tdn, it occurs to me in retrospect that perhaps you are confusing “peer reviews” with something post-hoc, like the New York Times book review, or something. Peer review is a process by which a scholarly article is vetted prior to publication, with expert peers reviewing the work, noting problems and concerns, and recommending whether it should be published, revised and reconsidered, or rejected outright. Books and book chapters, as well as a host of other venues for scholarly work, are typically not peer-reviewed, but most journals are. This means that one should give greater credibility to work published in a peer-reviewed format, since it has already purportedly been scrutinized and challenged by those knowledgable in the field.
Yes, I understand what peer review means. My GF and her collegue publish peer-reviewed articles all the time. You’ll have to take my word for it that they hold themselves to the same rigorous standards when they write books.
Really? That’s surprising. Just google spanking and Kazdin or spanking and Larzelere (the authors that I’ve cited) and you’ll turn up discussions of the matter.
Here’s a few to get started:
http://robtshepherd.tripod.com/spanko.html
http://people.biola.edu/faculty/paulp/debate.html
http://www.time.com/time/connections/printout/0,8816,1191825,00.html
chasm, I’m curious as to whether or not you have any children of your own, have been a care-provider, teacher or therapist for children. This is not because I think childless people should not have parenting opinions, but because a lot of what you write seems to be based in theory, not practice. Furthermore, and forgive me if this sounds harsh, it seems to be based in Psych 101 level understanding of psychology, not even Child Development level understanding.
For example, you write: “1) Children who have not yet reached the stage of development where they are able to understand the self-evident dangers from speeding automobiles or playing on roofs won’t understand the connection between being spanked by their parents and the cars or dangerous play area.” My experience, and what I was taught in child development classes, belies this. In less than 5 minutes, I can use operant conditioning to train a mouse to avoid a certain sqaure on a table. A two year old certainly has at least the trainability of a mouse. I once led my freshman psych class in a “training exercise” where we trained our professor to stand in a three-square foot space during his lecture. When he wandered off our determined space, we’d subtly look away, tap our pencils, yawn, etc. When he found the sweet spot, we’d pay attention. We had him trained halfway through the period, but when I asked him at the end if he’d done anything different today, he had no clue what we’d done to him. The point? You don’t *need *to make the connection for conditioning to work.
Again, in theory, I can see why you’d think this. It makes a certain amount of intuitive sense. And if you’re the kind of parent who lashed out unpredictably, I can see it happening - because of the unpredictability, not because of the spanking. In the real world, if spanking is reserved for specific infractions, there’s no reason at all for a child to become overly cautious and hesitant in any other area. If it’s well defined that running in the street, touching the stove, swearing or belting your sister will earn you a spanking, why on earth would you extend that to anything else? It’s just not logical, and so I’d also like to see some empirical evidence that is statistically corrected for other variables, such as socio-economic class, religion and parental age.
Again, this doesn’t sound like a real kid’s reaction, this sounds like a theoretical what-if. Even toddlers will tearfully nod and articulate, “no street!” when you ask them if they know why they’ve been spanked, in my (very limited) experience.
This is another thing piece that makes me wonder if you’ve been a caregiver. Kids feel everything very intensely, it’s true. I often say that they’re so small, there’s only room for one feeling at a time, so whatever they’re feeling, they’re FEELING! They’re not going to be a little teary. They’re going to scream and wail and howl and sob. That’s just how toddlers display what we later term a range of emotions from annoyance to rage. But the delightful thing is how quickly it passes. Then when they’re pleased, they’re not just mildly content, they’re WONDERFULLY HAPPY with a huge grin, jumping up and down hugging themselves with glee.
Again, I have to point out that I’m not a routine spanker. I think it can be a horrible technique if overused, used in anger or used when the natural consequences of the child’s actions would be less-than-life-or-limb-threatening. But my objections, like the quote **Hentor **quoted earlier, are moral objections and practical ones - I don’t think it’s the most useful technique, and I don’t like teaching might-makes-right. (I also think it’s a lot harder to teach kids not to hit one another if we’re hitting them.) However, I remain unconvinced that moderate spanking, especially “Danger” spanking, is hazardous to a child’s physical or mental health.
There is no consequence or punishment to speak of, not even time outs or losses of various privileges. If some potential problem arises, you tell them why something is dangerous, even if they cannot yet comprehend the full meaning. At the same time you take steps to shield them from the dangers their own ignorance will lead them into. This can take the form of moving dangerous household hazards out of their reach, preventing them from being able to get out of the house without you letting them out, and not leaving them play unsupervised. As they become more aware and capable–as they all do as the years pass–you gradually let up on your protections and the supervision is reduced.
