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Debate on spanking



 
 
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Old June 12th 04, 08:30 PM
Doan
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Default Debate on spanking


Recently, Chris made the claim that the spanking issue has been settled
and it is no longer a "controversy". This is repost is an effort to
debunk that claim. :-)

Doan

begin include
This is from the April 13, 1998 issue of US News & World Report:

WHEN TO SPANK

(For decades, parenting experts have said spanking irreparably harms kids.
But a close look at the research suggests otherwise.)

Dad and Mom are no fools: They know their '90s parenting manuals. So when
4-year-old Jason screams, "No!" and darts under the dining room table when
it's time to leave Grandma's, Dad patiently crouches down. "Remember, Jason,"
he says soothingly, "when we talked earlier about leaving?" Jason, scowling,
doesn't budge. His mother shifts uneasily and riffles through her mental
Rolodex of tips garnered from all those child-rearing books. She offers Jason
choices ("Would you like to come out by yourself, or shall I get you?"), then
rewards ("I've got a cookie for you to eat in the car"), and finally
consequences ("Get out or no 'Arthur' tomorrow!"). Jason retreats further and
cries, "I don't want to!" His parents look at each other wearily. Jason is a
bright, cheerful child who, like most spirited kids, is gifted at pushing
limits. He is often well-behaved, but lately, when his parents ask him to do
something, he seems to melt down entirely, screaming and even biting. Now he
sticks out his tongue and announces, "I hate you!" His father hauls the tiny
tyrant, kicking and flailing, out from under the table. Jason lets loose an
earsplitting yell. Dad, red-faced, finally loses it, raising his hand over his
son's rear end.

Now stop the action. If Jason's father reads the newspapers and listens to TV
news, he knows spanking is one of the more destructive things he can do to his
kid, that it could turn Jason into an angry, violent child--and perhaps, some
day, a depressed, abusive adult. He may even have heard the familiar refrain
of child-development specialists, who contend that a parent who uses corporal
punishment "is a parent who has failed." Yet he also feels instinctively that
a mild pop on the rear might get Jason's attention in a way negotiating won't.
Besides, his dad spanked him occasionally, and he didn't turn into an ax-
wielding monster.

In fact, the notion advanced by a slew of American child-raising authorities
that a couple of well-placed swats on the rear of your beloved preschooler
irreparably harms him or her is essentially a myth. Antispanking crusaders
relied on inconclusive studies to make sweeping overgeneralizations about
spanking's dangers. This week, even the American Academy of Pediatrics is
expected to tone down its blanket injunction against spanking, though it still
takes a dim view of the practice and encourages parents to develop discipline
alternatives. An AAP conference on corporal punishment in 1996 concluded that
in certain circumstances, spanking may be an effective backup to other forms
of discipline. "There's no evidence that a child who is spanked moderately is
going to grow up to be a criminal or antisocial or violent," says S. Kenneth
Schonberg, a pediatrics professor who co-chaired the conference. In fact, the
reverse may be true: A few studies suggest that when used appropriately,
spanking makes small children less likely to fight with others and more likely
to obey their parents.

Some caveats are in order. By "spanking," the AAP and other authorities mean
one or two flat-handed swats on a child's wrist or rear end, not a sustained
whipping with Dad's belt. Neither the AAP nor any other child-development
specialists believe that spanking should be the sole or preferred means of
child discipline, or that it should be administered when a parent is very
angry, or that it should be used with adolescents or children under 2 years
old. Most experts who approve of spanking suggest it be used sparingly, as an
adjunct to other discipline techniques.

CHILDREN ARE PEOPLE. The origins of the antispanking prohibition have a lot to
do with two social phenomena of postwar America: the rise of popular psychology
and the breakup of the extended family. In years past, grandparents used to
inundate a new mother with child-raising tips on everything from burping to
bed-wetting. One of them was likely to be "spare the rod and spoil the child,"
an adage some adults used to justify repeated spankings as the only form of
discipline--and not just in the home. Half a century ago, corporal punishment
in schools was legal in all but one state. But by the early 1950s, young
couples increasingly began to look to child-rearing "experts"--authors like
Benjamin Spock, whose manual "Baby and Child Care" counseled against the
punitive child-raising practices of earlier generations. Spock, a believer in
firm and consistent parenting, did not rule out spanking in his book's early
editions. But he salted his manual with concepts borrowed from Freudian theory,
stressed the impact that parents have on their kids' development, and
introduced what at the time was a radical notion: Children are individual
little people, with a host of psychic needs.

