I was recently reading this article about Sweden being the first country in Europe to outlaw Corporal Punishment for children. And it got me thinking.
Have there been any studies of children of parents who do not use corporal punishment? Are they healthier? Are they happier? And I guess my main question is whether they are more likely to commit crimes. Now I do know that ironically crime is slightly higher in Sweden than the rest of Europe. So this last question is especially interesting.
Just two quick points. My parents used corporal punishment sparingly when I was growing up. As I got older, they used groundings and writings more. And I definitely do **NOT ** believe corporal punishment should be legal in any form. But knowing how few people agree with me, it’s not that big of an issue for me.
There have been studies and most find that these children have better outcomes and commit fewer crimes. However, almost all of these studies are worthless because there is no way to know which way the causation runs. We don’t know if corporal punishment causes kids to be bad or that bad kids are more likely to be subject to corporal punishment. There is also the question of genetics. Impulsive and violent parents are probably more likely to both use corporal punishment and have crime prone children.
For the most part studies of children find that 50-60% of variation is genetic and the rest is due to everything else, and except at the extremes parenting makes no difference to outcomes.
That seems unlikely to me, since I think the decision to use corporal punishment has a lot more to do with parental philosophy than child behavior.
I believe that corporal punishment is unethical. I believe it teaches children than might makes right, and that when people don’t do what you want, it’s ok to hit them. Both lessons that I think are more harmful than whatever I’m trying to teach via the punishment. If it turns out my kid is more troublesome than most, that’s not going to make me change my mind and start hitting him.
On the other side, I would challenge you to find parents who believe that there’s nothing wrong with corporal punishment but, gosh, their little angels never disobeyed enough to merit a spanking.
The genetic correlation is a good objection. I wonder if there’s a study of corporal punishment in adopted children?
Here’s an article describing such a study that shows that the outcomes of corporal punishment look an awful lot like the outcomes of child abuse.
Here’s the money quote
So, it screws up your kids, and it doesn’t even work as effective discipline.
For anyone on the fence about this, please don’t spank your kids.
Its almost like you need a study of adopted twins, one that was subjected to corporal punishment while the other was not. That seems like a small sample set.
Twin studies are the gold standard for nature v. nurture, but if your goal is to eliminate the genetic correlation between parents prone to violence/corporal punishment and kids prone to violence, I think you get that with just “parents and kids not genetically related”.
Others have referenced that there are numerous studies, but some things are more difficult to prove (spanked because bad or bad because spanked). There are some ways to investigate that - take the same parents who decided to stop spanking. Were the kids better behaved, etc. (all sort of negative effects that have shown up repeatedly in studies) before the spanking stopped or after? And there’s still bias there - if behavior gets worse, parents are more likely to go back to spanking.
And, of course, so much of these studies depends on reporting. Might be reported in surveys once children grown. Or weekly by parents. But how accurate are the memories and how accurately to people report what they remember.
One the more interesting studies to me actually had parents that volunteered to wear a recording device. I like it that one because it’s not so subject to reporting bias, and because it gives at least some context (audio surrounding the event). Now it was a tiny study (< 40 families). Only those who agreed to be monitored were monitored. And parents who said they never yelled (as opposed to saying they yelled sometimes) were not included. So it can’t be thought of as representative. But it still draw my attention because it does use a recording device. It did not measure outcome, though, and was more about the circumstances under which corporal punishment was used. Link to article, for those interested. I do not know of any followup or if any other studies of this nature have been done since.
You probably won’t find much of that, per se… but you might find some parents who started off opposed to corporal punishment, but their kid drove them to wit’s end, to the point that they didn’t know what else to do.
“More to do with” is not the same as “exclusively the result of”. Both are factors.
This seems completely illogical. If you really buy that, then you can’t impose any sort of discipline at all, since that would teach kids that might makes right and if people don’t do what you want it’s OK to discipline them.