I’d suggest they submit to no one’s wishes in principle. Parents are way more powerful in the relationship and can take other measures to prevent them from doing certain dangerous things. Of course, if a parent insists on leaving children unattended in situations where they can wander into various dangers, this isn’t going to work to well.
I don’t think there should ever be any negotiation or rationalization when it comes to matters of a child’s safety (and I mean safety fairly narrowly defined). And I agree that as children are still developing they can’t weigh risks and consequences of various situations. So why would a child be in a situation where they are free to run into the street? In my view, it’s because the parent has exposed the child to a dangerous situation that they aren’t ready to manage on their own yet. It’s not because the child needs to be threatened, coerced, or manipulated in advance to ensure their safety.
“Controlling” children psychologically through playing up fears, punishment, and violence? I admit I do have a moral problem with it. “Controlling” them by securing their play areas and taking responsibility for their safety by supervising them and even restraining them at times is fine and in fact necessary. And it certainly works in the real world, even if it is relatively rare. I’ll hazard a guess that you, as a psychologist, would be less likely to see children and families that don’t have problems with this in your work, but I’ve known some.
There’s a difference between protecting children from their naivety or inability to manage the wider world, and spanking them to protect them from their naivety or inability.
What, you want to turn this into a battle of research papers? I haven’t looked at the literature in years and I don’t have access to the online journals at the university at the moment, but I know I could come up with some things, and I know you can come up with things that support your perspective. Maybe one side or the other is more popular in academia at the moment. Things will change in 20 years, as they have in the last 20. It wouldn’t prove anything.
As far as pain goes, I do think it’s serious pain. If I saw an adult with the same expressions on his face that I’ve seen on children just as they were spanked, I’d think he was in enormous pain, frightened, seriously emotionally upset, shocked, etc. In fact, I think almost everyone would see it the same way as me if the expressions were not on a child’s face. Saying it’s just a tantrum or tantrum-like behaviour is ignoring what the kid’s obvious and openly expressed emotions are. Somehow I don’t see it them as faking it.
I would guess if we surveyed people about spanking many would remember the pain. Some will say they don’t even remember the pain (usually they identify strongly with parent’s spanking), many will say the humiliation or meaning of the spanking was far more troubling (which is important too), but I would guess a great many remember a quite significant amount of pain from spankings. Are they just imaging this? It’s possible but I don’t think so.
Putting aside measuring the level of physical pain, it’s quite a claim that being picked up by a 20-foot giant and slapped on your ass repeatedly by a giant hand wouldn’t be quite physically painful or very emotionally stressful. Somehow I don’t think children are that much tougher than we are now as adults, when the scale of something like that would be similar. Maybe the editorial boards of various journals decided to publish some research studies that say differently, but I just see it as rationalized denial.
Really, I don’t know how strongly you mean what you said or if I’m misunderstanding you (so take this with a grain of salt), but when I hear things like this I always think of Descartes claiming that animals are machines that don’t feel pain.
I’m not being laissez-faire at all. I think it’s a common attitude to view what I’m saying as the equivalent of being neglectful, or submissive to the child and letting your kid walk all over you, or negotiating about whether a child can put themselves in danger. But I don’t mean that at all.
What I’m advocating requires more supervision and closer attention than the “don’t do that or I’ll spank you” method of ensuring the child’s safety. I say spanking is an evasion of responsibility because it’s substituting making your child feel pain for making the child’s environment safe and supervising or guiding the child by the hand when you’re in a situation that isn’t safe. The child isn’t truly ready yet to manage these situations safely on their own, but if you make them hurt they’ll just avoid the whole thing completely for fear of their parents. Now it’s not the parent’s responsibility, it’s the small child’s, though the parents will claim they fulfilled their responsibility with the spanking.
I’m saying that there’s better ways to do it that are better for the child, promote a more friendly atmosphere, and are far less violent. And they do work in the real world, I’ve even known a few examples.
Thanks for that.
They certainly are over the place. A few of those links do, in fact, state that there are detrimental effects. Some state that there are positive effects. Taken as a whole, I could conclude that spanking a 7+ year old has detrimental effects, and no positive effects, or no effects of any kind. And spanking a 6- year old has positive effects, plus negative effects, or no effects at all.
