Smacking a child can be just as damaging as severe violence and abuse, according to new research.
Experts say that parents who chose to discipline children using smacking as a method of punishment children could lead them to develop mental health issues.
Scientists at Harvard University in the US carried out a study to discover whether spanking as a form of punishment has an impact on brain development.
They found that children who had been spanked had a great neural response in multiple regions in the part of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex (PFC).
The PFC is responsible for a lot of functions such as a behaviour and cognitive activities.
In November last year Scotland became the first country in the UK to ban smacking children, making it a criminal offence to do so.
Previous to this the law allowed parents to use 'reasonable chastisement' when disciplining their children.
Researchers from Harvard analysed data from a large study of children aged between three and 11.
147 children between 10 and 1 who had spanked were monitored closely, however this excluded kids who had been subjected to a severe level of violence.
Each child lay in an MRI machine and was shown a computer screen with various images of an actor making both neutral and fearful faces.
While the children looked at the images, a scanner captured their brain activity in reaction to the different faces and compared the reactions from the two different groups.
Writing in the journal Child Development researches noted that on average, fearful faces evoked a bigger response than neutral faces in different parts of the brain.
They said: "Children who were spanked demonstrated greater activation in multiple regions of PFC to fearful relative to neutral faces than children who were never spanked."
They added that the findings were inline with other research that has previously been undertaken on children who suffered from severe violence.
This means that while adults might not see spanking as a form of violence, a child's brain cannot differentiate this to abuse.
Lead author of the study Katie A. McLaughlin said: "It's more a difference of degree than of type."
This study is "the first step" towards a deeper analysis on children's development and lived experiences.
They said: "These findings aligned with the predictions from other perspectives on the potential consequences of corporal punishment, studied in fields such as developmental psychology and social work.
"By identifying certain neural pathways that explain the consequences of corporal punishment in the brain, we can further suggest that this kind of punishment might be detrimental to children and we have more avenues to explore it."
However despite this, experts said that the results are not applicable to the individual life of each child.
They noted that spanking doesn't affect each child in the same way, adding that some children can be "resilient if exposed to potential adversities".
"But the important message is that corporal punishment is a risk that can increase potential problems for children's development, and following a precautionary principle, parents and policymakers should work toward trying to reduce its prevalence", they said.
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While McLaughlin concluded that the team hoped the findings would encourage families not to use spanking.
She said she hoped it would "open people's eyes to the potential negative consequences of corporal punishment in ways they haven't thought of before."