The psychologists and child-development authorities who churned out parenting
guides in the 1970s and 1980s took Spock one step further, advocating a new,
child-centered view of family. The locus of power should shift, these experts
seemed to suggest, so that kids are equal members of the household. Many
writers, such as T. Berry Brazelton, warned that strict parenting, and
particularly punishments like spanking, could promote aggression and discourage
children from cooperating with others. One of the most popular of the new crop
of books was Thomas Gordon's 1970 million-plus seller, "Parent Effectiveness
Training", which advised parents to stop punishing kids and to start treating
them "much as we treat a friend or a spouse." More recently, writers like
Nancy Samalin and Barbara Coloroso counseled an end to punishment altogether.
And while such books helped open parents' eyes to the importance of listening
to children and respecting their individuality, some warm, fuzzy--and not very
reasonable--ideas about discipline also began to gain popularity. (One author
suggested that if a child refused to get dressed in the morning, parents
should send him to school in pajamas.)

This onslaught of advice did not, on the surface, appear to alter parents'
attitudes toward spanking very much. Last year, 65 percent of Americans
approved of spanking, not much less than the 74 percent who did so in 1946.
But the modest overall shift in numbers concealed a marked change in opinion
among the American elite. By the 1990s, the refusal to spank had, in some
quarters, become a sign of enlightened parenting. In a 1997 poll, 41 percent
of college-educated Americans disapproved of spanking children, compared with
only 20 percent of those who didn't complete high school. Whites were more
than twice as likely to disapprove of spanking as blacks, and the rich were
less likely to favor the practice than the poor.

"Parents became intimidated by expertise," argues Kevin Ryan, director of the
Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University, who
thinks the antispanking movement has become too absolutist. "Psychologists and
educators corrupted parents, saying that all it takes are rational appeals to
a child's better side." Danielle Crittenden, a mother of two and editor of the
Women's Quarterly, a conservative journal, adds that "if you say you swat your
kid, people now look at you like you're a child abuser. You can't even talk
about it because people are so hysterical."

AGAINST SPANKING. Compounding parents' guilt were two books published in the
mid-'90s by researchers Irwin A. Hyman and Murray A. Straus that seemed to
solidify the antispanking consensus. In "Beating the Devil Out of Them",
Straus, a respected sociologist at the University of New Hampshire who has
done groundbreaking research on child and spouse abuse, concluded that spanking
children is a "major psychological and social problem" that can doom a child
to a lifetime of difficulties ranging from juvenile delinquency to depression,
sexual hangups, limited job prospects, and lowered earnings. Straus's 1994 book
won raves from well-known child-development experts like Brazelton and Penelope
Leach, who applauded him for spotlighting a link between spanking and violence
in society. Hyman, a psychologist at Temple University, made much the same
point in his 1997 manual, "The Case Against Spanking", and promoted his views
in numerous appearances on the talk-show circuit.

For Straus and Hyman, spanking became almost a unified field theory connecting
seemingly disparate social problems. "We really want to get rid of violence,"
Hyman said last year in an interview on CNN. "And we really want to improve
children's self-esteem and behavior. We should pass a law against spanking."
Straus went even further, asserting that spanking helps foster punitive social
attitudes, such as support for bombing raids to punish countries that support
terrorists. If parents stop spanking, Straus said on ABC-TV news last year,
"we'll have . . . lower costs to deal with crime and with mental illness."

The problem with Straus and Hyman's pronouncements was that they were based on
a body of research that is at best inconclusive and at worst badly flawed. It
is virtually impossible to examine the effects of spanking in isolation,
uncontaminated by other influences on behavior and development, such as the
overall quality of parenting and the varying temperaments of the children in
question. A "pure" study, in which researchers randomly assign children to one
of two conditions--either spanking or discipline with nonphysical methods--and
then track their behavior over a number of years, is for obvious reasons
impractical: Few parents would agree to participate in such research.

As a result, the vast majority of studies on spanking have instead been carried
out in one of two other ways. Some rely on retrospective interviews with
adults, who are asked decades later to recall if they were spanked as children,
and how often. Researchers then attempt to link the spanking with current
behaviors like depression or spouse abuse. In the second type of study,
mothers are interviewed about how often their kids misbehave and how often
they spank them, and researchers look for a relationship between the two
behaviors.

Neither type of study is very effective in teasing out exactly what is going
on. In the case of the interview studies, it is impossible to tell if the
spanking led to the misbehavior or the misbehavior led to the spanking. In the
case of the retrospective studies, it is anyone's guess how accurate the adult
subjects' memories are of their parents' discipline techniques. In some cases,
the researchers also failed to adequately control for other factors that might
have influenced the results. For instance, most of the studies conducted by
Straus himself include many people who were spanked as teenagers, which most
child-rearing experts agree is too old for corporal punishment. Other studies
failed to distinguish between one or two taps on the rear end of a preschooler
and, say, beating a child with a strap. One 1977 study of 427 third graders
who were reinterviewed 10 years later found that those who had been punished
more also were more likely than others to push, shove, or start fights over
nothing. But "punishment" was defined as including everything from nonphysical
disciplinary steps like reasoning with children or isolating them, to slapping
their faces, washing their mouths out with soap, or spanking them until they
cried.