I’ll buy that extremely infrequent spanking as a backup for timeouts is not the end of the world. They may even be a good thing. But I’ll stand by my assumption that frequent spankings do, in fact, cause harm, as indicated by your first link.
And of course I think we can all agree that not only frequency, but attitude and a number of other factors dictate the degree and nature of benefit/damage. The quick swat to prevent road kill is quite different than random and frequent beatings with a cane.
Really? I’m not doubting your story, but snopes covered this story that has been circulating since at least 1989.
At any rate, I take it you didn’t have to hit the professor to get him to stand there.
Consequence free parenting. Good luck with that.
With children? Why, whatever could happen?
What bedtime would you have them choose? How many cookies do you think a child will rationally select before dinner time? With a 5 and a 3 year old, how do you anticipate that they will rationally allocate the toys between the two of them?
Nobody has said anything about “playing up their fears” or “violence,” excepting the application of an emotionally laden term to mild spanking.
So why is restraining okay and loss of privilege not? Why is locking them in okay and using time out not?
Probably it is more often the case that those I do see are the ones who have had problems applying consequences properly, or not at all.
It’s called science, and it is the evolving refinement of the understanding of a subject. It isn’t simply the accumulation of opinion. It’s asking questions and collecting data on the use of physical punishment and later behavioral and emotional problems, and then considering whether we’ve measured what we wanted to. At this stage, one of the questions that has been poorly framed is “What is spanking?” It’s just foolish to pretend that it is a battle of opinions, and an insult to suggest that I haven’t given this critical thought.
Again, this is simply offensive and ignorant of the process of scientific study. Opinion pieces should be rejected out of hand, and I think I’m a good example of reconsidering one’s professional opinion on a topic as a result of refinements in the study of this topic.
And it becomes more apparent that you lack some critical understanding of developmental differences between children and adults, as well as the nature of children’s responses to stimuli. WhyNot already covered this as well.
It’s also quite a ridiculous claim that, to achieve similar sensations, one would have to multiplying the relative sizes involved. It just doesn’t make any sense.
I don’t know what experiences you have that lead you to think your philosophy would be applicable to even 5% of the population of children, but it doesn’t really matter. The fact is that it has no bearing on reality, and if suggested that it would remotely have a chance of working, most parents would laugh uncontrollably at the claim.
I didn’t say it was an *original *idea. I read it (somewhere pre-Snopes) and decided to try it. The fact that our professor was ALWAYS late for class gave me an opportunity to explain the idea to the rest of the class and they agreed to go along with it. Worked for us. It was either fall of '92 or '93 - I took the spring off to have a baby, but it was within my first year or so there.
Hitting is irrelevant. I was adressing the idea that the subject (teacher or child) needs to understand the connection between the consequence (inattentive students or spanking) and the desired behavior (don’t go “there”.) **chasm **tried to tell us that a kid who’s not old enough to understand that running into a street sometimes means death and death is a bad thing, even if he’s previously run into the street and been fine (that’s a pretty hard set of things to grasp - I’ve seen 10 year old run across the street without looking for cars!) *also *won’t avoid the street to avoid a spanking. I think s/he’s wrong about that, based on what I know of operant conditioning. The subject doesn’t have to “get” it to extinguish the behavior - it’s not always a conscious training technique like problem solving for a reward.
They do have to “get” it to some extent, in that they need to associate the behaviour with the punishment. If the kid doesn’t connect the behaviour and the spanking consciously, it’s possible that unconsciously they’ll associate the spanking with some other behaviour or motive (or not connecting entirely), and it’ll end up teaching the wrong thing. To use Pavlov as an analogy, what if the dogs had learnt to associate the bell with plates and not food?
Balls, ignore that last post. I have a mental block about operant and classical conditioning. :smack:
Agreed. I was merely addressing the (largely strawman, in the case of this thread) notion that if we don’t spank kids, we might as well not parent them at all.
Dude, I read that study you’re talking about. If you have to spank 156 times a year, it isn’t working and you need to try something else or you are spanking for the wrong reasons. I think you could safely assume that most folks who use spanking do so FAR more infrequently, in my experience anyways. I thought of one more aspect to getting spanked as a child that I hadn’t thought of. I learned that physical discomfort isn’t the end of the world or something to be obsessively feared. I know it sounds odd but while I REALLY didn’t want to get spanked as a kid I also learned that when it does come down to it you just take your licks… learn your lesson if you’re smart, and move on. When bullies threatened me, well… I wasn’t as scared of getting hit so I threw down and it usually ended there. Honestly, the worst punishment I ever endured, and the one my mother never inflicted again… because (ironically) she thought it WAS needlessly cruel and potentially harmful, is when my parents took all my books away for a week once.