Obviously you’re relying on kids’ ability to distinguish between their parents and “people”, just as the people who use corporal punishment are. And it’s a good thing, too. The notion that there might be some people who have the authority to do things that other people can’t is a very useful lesson to learn in life.
I would come pretty close. I have a pretty big family, and there are some kids who were virtually never smacked (e.g. 2-3 times in their lives) and some who were smacked much more frequently. Depends on the kid. (Not that the first group was “angels”. My own feeling is that you gave a smack mostly when confronted with defiance or the like (e.g. there’s nothing that calms down a couple of persistently fighting kids in the back seat of the car like a couple of well-deserved smacks). You can generally deal with punishment in other ways.)
That’s a ridiculous generalization. My parents never hit me when I was a kid and they never had to “deal with the police” on my behalf. They taught me right from wrong and I was able to learn it without having had the snot beat out of me.
Agreed. Which is why I didn’t say that those studies are perfect, just that I don’t buy the claim that they are useless, since the causality could easily run the other way.
If the argument is that it’s impossible to differentiate “kids with problems are more likely to get spanked” from “spanking kids makes them have problems” theories based on studies, then you need a model of parental action where parents’ punishment choices are primarily based on child behavior, not on other factors.
I believe that such a parent is uncommon.
I agree that, to some extent, exerting parental control is going to involve some amount of “I’m your parent, so I get to decide how this works”, and that’s probably inevitable.
But, you know, there’s a big difference between “if people don’t do what you want, it’s ok to discipline them” and “…it’s ok to hit them”, which you sort of elided over.
Discipline is, in many ways, about learning conflict resolution. Remove the child from the situation, wait until they calm down. Talk about why we don’t do that thing, and the consequences of it. It’s not unreasonable to think that we should model conflict resolution that doesn’t involve physical violence.
If either scenario is plausible going into the study and either scenario is plausible coming out of the study, then that study is useless. It hasn’t added anything.
Of course it’s possible that the causality could run the other way. You didn’t need the study for that. That’s a hypothesis. The question is whether the study weighed things more in that direction, and I don’t see it. (Is there seriously any doubt at all that people who are genetically prone to impulsiveness and violence are more likely to both smack their kids and also to pass on these genetic traits?)
I don’t see the slightest difference, for our purposes. Either kids can make that distinction or they can’t. I can’t think of a reason why they would be able to make that distinction for other forms of discipline and not for spanking.
That type of thing is more appropriate at older ages. At younger ages kids “understand” a good smack much better.
The way you phrase this makes it sound as if this was a general conclusion of the study. But best as I can tell it’s all of one anecdote, mentioned in an article about the study. Do you have anything more?
I would think there are two ways of seeing if spanking is harmful, one is to see if it correlates with bad outcomes, and secondly seeing if there is a dose dependent response. If there is a genetic component to self control, and there definitely seems to be, then that would confound the first type of result. If bad kids get spanked more then that would confound the second type of result.
Studies that try to control for genetics are relatively rare but I found two. Onesays that mild physical punishment is not associated with bad outcomes but harsh physical punishments are. The secondsays that physical punishments are associated with agression only in boys with a genetic predisposition.
As a former child care professional, I think timeout is a much better punishment for several reasons but that having a system with more than one tier is a good idea. Spanking might be okay for the second tier.
As a parent I am lucky enough to have perfect angels as children.
I don’t see the argument that it teaches kids to be violent as a good one. Some children are naturally violent and do not need to be taught. Also most children are very well acquainted with the notion that some things are only for adults. Like driving cars, and smoking, hitting other people could be an adults only thing.
I don’t get what you’re saying about the second type of study, the “dose dependent response”. I can’t imagine anyone thinks the more you smack kids the better they behave. (There are many things which are positive in smaller doses but harmful at higher doses.) And any test for “dose dependency” is going to be skewed by violent child abusers who whack the heck out of their kids.
