Or something.
Corporal punishment (CP) is defined as “an act carried out with the intention of causing a child to experience pain, but not injury, for the purposes of correction and control”.
Spanking and slapping are a “socially legitimate form of interpersonal violence” used to discipline children in the United States and many other countries. Spanking can, it seems, include the use of an object such as a stick, but is subjectively distinguished from a violent assault.
A US study by Straus and Paschall on the effects on cognitive ability of whacking kids came up with one really positive message:
In the younger children, the thing that made the biggest difference to IQ scores was whether or not mothers provided cognitive stimulation. This was more important than anything else, including corporal punishment.
The bad news was:
The figures revealed that 93 per cent of mothers had spanked 2- to 4-year-olds once or more per week, whereas only 58 per cent had turned to physical discipline with the older [age 5 to 9] kids. Nearly half of toddlers’ moms had spanked their children three or more times per week, Straus and Paschall found.
Four years later, younger children who had never felt their mother’s palm had gained an average of 5.5 IQ points compared with kids who had suffered corporal punishment, while older unspanked children had gained 2 IQ points, on average.
They say that if you smack and provide cognitive stimulation kids will be OK, well, almost, but not as OK as they would be if parents didn’t smack.
“93 per cent of mothers had spanked 2- to 4-year-olds once or more per week” is a helluva lot of spanking and I would have thought largely destructive of relationships where cognitive stimulation is the norm.
We have to ask ourselves what sort of behaviour regular spanking is modelling. Authoritarian bullying? Yet we are told:
“The practical side of this is that paediatricians and child psychologists need to start doing what none of them do now, and say, ‘Never spank under any circumstances,’” says Murray Straus, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, who led the new study along with Mallie Paschall at the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley, California. (Emphasis added)
Paediatricians are, I understand, excellent on physical development, but not expert on psycho-social development. But child psychologists?
This ScienceDaily report includes a graph showing the damage done.
I wonder what the situation is here in Australia. Bad and getting worse?
If we have an epidemic of corporal punishment in the early childhood years, or even an undesirable level of CP (one instance is too much), the question remains as to what to do about it. The critical phase for child development is, I understand, age 1-3 or the toddler stage. This is when doors are opened or closed, basic behaviour patterns established, even the foundations of personality and future mental health. Parenting is a complex business and learned rather than intuitive. So tragically we see adverse parenting practices emerging almost automatically in subsequent generations.
I thought there was some positive potential in the Government’s early childhood education plans of setting up one-stop community support child services centres. But I’ve heard nothing in recent times. Was this a casualty of the transfer of $2.5 billion from education to climate change initiatives, largely to be allocated towards clean coal? Surely not!
The State Government here offers a Management of Young Children Program (MYCP) which on one opinion I value is even better than Prof Matt Sanders’ world famous Triple P Positive Parenting Program. It involves observation of parents interacting with children and being offered alternative strategies in dealing with issues.
I’m sure other states have similar initiatives which could be supported, built upon and made more widely available. I’m sure that even for the bean counters the social capital and human productivity engendered would be worth every cent.
In fact the ScienceDaily story picks up a separate study by Straus which explores the relationships between level of economic development, national average IQ and prevalence of CP, purporting to show that:
a higher national level of economic development underlies both fewer parents using corporal punishment and a higher national IQ.
The article says that there is a worldwide trend away from corporal punishment and 24 countries made it illegal in 2009. Some countries have “made vigorous efforts to inform the public and assist parents in managing their children.” I’m a bit out of the loop on these matters and don’t know the legal situation in Australian states, but if there was a vigorous program to assist parents I’d surely know about it.
From Murray Straus’s website there are links to the Straus and Paschall paper and the separate international study. If you want to explore the topic in more detail, I’d recommend both, not without reservations.
Here’s the link to the published paper.
The Straus and Paschall paper drew the sample from women first interviewed in 1979 as part of a national longitudinal survey of youth. A strength is that quite a lot is known about the mothers, so the relationships between various factors could be explored. A weakness is that no information was gathered about the fathers. Data collection for this study began in 1986.
Longitudinal testing of cognitive ability was done but not with a standard IQ test. The second (T2) test, for example, was a Math and Reading Recognition test. I’d query whether it measured problem solving. I suspect it was narrower than an IQ test, which itself is a narrow concept of intelligence. (There was a brilliant post on this topic back in 2005.)
Similarly the notions of maternal “cognitive stimulation” and “emotional support” seem limited.
There was an astonishing amount of hitting going on. For the 2-4 year-old group, a third of mothers spanked four or more times a week, while 12.8% spanked seven or more times per week. The 6.6% who were not hit during the week preceding T1 and T2 may nevertheless have been hit at other times.
The Straus study showed that whereas 70% or so consistently over time favour CP in the US over 90% in fact do so. Compare this with Sweden where approval of CP was down to 11% in 1994.
The Straus paper has a lot of interesting information about other research, but as a piece of research as such it is basically RS. Two half-assed questions were added to an international dating violence study which sampled students at 68 universities in 32 countries. (What does being spanked or hit “a lot” mean?) The sample wasn’t large enough to use sophisticated statistical techniques and the question was overly subjective and reliant on memory. These weaknesses are admitted in the paper.
Still Straus may be onto something by suggesting the reduction of CP noted in many parts of the world as at least one explanation of the mysterious Flynn effect, the fact that measured average IQ increases over the generations just about everywhere, for no apparent reason. I suspect this is premature and needs teasing out by a far better designed experiment. But I like the absence of CP as an indicator of a civilised society.
Perhaps parents that actively choose against CP are more likely to be critical/reflective thinkers, and a child raised in this context is likely to be advantaged intellectually and emotionally, accounting for the IQ leap?
This is another one of those extra stupid studies that the so called experts keep inventing. The facts of real life do not back the studies in any way. Until the last couple of generations children were spanked. Let’s look at the “Greatest Generation”, the ones that lived through WW2. This truly was a productive generation that lived through one of the hardest times in modern history. You can bet they were spanked as kids. They not only survived but launched the world into the modern age. I’ll also use the example from my home town. All of my friends were spanked. In school we got the paddle. Our ACT Scores (college entrance exams) were high. We did well in college and have good jobs. The same school today without spanking at home or in the school scores very low on college entrance exams. The facts of real life just don’t back the studies.
Maybe parents who are smarter do not spank their children. So the causal link could be the other way around. Smarter parents have smarter kids.
Although this study appears to show a correlation between corporal punishment and IQ, it does nothing to show the causal direction. Children who have a lower IQ (or are developing slower) could more frequently engage in behaviour that results in corporal punishment from the parents.
‘This is another one of those extra stupid studies that the so called experts keep inventing. The facts of real life do not back the studies in any way.’