The shortcomings in the research aren't just methodological quibbles--they go
right to the heart of what worries parents about spanking. To take one example,
one of parents' biggest fears is that spanking might lead to child abuse.
Common sense suggests--and studies confirm--that child abuse typically starts
from situations where a parent is attempting to discipline a child. But no
study demonstrates that spanking a child leads to abuse--indeed, it may be the
other way around. Parents who end up abusing their children may misuse all
forms of discipline, including spanking. Sweden, often cited as a test case,
hasn't borne out the spanking prohibitionists' fears, either. After Sweden
outlawed spanking by parents in 1979, reports of serious child abuse actually
increased by more than 400 percent over 10 years, though the actual number of
reports--583 cases in 1994--was still quite small. Sweden's experience does
not prove that banning spanking creates more child abuse, but it does suggest
that outlawing the practice may do little to lower the rate of child abuse.

WHY TAKE A CHANCE? Straus and Hyman and other parenting experts concede that
much research on spanking is flawed, but they believe its collective weight
supports their claims. "There's enough evidence to decide we don't need it
[spanking]," says Hyman, "even if the evidence isn't that strong." Besides, he
asks, given the stakes, is it worth taking a chance? "The question should be
turned around. We should say, 'Give me a good reason why you should hurt
kids.' "

Journalists, reporting on child-rearing trends, seem to have adopted a similar
approach to spanking, rarely bothering to scrutinize the claims of
prohibitionists. Consider the news media coverage of a much touted study by
Straus, published last year in the "Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent
Medicine." His research indicated that frequent spanking (three or more times
a week) of children 6 to 9 years old, tracked over a period of two years,
increased a child's antisocial behavior, measured in activities like cheating,
bullying, or lying. The American Medical Association, which publishes
"Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine", issued a news release
headlined "Spanking Makes Children Violent, Antisocial," and Straus's findings
were reported by the three major networks and included in at least 107
newspaper and magazine stories. But neither the press release nor many of the
news reports mentioned the study's gaps: that 9-year-olds who are spanked at
the rate of every other day may have serious behavioral problems quite apart
from their being spanked, and that the 807 mothers in the survey were just 14
to 24 years old at the time they gave birth--hardly a representative sample.
Typically, news accounts reported simply that Straus's study determined that
"spanking children causes [a] 'boomerang' of misbehavior," as the Associated
Press put it.

Remarkably, the same issue of "Archives" carried another, longer-term study by
psychologist Marjorie Lindner Gunnoe that came to quite different conclusions.
Unlike Straus, Gunnoe used data that tracked somewhat more children (just over
1,100) for five years (not two years), sampled older parents as well, and
relied on reports from both children and adults. The researcher concluded that
"for most children, claims that spanking teaches aggression seem unfounded."
Gunnoe found that children ages 4 to 7 who had been spanked got in fewer, not
more, fights at school. (The reverse was true with white boys ages 8 to 11 in
single-mother families, who Gunnoe suggested might be less accepting of
parental authority.) Yet there was no AMA press release on the Gunnoe study,
and none of the network reports and only 15 of the 107 newspaper and magazine
stories on Straus's research mentioned Gunnoe's contrary findings.

Outside the not-so-watchful eye of the media, researchers have been reassessing
the conventional wisdom on spanking for several years. In 1996, psychologist
Robert E. Larzelere, director of residential research at Boys Town in Nebraska,
which does not allow spanking, published the results of a sweeping review of
spanking research, in which he examined 166 studies and came to several
unexpected conclusions. Rejecting research that was not peer-reviewed, that
included overly severe or abusive punishment (causing bruises or other
injuries), or in which the child's behavior was not clearly preceded by the
spanking, Larzelere ferreted out the 35 best studies. Among these, he failed
to find any convincing evidence that nonabusive spanking, as typically used by
parents, damaged children. Even more surprisingly, Larzelere's review revealed
that no other discipline technique--including timeout and withdrawal of
privileges--had more beneficial results for children under 13 than spanking,
in terms of getting children to comply with their parents' wishes.

