distinct honor to receive the Mavis Hetherington Award for Excellence in Applied Developmental Science. This award has special resonance for me because I was inspired to pursue graduate school after taking an undergraduate seminar taught by Hetherington while I was at the University of Virginia. I am grateful to Division 7 for having an award that recognizes applied developmental science and for selecting me as the sixth recipient of this Award.
I have spent much of my career trying to understand both why parents use physical punishment and what effects it may have on children. In collaborations with colleagues from a variety of disciplines, I have used primary data collection (Gershoff et al., 2025), secondary data analysis (Gershoff, Sattler, & Ansari, 2018), policy analysis (Gershoff, Purtell, & Holas, 2015), meta-analysis (Gershoff & Grogan-Kaylor, 2016), program evaluation (Gershoff, Font, et al., 2018), and narrative reviews (Gershoff, Goodman, et al., 2018) to understand the extent to which physical punishment is linked to child outcomes and how physical punishment can be prevented. Across all these studies, we have found that physical punishment is consistently linked to worse outcomes for children.
In order to attract public health attention to the topic of physical punishment, I worked with colleagues from the UK, Canada, and Ireland to publish a narrative summary in The Lancet that found physical punishment was linked with deterioration in child outcomes over time (Heilmann et al. 2021). We were gratified that our article was used a few months later by the World Health Organization (WHO) to create a fact sheet on physical punishment and its links to child health (World Health Organization, 2021). The WHO continues to advocate on this issue, including by organizing the First Global Ministerial Conference on Ending Violence Against Children in Bogotá in November 2024. I was fortunate to present at the Conference and to talk directly with government ministers about their efforts to ban physical punishment.
When I began studying physical punishment, there were only five countries that banned all physical punishment. There are now 68 countries with bans, including 28 in Europe, nine in Africa, nine in South America, and five in Asia. Human rights arguments play the largest role in driving these bans, but I am so pleased that policymakers are also citing my and others’ research as justification for bans. In order to inform this growing global discussion about physical punishment, my colleagues and I recently published a meta-analysis of 189 studies from 92 low and middle income countries in which we found that physical punishment is linked to worse social-emotional, academic, and behavioral outcomes for children in all regions of the world and regardless of whether physical punishment is legal (Cuartas, Gershoff, Bailey, Gutierrez, & McCoy, 2025).
Parents are not the only ones who can legally hit children in the United States. Physical punishment by teachers and administrators remains legal in public schools in 20 states and in private schools in 45 states. To understand how school physical punishment is being used, my colleague and I published an SRCD Social Policy Report that documented disparities in school physical punishment by race, sex, and disability status (Gershoff & Font, 2016). This report was cited a few months later by the U.S. Secretary of Education in a Dear Colleague letter to all governors and heads of state departments of education urging them to end physical punishment in schools (U.S. Department of Education, 2016). The Secretary’s letter in turn led to the introduction of a bill known as the Protecting Our students in Schools Act in 2020 and 2021, which would have required that states ban school physical punishment in order to receive federal education funding. With a grant from APA’s Committee on Division-APA Relations, I led a consortium of APA divisions, including Division 7, along with the Education Trust and the Southern Poverty Law Center in organizing a Congressional Briefing in support of this bill in 2021. Another Dear Colleague letter about school physical punishment was issued by the U.S. Secretary of Education in 2023 (U.S. Department of Education, 2023) and the Protecting Our Students in School Act was subsequently reintroduced in 2023 and 2025. Although the fate of this bill is unclear, it is wonderful to see the continued federal focus on the need to end state-sanctioned violence in schools.
I am thankful to have worked with so many amazing collaborators over the years and hope that my work can continue to inform policy and intervention efforts to end all forms of violence against children.