Ah the argument from authority of real life – one’s licence to say anything one pleases without that la de da, elitist systematic evidence for your position.
OK, so there’s a correlation between spanking and lower IQ. But, as the saying goes, correlation does not prove causation. There could well be a more complex explanation, like the one sublimecowgirl suggests.
I’m puzzled by one thing: why would spanking directly lead to lower IQ? Assuming it does not involve violence that would cause brain injury — which should obviously be punished to the full extent of the law, and then some — how does a light smack on the derriere cause a decline in IQ?
I’ve not so far got into the parenting game, but when you see toddlers screaming their heads off in public places, and generally behaving like little monsters, it is hard not to sympathise with the weary mom who administers a little light correction.
There are a plenty of plausible reasons for the correlation that have nothing to do with the effects of smacking – just off the top of my head, less educated parents smack more, less educated parents’ kids develop slower; naughty kids get smacked more, naughty kids learn slower, etc. Crucially, you can’t standardise for the
second of there in an OLS – you need an instrumental variable.
Publishing standards in child development must be disturbingly low for the authors to be allowed to draw such a strong conclusion from such weak facts – certainly in economics the referees would be absolutely scathing.
scg @ 1, yes, I think. The non-hitters seem to be a very select group. But CP was correlated with loss of IQ (I’ll use this as shorthand for “cognitive ability”) in the remainder. The less beating, the more IQ gain.
John H @ 2, what Tim D said @ 4. It’s a no-brainer that smarter parents have smarter kids, but the study was about change in IQ.
Cognitive stimulation is strongly related to +ive IQ change and it’s a fair bet that the intelligence of the mothers is positively related to the level of cognitive stimulation. But the study says:
But they say that none of the characteristics from the social context, including specifically the one above, “moderated the tendency for CP to be associated with slower cognitive ability”.
So, in short, you and your mates may have done even better if you hadn’t been whacked. But two warnings. Better IQ doesn’t mean better academic performance in every instance or better career outcomes. And the desirable alternative to whacking is not an absence of discipline. I’m not sure how you know what goes on in the same school today. Have you done some research?
Paulus @ 5, we are not necessarily talking about a “light smack on the derriere”. CP as defined is anything short of physical assault that causes physical damage. It could include a slap on the face for example, or a thrashing with a leather strap, provided there was no damage other than a few red marks.
Parenting is not an easy game and some modern parents make the mistake of giving toddlers too much choice and/or negotiating with them. Children always deserve an explanation if you discipline them, and profit from a framework of norms.
Many kids learn that throwing a tanty in public means they get their way, and so the behaviour is rewarded as parents try to escape embarrassment.
Hitting kids, I think, interrupts the development of positive communication between parent and child and tends to produce a relationship which adversely affects cognitive stimulation.
How do you know it’s not the other way around? That they might not have been whacked had they done better in the first place?
Desipis @ 3, kids with lower IQs are not per se badder than kids with high IQs.
If 2-4 year-olds are behaving badly the fault is usually in the parenting strategies.
This study didnt control for income or the geographic region in which the child lives. I’d hazard to guess that income and use of CP are correlated, with higher income families less likely to use it. Furthermore the area in which these children live may effect their access to quality preschool or primary school education.
These factors may explain the IQ difference.
dd @ 6, most of that stuff off the top of your head was considered and discounted in the study.
I don’t have any expertise in statistical analysis in social research methodology, but your point about the quality of research in general could have some traction. Much educational research, for example, lacks the funds to gain access to proper samples and/or follow through longitudinally. The central claim of this research seems to me to be reasonably robust, though I’d appreciate an expert commentary by someone with the requisite research skills who has read the full paper.
The international study has problems, but in the text he covers his backside by admitting the weaknesses and not making strong claims.
stuart @ 11, frankly I doubt it. The authors did consider income/social status and found differences, for example, in the African American mothers as a group. such differences, however, did not affect the outcomes of the study.
Can people see that hitting kids is deeply ingrained in US culture, is normatively accepted, but not the only way of bringing up kids? Furthermore, when you think about it, beating young kids with mentally traumatic results is on the face of it a pretty uncivilised way of going about child rearing.
One of the disturbing aspects is that if you ask mothers to keep a diary the amount of whacking is many times (six times in one study) greater than if you ask for an estimate from memory. Part of the reason for this kind of research is to identify taken-for-granted realities and question their basis.
What the situation is here in Oz, I don’t know, but I suspect it is is up there and a contrast with countries like Sweden.
Now I’ve got to take a spell from this thread and do a few other things.
As a descendent of one (of many millions) who died in those hardest of times, this seems a fairly trite analysis.
Regarding the productivity, and perhaps some of the brutality, of that ‘greatest generation’ (for the Germans, Japanese and us all I presume?). A recent book I’ve come across on the history of methamphetamine (American Meth: A History of the Methamphetamine Epidemic in America) suggests that it had more to do with the chemists lab than any thing else.
It’s still here, now officially for ADHD kiddies, military pilots and of course unofficially for corrupt police and criminal interests.
Is it only direct damage to our central nervous system (a crack on the head?) that can effect our mind, cognitive ability, intelligence, curiosity?
How often would CP be delivered along with negative cognitive reinforcement? Don’t do that, do this, don’t ask questions, stay there and don’t move… as our brain/CNS development seems largely a process of pruning (nerve cells don’t divide and grow like other cells and organs), early repression of some more ‘adventurous behaviors’ (curiosity and interest in different/new things?) could well cut some of those potential connections it seems to me.
Where exactly does our mind end and our body (and it senses?) begin. At the blood brain barrier, the neck, the very far end of the nerve cell cell just below the skin? If CP wasn’t believed to affect childrens behavior/attitude/cognition (teach em a lesson? change their thinking through physical means?), then why would anyone do it?
That said, sublimecowgirl makes a good point.
desipis @ 9, it’s mainly about 2-4 year olds. The commonly held belief is that even among child development experts is that whacking the youngies does no harm, if done with restraint, occasionally, within well-defined circumstances. Some toddlers do present bigger disciplinary challenges than others, but the assistance programs I referred in the post give parents strategies of getting on top of the situation short of whacking.
No child development experts would favour the wholesale whacking revealed in the survey.
If people are going to continue to assert home-spun wisdom over expertise and research, it illustrates that we have a long way to go.
Quoll @ 16, people do it (CP) because it was done to them, is culturally approved and often, even when parents know better, out of tiredness and frustration. The latter reasons won’t wash in other forms of interpersonal violence, so why should they be an acceptable excuse here?
Was there any analysis of the relationship between corporal punishment and the creation of evil geniuses? If not, they wasted a golden opportunity.