When Larzelere and others presented their research at the 1996 AAP conference
on spanking, it prompted a quiet wave of revisionism. The two conference
organizers, S. Kenneth Schonberg and Stanford B. Friedman, both pediatrics
professors at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, wrote afterward
in 'Pediatrics', "We must confess that we had a preconceived notion that
corporal punishment, including spanking, was innately and always 'bad.' " Yet
by the end of the conference, the two skeptics acknowledged that "given a
relatively 'healthy' family life in a supportive environment, spanking in and
of itself is not detrimental to a child or predictive of later problems."

The spanking controversy may be an abstract debate among academics, but it is
a real-life dilemma for parents of young children who wrestle daily--and
sometimes hourly--with disciplining their small charges. A study of 90 mothers
of 2-year-olds found that they interrupted them an average of every 6 to 8
minutes to induce them to change their behavior. Shellee Godfrey, a mother of
two from High Point, N.C., swore she'd never spank her kids. "I figured, I'm
gonna talk to my children," she says. Then came the day when she was late for
work and Jake, her strong-willed 2-year-old, refused to get dressed, repeatedly
ripping off his diaper. "I was desperate. I finally popped him and said,
'You're putting this diaper on!' He looked at me, and he did it. He was fine.
But I felt really bad, like I had hurt him."

Naturally, no child-development specialist is about to run out to write a book
called 'Why You Should Spank Your Kid'--which may be one reason why the news
media have buried the notion that spanking might in some cases be a useful
discipline technique. After ethicist Ryan was quoted in the New York Times a
few years ago saying, "Mild physical punishment is appropriate in extreme
cases," he says, "I never got so much hate mail about anything."

One lesson of the spanking controversy is that whether parents spank or not
matters less than HOW they spank. "If parents use it as an occasional backup
for, say, a timeout," says Larzelere, "and as part of discipline in the context
of a loving relationship, then an occasional spanking can have a beneficial
role." The welter of child-raising books of the past 30 years has also provided
a host of alternatives to spanking that allow children to express their
feelings--a radical idea earlier in this century--while at the same time
preserving firm limits on behavior. The best disciplinary approach, experts
say, is to use a number of methods, including reasoning, timeouts, rewards,
withdrawals of privileges, and what some experts term "natural consequences"
(e.g., if a child refuses to eat his breakfast, he goes hungry that morning).
Spanking seems to work best in conjunction with some of these techniques. For
example, another analysis of spanking studies by Larzelere shows that when
spanking is used among 2- to 6-year-olds to back up other discipline measures
--such as reasoning--that have failed, it delays the next recurrence of
misbehavior for twice as long as the use of reasoning alone.

For parents who choose to spank, there are appropriate and inappropriate ways
to do so. Kids under 2 years old should not be spanked, because the danger of
causing physical injury is too great. As for adolescents, research suggests a
fairly solid correlation between spanking and increased misbehavior; grounding
teens has proven more effective. The age when spanking is most useful appears
to be between 2 and 6, and parents should take into account the nature of the
child. A single disapproving word can bring a sensitive child to tears, while
a more spirited youngster might need stronger measures. Finally, spankings
should be done in private to spare children humiliation, and without anger. A
parent who purposefully includes spanking as one of a range of discipline
options may be less likely to use it impulsively and explosively in a moment
of rage.

As for how to spank, the AAP warns against using anything other than an open
hand, and only on the child's rear end or extremities. The intention should be
to modify behavior, not cause pain. "A spanking is nothing more than a
nonverbal way of terminating the [bad] behavior," says psychologist John
Rosemond, author of "To Spank or Not To Spank". It secures "the child's
attention, so that you can send the child a clear message of disapproval and
direction."

Plenty of parents feel they can deliver that message without striking their
child. "Our belief is that spanking, hitting, any overt physical punishment
isn't an effective technique for encouraging positive behavior," says Gerrie
Nachman, a Manhattan mother of an 11-year-old son. "The last thing we want to
do is model to our son physical abuse as a way of dealing with inappropriate
behavior in other people."

PARENTAL ABUSE. At the other extreme are parents who deliver far more than a
tap on the rear. In response to a 1995 poll, almost 20 percent of parents said
they had hit a child on the bottom with a brush, belt, or stick in the past
year; another 10 percent said they had spanked the child with a "hard object."
One valuable lesson to come out of the antispanking movement is an awareness
of how many parents abuse spanking. Straus found that two thirds of mothers of
children under 6, for instance, spank them at least three times a week, which
most experts would say is too much.

The current state of knowledge about spanking may cut two ways: Parents who
use spanking appropriately can relax and stop feeling that they are causing
ineluctable harm to their child. But parents who overspank--and mistakenly
believe that their firm thwacks are benefiting little Samantha--should scale
back their spankings. Somewhere in between parents' guilt and parents' denial
lies a happier medium.

end include

 




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