No prob. I have a similiar one over “punishment” and “negative reinforcement”, which is why I copped out and used “consequence”! 
As the OP suggested, even spanking should be applied in a consistent manner, with many repetitions (or at least threats of same).
If you don’t want to have to deal with consistency and repetition, parenting might not be your best bet.
Personally, I engaged in the behaviors that got me smacked as a child (I was never spanked in the OP’s sense of the word, so I can’t speak to that) over and over again. And got hit over and over again as a result. Unless mom was in a good mood that day. Or forgot which chores were mine and which were my sister’s.
On the other hand, my daughter will hit me, then look up and say, “time out?” And then afterwards, she says sorry and doesn’t do it again for a while, at least.
Consistency is the single most important part of disipline, in my opinion. If you are capable of spanking in the way the OP described, I think that your kids will be better off than with an inconsistent system that isn’t violent. Of course, I think they’d do better yet if time outs, natural conciquences, and other non-violent alternatives were used consistently, too.
You phrased that as if I’d disagree with it. I don’t, I think it’s spot-on.
In fact, in many spanking threads I have read (not this one) the most ardent supporters often claim “I have to spank my kids constantly, because they are constantly out of control.” To me that speaks volumes about either the efficacy of the spanking, or the quality of the parenting.
OK - wait wait – you’ve got me here:
primarily because “no, or else I’ll whack you one” doesn’t really help kids develop their judgement. It’s not terribly instructive. And distractions, those are a HUGE help! TREMENDOUS! FANTASTIC!
But THIS part:
IT IS TO LAUGH.
Bucko, I hope you have twins someday.
It’s not the first time they, oh, let’s see, what do they do - throw food all over the kitchen you just finished cleaning, unroll toilet paper and strew it around, get up and run away from you as you’re changing their diaper, grab the vacuum cleaner filter while you’re putting the trash out the door & shake the debris all over the living room, break their toys, books and videos, dump the clean clothes out of the drawers — it’s not the FIRST time they do those things that’s the problem. It’s the 83,296th time. That week.
See, your prescription of constant, unending, perfect “supervision” is FAR more restrictive than even a (worst-case scenario) spanking here & there – kids NEED to get into trouble. It is called “pushing boundaries”. You cannot run a 24/7 “prevent defense”. Can’t be done. And so parents NEED an arsenal of reactions that DON’T involve CPS. “Natural Consequences” is my favorite – if they (hah - WHEN they) act out using a certain toy (“Quit throwing that ball in the kitchen! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”), they lose that toy. Rewarding positive behavior (“bribery”) is a close second.
You’re forgetting, too, that some of a small child’s truly obnoxious behavior involves other children. Either siblings, or shorties who are supposed to be their “friends”. There’s no ignoring it when your kid bites someone (or is bitten), or attacks a playmate/ the cat/ YOU with a toy train.
The bit about “explaining” dangers - uh, yeah. They don’t care.
Well, yeah… but then I go on to say the majority of the people I know who spank don’t do that. :> The impression I get is this, based on the thread so far, Spanking is being judged as a whole using a very wide definition of what IS spanking as well as how it is instituted. This means my mother’s use of spanking that I detailed above is thrown into the mix with somebody who smacks their kids around several times a week (and even in some cases with people who legitimately BEAT their children). Well… ok… but let’s take non violent ‘Time Outs’, what if I decide as a clinical researcher that there is no real difference between a moderate use of time outs in a day lasting a few minutes in their room and locking your kid in a dark basement all day for infractions. I guarantee you, one approach is healthy and the other is not… but I would say they’re not the same discipline method at all.
You make a good point about frequency, and this is possibly a sticking point for us. When I speak of spanking, I think 3 or more times a week, with 10 good swats in each one. (That’s how it was done to me. The ten good swats bit, anyway. I have no recollection of the frequency.) Two little swats once every month or two is a whole 'nother kettle of karp.
Let’s put a finer point on this: it’s not “consistency” and “repetition”, it’s what can seem like “inifinite consistency” and “infinite repetition”. Solutions that take 6 months to finally work don’t strike me as much of solutions.
The fact is, in the real world, people with widely varying levels of patience have kids. What you’re suggesting is that only the top 5% or so of folks on the patience scale can ever be effective parents.