“Publishing standards in child development must be disturbingly low for the authors to be allowed to draw such a strong conclusion from such weak facts – certainly in economics the referees would be absolutely scathing.”
.
That’s certainly true (although there are certainly good child development journals and no doubt bad economics ones too), but despite all the complaints about correlation and causation, it’s worthwhile noting that it is going to be an area where it is almost impossible to do the type of study that would solve this issue unless you want to have a randomized beating condition (somehow, I’ll assume no ethics committee is going to allow that — perhaps the best you could have would be a non-beating condition). Thus whilst there might be potential confounds, it’s certainly something worth considering, even if the relationship between cognitive development and being hit happens to be rather indirect. It certainly isn’t hard to imagine (or find data for) things like the effect of violence on attachment, so it would be exceptionally surprising if hitting kids didn’t have some effect on their development. Whether standard IQ tests are especially good at picking that up is another story.
conrad, thanks for that.
I’d be interested in trying to tease out the optimal conditions for the development of various aspects of human ability, going beyond the common meaning of “cognitive” more in the manner of Gardner’s Frames of Mind, and the main inhibitors.
I’m not a big fan of the generalised “g” factor, supposedly measured by IQ tests, as 2005 post elaborates.
‘If 2-4 year-olds are behaving badly the fault is usually in the parenting strategies.’
Correction, all 2-4 year olds do things that would try the patience of a saint, but the parenting strategies can only be criticised when they reinforce bad behaviour (such as bribing your way out of a tanty) or fail to deal with it.
I was quite horrified by the frequency reported by mothers of spanking in this survey – even once a week seems a lot. But my experience is that a slap is a quick fix, short term solution, usually driven by exasperation.
This is why I also question the other factors, such as stress, socio-economic standard, degree or otherwise of spousal support, etc. Dunno if I agree that middle class parents would be less likely to slap, particularly in America, which does have a spare the rod, spoil the child/tough love mentality not necessarily shared in Australia.
What about other forms of negative parenting, such as yelling or ignoring? The point was made in the post that the most telling determinant of IQ was maternal cognitive stimulation … that is, engagement with the child. I think most parents know (and the parenting programmes named emphasise) that engagement with the child is the best long-term discipline measure. And they don’t mean sitting down with Johnny Toddler and patiently negotiating your way through his supermarket pestering routine. They mean playing with and enjoying Johnny Toddler when you are not in the supermarket so that you put lots of good stuff in the bank. The good stuff makes it easier to refrain from slapping him in the supermarket but also (and this is crucial) means simple sanctions, such as short-term emotional withdrawal or saying ‘I don’t like it when you do that’ are much more effective. They also mean that, later, you can talk about why a slap was delivered.
I’m willing to bet that kids who have active relationships with their parents do well on all tests, whether or not they are slapped.
conrad, FWIW I don’t approve of beating kids (though a single short sharp smack on the bum for a toddler below the age of reason, in the interests of good Pavlovian conditioning, is a qualitatively different thing in my book).
It’s quite possible the paper’s thesis is true – its just that judging by what they’re telling practitioners to do the authors have let their prejudices get way ahead of the demonstrated facts.
“I’d be interested in trying to tease out the optimal conditions for the development of various aspects of human ability”
.
I think this is an impossible question, since you basically need to specify the set of all abilities you are interested in, and the optimal conditions for some might not be optimal for others. Also, in some cases, it might make no sense to look at more than one ability if that ability happens to be pretty modular or unaffected by other abilities (reading and reading processes, for example, correlate poorly with most other cognitive tasks — so you can be a poor reader but super at maths. This is one of the crazy things about IQ tests — essentially uncorrelated tasks are used to make total scores).
.
Because of these sorts of proplems, people tend to look for particular conditions which happen to have negative or positive effects (e.g., punishment; a remediation program; teaching quality). For studies where it isn’t clear what the outcome on particular things should be (e.g., teacher quality), generally a grab-bag of variables is examined which hopefully is at least somewhat representative of things that affect people (that’s what these authors have done). At least in areas where problems are more tractable, as things get more and more investigated, you often end up finding out which variables are important and why, so you can get around the bag-of-variables problem (e.g., punishment causes greater fear which then causes poor attachment).
.
It is of course especially tricky to examine things which don’t have big effects but are still important (such as punishment). For example, very few people are going to disagree that lead in petrol is bad news. However, if you did a study like the one mentioned but substituted lead for punishment and measured the difference between people living in the inner city who inhaled a lot of lead tainted petrol versus those in the country that didn’t, there’s probably a good chance your data wouldn’t look any better — there’s just so much noise when looking at things over time and in different groups that its hard to ever be sure of what you find. No doubt people would complain too. However, this is not how to interpret evidence from these studies — they arn’t supposed to be definitive like some studies in hard sciences are. You take this study with the 20 that came before it, consider any possible confounds across the set, and then make your judgment, which is exactly what the authors did.
.
Flicking through the paper mentioned, the authors are clearly aware of this:
.
“However, it is a well-established principle in epidemiology research that reducing a widely prevalent risk factor with small effect size (e.g., spanking) can have a much greater impact on public health than reducing a risk factor with a large effect size but low prevalence, such as physical abuse (Rose, 1985; Rosenthal, 1984). Therefore, for the nation as whole, an average gain of this size can be extremely important” (p. 478).
.
.
DD: “its just that judging by what they’re telling practitioners to do the authors have let their prejudices get way ahead of the demonstrated facts”
.
Actually DD, I read the paper, and their suggestions are extremely nuanced (the only suggestions are in fact in the last paragraph, where they could have skipped using “cruel irony”), it’s the way other people are interpreting them, not the authors themselves.
Conrad, yes. It is always good to read the actual paper before criticising it. even a careful reading the article above renders many of the comments here meaningless. The article does refer to change in IQ, not IQ levels per se.
On the oft-quoted example of screaming children in shopping malls and supermarkets, I think we often underestimate the extend to which such places, and extended trips to them, can be stressful experiences for small children.
Try to imagine yourself being pushed around in a wonky trolley through towering canyons of bright colours, bright lights and booming noise by a mother who is also stressed, tired and frustrated. The best way to deal with children screaming in a supermarket or plaza is simply to get them out of there as quickly as possible. To avoid stressing children, keep trips to the plaza short, focused and entertaining. Don’t go if the child is already tired or is unwell.
Certainly there are limitations to what can be achieved for the purpose of research. Yet surely if you’re going to propose a policy change or even legislation, it would be prudent to do a proper study first to demonstrate that your hypothesis is actually true.
Brian: “Hitting kids, I think, interrupts the development of positive communication between parent and child and tends to produce a relationship which adversely affects cognitive stimulation.”
Yeah, I seem to recall (peering thru the incredible fog of my undergraduate days) that the anthropologist Mary Douglas did some interesting work on the relation between cognitive development and the varieties of manner (as it were) which one uses to communicate with children, correlated with class etc etc. As I dimly recall, her work had more to do with differing strategies of language/framed intention than with CP as such; but OTOH if you consider CP as, well, a species of language (which I’d admit is sorta valid), then I think it may fit the paradigm. The basic idea being that what the child learns to understand under a CP regimen is a kind of binary, simplistic “WHACK/NOT WHACK” equivalent to a “not good/good” theory of the world, rather than learning from a more complex, cognitively rich regimen of “NO WHACKS/ OK, now I’ll explain to you why your behavior is good, or not good, or somewhere in between, on a detailed and graded scale.”
Not being an actual anthropologist or even an impersonator of same, I have no way of evaluating the validity of the general thesis, but it did at least seem inherently interesting, and I certainly made a bit of hay out of it at the time, just to stumble thru all the various hoops and keep myself in hard drugs and out of trouble.
But of course I could be wrong, as I was quite out of my mind for years at a time… at the time. Maybe wasn’t whacked enuf m’self as a kid.
I am the proud parent of a 2 and 4 year old. Neither have been spanked (yet – see below).
I was spanked, and had wooden mixing spoon and belt used on me. When we had kids I said I would spank them if I needed too.
Luckily my wife is an early Childhood Teacher. She said no to spanking. When our kids were 6 months and 2 1/2, she booked us into a parenting course. Many of our friends questioned why we did it as our children are so well behaved. I am so glad she did.
Yes this is a plug – the Magic 1 – 2 – 3 Course is well worth the money. It helped me understand child behaviours and parent behaviours. Our kids push the boundaries and all the buttons they can but I can deal with it calmly and effectively. It completely changed my parenting and vastly improved it.
Kids from day one love routine, consistency, boundaries and they will imitate what they see.
I have said to my wife that I retain the option to go nuclear if I ever have to, but with Magic 1-2-3 as the foundation of our discipline policy I don’t ever expect to.
Not all mothers have the luxury of a quick trip to the shops with a toddler/s who are in the mood. I doubt that there’s a mother alive who enjoys going shopping with small children.
The ideal situation would be to leave the child at home with the other parent or a babysitter, while the parent has a nice quiet time doing the essentials and maybe some non-essentials like a cup of coffee and a bite to eat without constant interruptions, tantrums and demands for attention. Unfortunately, that’s not always possible.
I don’t think the occasional short, sharp slap will reduce a child’s IQ, as much as living in a household fraught with fear and danger.
Hello all
I took the time to read the paper and have a few comments.
A couple of qualifiers though. First, I’m a parent of a gorgeous 18 month old son and my wife and I have decided NOT to use corporal punishment with him as a disciplining device as he gets older. Second, I have a lot of experience analysing longitudinal data sets, but in the context of economics, NOT child development.
That said, unfortunately DD is correct in that this paper would never have seen the light of day in a good economics journal.
First, although the authors attempt to control for demographic and other social factors that might affect cognitive ability, besides corporal punishment, the data set they have at their disposal leaves them with a very limited set of control variables. The list of variables they include is: maternal cognitive simulation; maternal emotional support; child’s birth weight; child’s age; gender; ethnicity; number of other children in the home; mother’s age at birth of child; mother’s education; and father presence.
Look at that list. It should be pretty obvious to everyone commenting on this thread that there is a large POTENTIAL problem with ommitted variable bias in this study. Not only is there almost no information about the father avaiable, but apart from the child’s cognitive ability and basic demographic information, we have nearly no information about other behavioural characteristics of the children that could be correlated with both the extent of corporal punishment and cognitive ability.
Next, there is POTENTIALLY a significant reverse causality problem. The authors acknowledge that causation could run from cognitive ability to corporal punishment, but then seem to think that they deal with this by instead looking at whether corporal punishment affects the rate of subsequent improvements in cognitive ability. Unfortunately, this does not deal with the problem and the authors make no attempt to use the standard tests for endogeneity, nor even discuss the possibility of looking for a credible instrumental variable (a variable that is correlated with corporal punishment but only correlated with cognitive ability through its impact on corporal punishment).
Now, let me be clear. Finding a good IV in these circumstances would be very difficult. And the authors appear to attempt to control for as many factors as their data allow them to.
However, the conclusions are very strong (“cruel irony”, “individuals that defend spanking”, “media and educational programs explicitly focused on not hitting toddlers”, etc) given the weakness of the methodology.
If it were me, I would have concluded that the results were interesting and suggest that there could be a causal relationship running from corporal punishment to cognitive ability, but that considerably more research was necessary before stronger conclusions could be drawn.
“If it were me, I would have concluded that the results were interesting and suggest that there could be a causal relationship running from corporal punishment to cognitive ability”
.
If it were me I’d conclude exactly what they did (and I have lot of experience looking at data like this too, in child development). All you are pointing out is that there are potential confounds. Big deal. That’s true of every study. If we all tried to control every single possible confound (most which produce tiny and essentially irrelevant effect sizes in any case), no studies would ever get run.
.
What you haven’t said is the extent that those potential confounds you point to could go in explaining the effect (and the 20 studies before them that find basically the same thing). If, for example, you are claiming that there are behavioral confounds that lead to what are best described as huge effects, and they can explain the entire data pattern or even a reasonable proportion of it, then what you are really saying is that parents with children with behavioral problems that wern’t measured like to beat them a lot — so much so that it causes huge differences in IQ (almost 6 points in the early age groups). That’s not a lot of faith you are putting in most parents.
.
This idea is made even worse because the groups are controlled at the first time point and we are looking at difference scores. Thus, what you are really saying is that groups which appear to be similar at the first time point are actually confounded, and so 4 years later, we find differences not because of the variable which is manipulated (CP) but because of some unmeasured differences in the groups to start with (which obviously had no previous effect to up to time point 1). That’s just crazy.
Conrad, when you have a data set with as few good control variables as the this study had, and you don’t even attempt IV or any other statistical method to deal with the large potential endogeneity problem, you should be very circumspect in your conclusions.
FWIW, it is the omitted variable bias, not the reverse causality that I am most worried about with this study. The authors have no information about the behavioural characteristics of the children themseleves, which could of course be significantly correlated with cognitive development.
Remember, there are confounds and there are confounds. That is, the extent of likely omitted variable bias varies from study to study. Of course, studies go ahead and are published despite some omitted variable bias being likely. But in this study, it would potentially be very large. The study discusses those confounds only to a very limited extent, and then goes on to say that the entire basis of the parental education system should be changed, should the results be confirmed, presumably by studies suffering from similar methodological problems.
I’m sorry if you have lower standards of evidence than I do. And my conclusion is not based on some preference for corporal punishment. I don’t use it now and don’t want to in the future.
However, just because I don’t like a practice, doesn’t mean that I support conclusions being reached that involve stretching a data set further than it should be stretched. The authors’ personal contempt for corporal punishment is very clear in almost every passage of the paper.
Finally, I don’t find it hard to believe that behavioural/social/familial factors present at the initial point COULD be significantly correlated with contemporaneous use of corporal punishment and subsequent cognitive development. They may, and they may not. Unfortunately, the authors do not have the adequate control variables and so can’t say much about it. It is a weakness of the paper and again, would lead me to be more circumspect than they are.
I can’t say this any more clearly than I have. It is a paper that has a very poor “control group” and yet, does nothing beyond simple OLS to investigate the relationship of interest. I could get over that if we were talking about an issue of minor interest, but here we are talking about something with enormous policy/familial/social consequences. Conclusions simply must be based on better evidence than this.
Another problem, which the authors discuss, but cannot evaluate, is the nature of the spanking. Their scale is based on regularity not intensity. They cannot distinguish between very different degrees of punishment. While they say that abuse is sufficiently rare as to not contaminate their results, the problem is more significant than that because there can still be degrees of corporal punishment that stop short of criminal abuse (though I know this has been debated by others on other related threads).
Perhaps the right conclusion is that the paper is consistent with their being a risk that use of corporal punishment affects cognitive development, and that given this risk, parents should desist until the relationships are better understood (precautionary principle).
Anyway, I don’t care to get into this in any more detail than I have. I reached the conclusions I did on the basis of my experience as an econometrician. If I were refereeing this paper, I would reject it. However, given that I personally don’t believe in the use of corporal punishment, I don’t want to get into a debate where my view on the statistical worth of this paper is confused for a defense of the practice.
I hope you understand.
I’m with Labour Outsider on this. Though not for any academic scruple. What are we discussing here? Hitting children, toddlers, babies? Isn’t that illegal in this country?
I can remember in the 1980s the debate on corporal punishment in schools still raging long after we had outlawed it in prisons for criminals.
Now in 2009 we have a serious debate on LP on the statistical correlation of IQ to the incidence of corporal punishment of children ie. slapping toddlers around, does it dumb them down a bit?
LO that’s fine, and I thank you for your contribution. I don’t have a lot of maths in my background and never got to audit the course on research methodology which was offered by one of the then CAE’s that used to be teachers colleges. The dialogue between you and conrad should assist anyone who wants to come to terms with the paper as a piece of research.
We can’t always wait for research in making policy decisions. In this case I would take a position on the basis of principles and values. In my concept of education, as a matter of principle I would be against the use of the stimulus-response manipulation of others, especially where there are power differentials. So the Pavlovian cuff, however seemingly natural and innocent, must be questioned, and if there is another way, discarded.
Razor has told us of another way. But I’d emphasise that within the framework Razor describes it is necessary to give children the opportunity to make choices and to take responsibility for their own actions, not for external rewards (or punishments), but for the intrinsic rewards they experience in learning to interact positively with others.
As adults we have to always remember that we are modelling behaviour. In hitting kids we are telling them that it is OK to use such means to modify the behaviour of others or to exert our will over them.
naomi @ 22, you are right. Almost invariably with 2-4 year olds there will be a contestation of will at some stage. But my point is that the adult is ultimately responsible for setting the tone of the behaviour. So I would modify my statement to read:
If it’s happening and you don’t know how to change it, I’d suggest seeking help.
One of the issues I had with the article was that the authors didn’t adequately address what I think would be a very common defence of CP, that is the use of CP in very specific circumstances as a last resort and much less frequently than once a week. There is a lot of unexplored territory between once a week and nothing. Indeed they quote Baumrind as saying that CP must be:
The authors say that none of these conditions were tested, but should be in future research.
Clearly they do lay themselves open to criticism by pre-empting such research in nevertheless calling for the complete banning of CP. Personally I wouldn’t wait for the research, but then I’d act on ethical grounds, not autocratically, but rather through persuasion of those in the position to make laws, which is perfectly OK in a democracy.
Often in talking to children about their behaviour one technique is to explain to them that if they do certain things there will be “consequences”. One such consequence might be CP. So it could be said that it is an outcome they have chosen.
I still wouldn’t accept the use of CP, but the above is how many child development experts see it.
“If I were refereeing this paper, I would reject it. However, given that I personally don’t believe in the use of corporal punishment, I don’t want to get into a debate where my view on the statistical worth of this paper is confused for a defense of the practice. I hope you understand.”
.
I was criticizing your statistical view, not a defense of the practice. It seems to me your main suggestion is that there are unknown behavioral effects, which you can’t say (some of the measures they used as controls were pretty decent), that cause the IQ effect and also an associated increase in the extent parents use CP. So, for example, if there are 3 kids in a family, and one didn’t develop as quickly, you are predicting that parents should use CP more with the dull one more, so much more that it causes the differences in results found. That’s your prediction.
.
Personally, if I got it to review, I’d let it through (and I probably review around 20 psychology papers year). If we all had such tough standards (it’s simply not possible to run every possible survey/behavioral check in human studies, because not suprisingly, people get sick of filling them in), nothing would get published.
So basically the study was a red herring and what you want is to impose your unproven parenting values upon others? Nice.
Do you have any evidence as to the risks of applying a ban on CP? For instance if parents are unable to resort to CP, how many of them will be pushed to emotionally abuse their children to get them under control? Not all parents are going to have the knowledge, skills and opportunity to control their children with solely positive techniques (and not all children will always respond to them). If a short smack is to be considered physical abuse, then telling the child they are ‘bad’ is emotional abuse.
depisis, I’ve already said I would seek to persuade. Law-making is based on principles and norms all the time.
Responsible lawmakers would take into account what information/support programs were available, or were to be made available, to parents.
Brian, judging by the study CP is very much the norm. Responsible lawmakers would realise that there are a wide range of parenting philosophies out there and that short of actual evidence that a particular philosophies is harmful they shouldn’t legislate against it. I’m all for educating parents in different parenting techniques but making claims about facts that aren’t supported by evidence is wrong.
If it’s so important why not organise a study that would prove (or disprove) your case?
“I’m all for educating parents in different parenting techniques but making claims about facts that aren’t supported by evidence is wrong”
.
There’s heaps of studies looking at CP, not just this one. This one should be seen as one of many. Many other studies look at other things like social learning and so on, and the results are entirely unsurprising (kids exposed to violence are more violent themselves). Whether that means you have to make laws like Sweden to stop it is another question (parenting programs and so on are fine by me). Alternatively, given that Australia has the highest rate of violent crime in the OECD (at least based on the last big comparison in 2001), obviously what is currently being done is not working very well, and looking at things in the long term and what might be done to change them seems entirely reasonable to me.
“I’m all for educating parents in different parenting techniques but making claims about facts that aren’t supported by evidence is wrong”
.
There’s heaps of studies looking at CP, not just this one. This one should be seen as one of many. Many other studies look at other things like social learning and so on, and the results are entirely unsurprising (kids exposed to violence are more violent themselves). Whether that means you have to make laws like Sweden to stop it is another question (parenting programs and so on are fine by me). Alternatively, given that Australia has the highest rate of violent crime in the OECD (at least based on the last big comparison in 2001), obviously what is currently being done is not working very well, and looking at things in the long term and what might be done to change them seems entirely reasonable to me.
Proving a correlation multiple times does not prove a causation. Are there studies that demonstrate a causal link between CP (by controlling it as an independent variable) and poorer outcomes?
Despis,
perhaps a better suggestion would be to read an article which has many of the issues summarized, rather than trying to find some study which claims causation or yet another study which shows some effect.
A good article (in a really good journal) is:
Gershoff, E. T. (2002). Corporal punishment by parents and associated
child behaviors and experiences: A meta-analytic and theoretical review.
Psychological Bulletin, 128, 539–579.
and the three commentaries of it and then the response by Gershoff are worth reading also.
conrad, LO said a lot of the things I was trying to hint at in an abbreviated form. The big problem with this paper is that its claims are unequivocal while its evidence is very equivocal. Reading it, I’d concede that that the work should have resulted in a publishable paper somewhere – but one that is far, far more cautious.
The point LO keeps making is that not merely that there is the possibility of bias – there usually is in these things – but that there is reason to believe the bias is large enough to risk invalidating the conclusions. Which points to the need for great modesty and tentativeness about those conclusions.
But there’s nothing modest or tentative about these authors’ claims. As LO says you wouldn’t get away with it in academic (as distinct from popular) economics; that’s ensured by the emphasis there on mathematical and statistical rigour (which so many posters here have decried in their fulminations against “economic rationalism”).
Desipis @ 43. I think that conrad earlier said that the only way you could effectively do this is to control for the abuse through having a whacking/ no whaking group that you follow over time. As he said this is never doing to happen (and even if you did you still couldn’t know if it was the whacking that made the difference- i.e. if the whacked kids turned out to have lower IQ’s it might just be because they were stupider, or conversely if the whacked kids had higher IQ’s could you definitively say it was the whacking what did it?). It seems to me that your point is that no-one should tell you how to parent, which is a philospohical position and one not likley to be changed by this kind of research.
Why not? If its unethical to control CP within a sample population how the hell is it ethical to control CP across the entire population?
Brian @15: “What the situation is here in Oz, I don’t know, but I suspect it is is up there and a contrast with countries like Sweden.”
I spent 6 years living in Norway, and I don’t remember ever seeing anyone hit a child. Nor do I remember seeing them throw extensive tantrums in shops, which in Australia tends to result in a smack, verbal abuse, or worse.
The Norwegian kids are unlikely to be significantly different human beings, so there is presumably something different in the manner of nurturing?
I don’t know if it is related, but small bubs in Norway are not left howling from hunger in public places, like buses and planes – they are discreetly breastfed, usually shielded by their baby blanket. The littl’uns are carried about everywhere in baby backpacks by their mums and dads – shopping, skiing, you name it. They are taken to the work creche during the week, where they see their parents at various breaks during the day.
Perhaps these types of things have an influence on their subsequent behaviour and rapport with their parents?
conrad,
Had a quick read through that article. It appear to answer to my question is no, there is no direct evidence of a causal link, despite the hundreds of studies and heavy handed legislation. The article appears to raise the same issues that have been raised in this thread:
Desipis, Neither@46 means that we’d need to allocate kids randomly to the whacking and non-whacking groups (ie, in some cases ask non-whacking parents to whack, and the whacking parents not to). Not gonna happen.
I can also provide another variable that needs consideration: the social and intellectual function of young children is disrupted if their care arrangements are chaotic or overly complex. See this pdf.
desipis @ 38:
I think it’s a fair bet that parents employing CP also use aggressive verbal techniques.
FWIW I’d consider the state providing/supporting assistance in positive parenting techniques, as identified in the post, as a higher priority than legislation banning CP. I’d also point out that legislative action is little more than a state assertion of a value position. No-one is going to set up closed circuit TV cameras in the home to supervise what actually happens there.
Razor @28. I endorse what you say about the 1-2-3 Magic workshop. I’ve had much feedback that the strategies taught in the workshop provide real alternatives to physical punishment.
Disclaimer: I work for a non-profit organisation that runs the workshop.
desipis, you are continually asserting the right of parents to hit their kids, so I thought I’d have a look at the rights of kids not to be hit. Rights are particularly important for groups who are vulnerable and can’t advocate for themselves. Likewise governments, or in the lingo State Parties, should pay particular attention to the protection of such groups. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been signed by all UN members except the US and Somalia (unless they did so in 2009) has relevant sections in article 14.2, 18.2, 19.1 and 2 and 28.2.
Article 14 gives parents a head of power “to provide direction to the child… in a manner consistent with the evolving capacities of the child.”
Article 18.2 states that “States Parties shall render appropriate assistance to parents and legal guardians in the performance of their child-rearing responsibilities and shall ensure the development of institutions, facilities and services for the care of children.”
Article 19.1 says “States Parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse… while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child.”
I’ve left out some of the heavier stuff there like sexual abuse. Article 19.2 calls again inter alia for State Parties to provide protective measures including the establishment of social programs to provide necessary support for the child and carers.
Article 28.2 calls on State Parties to “ensure that school discipline is administered in a manner consistent with the child’s human dignity and in conformity with the present Convention”.
Some may see the heavy hand of the state in this, but it’s what I see the state as being for, either directly or through other agencies.
The article by Straus tells us that both the UN and the EU have called on member nations to prohibit CP by parents. 24 nations have done so. In some of these “vigorous efforts have been made to inform the public and assist parents in managing their children.” Others have done little to implement the prohibition.
As I’ve said earlier, I see these information and support measures as more important than the actual prohibition.
I still see the absence of CP as a mark of the civilised society, would like to think Straus is right in saying the trend is all towards non-hitting and would hope that in a couple of decades time we wouldn’t be talking about it any more.
Elise @ 48, I think the positive benefits of the bodily contact from Norwegians carrying their little ones everywhere could easily be underestimated.
Despis,
I’m happy with the article and it’s conclusions (the one I referenced and the responses). There are innumerable things where it’s essentially impossible to get the type of data you want in the social sciences, for various reasons (no control condition, no perfect randomization etc.), and so you must use non-perfect, but still good data (e.g., looking at conditions where parents are assigned to, say, a non-CP workshop, as is common, although not surprisingly, all of them teach you a lot about parenting). If you arn’t willing to accept that sort of data, you will never get anywhere on many social issues. It’s also worthwhile noting that what many people think is the best data to collect (i.e., randomized trials) has problems (non-random drop out, knowledge of being in the program, 3rd party influences, getting people to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do etc.). So as far as I’m concerned there is *no* simple single experiment you can run to answer this sort of question, which means the best you’ll ever get is a meta-analysis.
.
It seems to me the only aspect that is usefully debatable about whether CP really has an effect is the Baumrind stuff about when and under what conditions CP has no effect (and they seem pretty small). The good thing about the first study mentioned is that it parametrically manipulates the extent of CP, and it shows even in the lower CP groups there is an effect. I also agree with Brian (although not based on UN rules, which I don’t care about too much), that children do have some rights, including right not be subjected to violence.
brian,
There seems to be some relation to the post on abortion in your comment.
Actually I’m more interested in the kids right to be brought up in a fashion that best enables them to fit into and function in society. Each kid is going to be different and I think that the kids parents (or guardians) are in the best position to make any judgement calls concerning their development on issues that don’t have a clear scientific determination.
The only section from the UN convention you’ve quoted that could be interpreted as a ban on CP would be: “protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence”, but then the mental violence part would have to cover all other forms of child punishments so I don’t think that CP is part of the intended scope.
conrad,
The difficulty of the science to provide evidence for a position is no excuse to skip the science and assume the position is true:
If we don’t have the scientific data to support a position then we should acknowledge that we just don’t know. If someone is going to propose policy on the basis of fundamentalist ideology then they shouldn’t dress it up as a scientifically backed position.
Desipis,
the world isn’t black or white. We don’t have irrefutable evidence that the world is warming, that smoking causes cancer, that vaccines don’t cause autism, that we evolved from monkeys etc. That’s because there is no irrefutable evidence for most problems outside fields like mathematics. Hence you need some balanced decision based on what you know. We already make decisions based on that idea. That’s why most forms of violence against children are already banned — because most evidence we have shows that violence against children has negative consequences, even if the physical consequences are not permanent (indeed, most of the evidence is based on theoretical constructs like attachment, cognitive development, and correlations between actions such as violence shown in later life), not because we have irrefutable evidence that such violence really does harm children.
conrad,
I’m not the one trying to paint something as black and white, in fact I’m arguing against it. I’m not asking for irrefutable evidence, I’m asking for at least some evidence of a causal link. Why not push for a trial of whatever policies, education, legislation, etc on a small (preferably voluntary) but diverse subset of the population before pushing for it to forced on the whole population? Is it not prudent to test a proposed change before implementing it when the consequences could be so significant?
Whilst CP is not something my wife and I use, or intend to use, I’m not really convinced by arguments like this. I think most children as they grow up are capable of understanding the nuances involved. Its more a short term rather than a long term issue as kids do copy behaviour even when they don’t understand it.
For example, whilst we may on occasion physically restrain our daughter from rolling around in a muddy puddle even though she really wants to, I don’t that means that later on she will not be able to understand that there are times when using physical force is ok in some circumstances and others when it is not.
Also I’d point out that some of the non physical techniques used with children would be interpreted between adults as rather emotionally manipulative. It was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me when someone pointed out that fundamentally most young children just want to please their parents (even if their behaviour doesn’t seem to say that).
“Why not push for a trial of whatever policies, education, legislation, etc on a small (preferably voluntary) but diverse subset of the population before pushing for it to forced on the whole population?”
.
Because randomized trials won’t provide you with any better data for things like CP than we have now, measuring the effects of CP can take decades (e.g., looking at the relationship between CP at future violence, mental health etc.) so you will be stuck with doing nothing for decades, and no-one is going to allow you to run such a trial in any case.
.
You might like to consider the history of these sorts of things — even until relatively recently, it was quite legitimate to really hurt children as punishment (indeed, schools were allowed to without even asking the parents). You can’t do that now, and that’s surely a good thing. However, if we had to run trials to see the long term effects of these things on children, we’d probably still be beating our children today.
Chris @ 59, I’m going here on what early childhood education specialists tell me. Especially in play situations there are rich opportunities for teaching kids how to interact and transact successfully socially. If another is hurting you (physically or feeling) you don’t just whack them, you use your voice. (“Does Mrs X hit people if she doesn’t like what they are doing? Of course she doesn’t, she uses her voice!”)
At preschool/prep level a lot of the teaching revolves around teaching kids to use language in order to negotiate and that other people have wants, desires and feeling also, and hence the need to ask and listen.
In terms of manipulation, I think that in principle it always needs to be questioned. But little kids a pretty good at it.
The trick seems to be in distinguishing between their needs and what their overt behaviour seems to say. I’m not that good at it but had the opportunity to observe at close quarters an early childhood specialist I married, who I promised not to quote on this thread (she’s not the only one I know).
Bullocks.
Why are you so keen to throw caution to the wind when mandating a change to parenting techniques that have proven themselves over a very long time?
And now we’re stuck with a serious negative impact in education standards because one child’s behaviour is allow to interrupt the whole class. We can’t punish them in any effective way so they just repeatedly disrupt the class causing all the other students to suffer. You can’t just isolate the ‘bad’ effects when determining whether something is a good thing.
Yes, there were plenty of cases where corporal punishment went too far, but as you said the world isn’t black and white so we shouldn’t just take a knee jerk reaction and ban something because in some-cases there are some negative consequences without considering the negative consequences of the ban itself.
conrad @ 54, there is, of course, no simple way of deriving human rights, so rather than open that very vexed area I thought I’d grab the UN Convention for convenience. It goes a bit further than that however. Anyone can claim rights but if a right is to to mean anything it has to be socially constituted, either through generally accepted norms or in a more formal way. The right of parents to hit kids is based on socially accepted norms in the US (70% support) and the Straus article puts it about the same level in NZ. There is no such norm in Sweden, however, where support was surveyed at 11%, although actual spanking (1995) was 33%, down from 94% in the 1950s.
OTOH the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has been ratified by 193 countries. How much difference this means to the lives of children is another matter.
Depisis is right @ 55 in focussing on the phrase “protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence”. So then you have to consider what constitutes “physical violence”, for example. Here I agree with conrad:
It is noteworthy that in the US, where there is strong cultural support for spanking, the American Academy of Pedriatics in 1998 after several years of bitter debate put out a “strong anti-CP statement”. Yet included as a permissable action was hitting the child across the buttocks with an open hand. I assume they didn’t specify limits to the permissable force and wonder whether they had anything to say about the maximum number of hits.
So those with a ‘right to hit’ position are still faced with whether this should have limits, or rather precisely where those limits should be. There would always be a point where ‘acceptable discipline’ shades into ‘criminal assault’. With respect the notion that parents know best won’t wash.
In education decisions need to be made all the time without the luxury of a scientific basis. In deciding whether one provision is better than another, and indeed on regulative policy, there is no opportunity to run experiments, which, if they are to prove something about long-term benefits (if we can agree as to what these are) would require longitudinal studies running for 30 years or so. By which time conditions would have changed.
In practice you have to make judgements on what you know, and this often comes from listening to the opinions of practitioners and people you hire to monitor the system. But in saying that parents know best you simply discount and set aside the whole field of child development studies.
Meanwhile no-one in this country as far as I know is being forced to go to programs like MYCP, Triple P and Magic 1-2-3. If they were no use and were not favourably commented on by word of mouth, they’d simply fold. I think it would be interesting to do an evaluation to look at before and after attitudes on the part of parents and then try to work out whether there have been actual changes in their parenting practices which persist, say, a year later.
If it helps, that’s where I think the action should be, rather than in legislative prohibitions. But don’t imagine that there is no ideological dimension (in the sense of being based on a system of ideas and values) to using CP on children.
Depisis, my comment @ 63 was written before I saw yours @ 62.
The issue you refer to here has nothing to do with CP in schools as far as I can see. There was a policy decision taken back in the 1980s to mainstream more ‘special needs’ kids into the general classroom instead of segregating them in a special class or unit or institution. There are cases where the presence of such kids requires the full-time attention of one adult in a general classroom context. Specialised sessions with appropriately qualified personnel is also necessary.
Schools often struggle to deal with these cases and it can affect the experience of other children.
While some of the special needs children are prone to sudden violent outbursts. I think the professionals involved would recoil with horror at the suggestion that CP would be any use at all. On the contrary it is likely to be highly destructive.
Children grow and at some point there is a fair chance that the adult will lose the fight if that’s what you see as the answer.
But this is just scratching the surface of another huge issue which is more than I want to take on in this thread.
Now just to personalise this all for a second. My dad, and to a lesser extent my Mum hit me and my siblings, they did not do it very often, never on the head, mostly with their hands and sometimes with a wooden spoon. From what I can remember I was never hit when I deserved it, I was always hit for what to me was not a good reason, and as such it never taught me anything. All it did was make me really afraid of my parents when they got angry (I could tell when my Dad was about to lose it by the appearance of the crease between his eyebrowls- one of the most reviled sights of my childhood). Now what I can say is that the hitting did me no good, it didn’t teach me anything, apart from the fact that my parents didn’t really know what was going on, didn’t bother to try to find out and consequently reacted in a way I most certainly didn’t like. Now I know that the plural of anecdote is not data, however the point is if CP doesn’t actually do what its proponents argue, then why should it be maintained. I, personally would have much rather not been hit.
And just to add more anecdotes, my friend, the father of three children, two of whom could be considered challenging has tried smacking, but says that it is not actually effective. But hey as long as it does no (observable physical) harm we might as well just get into it, I mean it is not as if we should have our right to indulge in “parenting techniques that have proven themselves over a very long time?” (desipis, 2009). To that I would say where is your causal evidence?
And just to add more anecdotes, my friend, the father of three children, two of whom could be considered challenging has tried smacking, but says that it is not actually effective. But hey as long as it does no (observable physical) harm we might as well just get into it, I mean it is not as if we should have our right to indulge in “parenting techniques that have proven themselves over a very long time?” (desipis, 2009) questioned? To that proposition I would say “where is your evidence that they have proven themselves, preferably sourced from an economics journal”?
Brian,
Regardless of whether its driven by the CP policy or the inclusion of special needs kids into general classes, its still a demonstration of a well-meaning policy (presumably backed by numerous studies) being implemented to the detriment of those involved.
I imagine that legislation on the issue uses grey words such as “reasonable” to enable assessment on a case by case basis, rather than applying a one-size fits all arbitrary line. Having experts study an individual case and conclude that the parent is wrong is very different from having an expert issuing a blanket edict that affects all individuals regardless of circumstance.
I think it’s self evidence that the status quo for child discipline techniques will at worst create the status quo for society. The worst case for banning CP is somewhat unknown, I’m not saying it’ll lead to chaos but there is significant potential for unanticipated negative effects which dwarf the supposed benefits. Studying those countries that have banned it (once the bans have time to take affect) might produce some information as to the overall effects of the ban.
Desipis @ 68, as to the last part, I’m sick of that argument. I’m not pushing strongly for a ban on hitting. I think it would have to be given detailed consideration as to all the implications beyond the scope of a blog thread, but in principle, I personally would have no objection and would actually favour it on ethical grounds and to protect the rights of the child, which take precedence over the rights of the parent.
As to the education mainstreaming issue, I almost agree, except that I do believe that mainstreaming is to the benefit of the child in many cases and should be implemented where reasonably possible and where it doesn’t disadvantage the other children. But I do believe the cutoff point for segregation goes too far, and the support provisions in the general classroom are in many cases inadequate.
This was quite predictable at the time, IMO, and was indeed predicted. We don’t always get policy decisions right.
neither a dissenter nor a narcissist be, I have some fellow feeling. I respected my parents and generally had a good relationship with them. If there was sundry, low intensity hitting, I don’t remember it.
But my dad had a filthy temper and on three occasions I was thrashed with the razor strap. Once my sister and I lit a fire in the yard, he reckoned too close to the house. I still think he was wrong and we had everything under control. But she was possibly 9 at the time and I seven, so I could see his point. We sat under the house bawling from pain and shock and then had a competition to see who could stop bawling first. Probably no harm done.
The last time when I was 9 or 10 he asked me to get a load of wood in and then went off to feed the pigs. I had my head in a book and didn’t hear him.
Just after dark I still had my head in the book when I was interrupted by an enraged parent, who belted me mercilessly with the strap while I got the wheelbarrow, loaded the wood and wheeled it in, then filled the wood box. I had a sense of injustice about the whole thing, and even now when I think of him I invariably think of the incident. Which is a bit sad, because normally he was a kind, mild-mannered man and I got on with him fine.
To me, it is important how the beaten children perceive the experience. I think many parents who hit do so for reasons intrinsic to them rather than any way that is consistently and logically related to a child’s behaviour. I can’t imagine a pattern of hitting that is perceived as arbitrary can possibly do any good at all.
Brian,
Personally I’m sick of academics who don’t understand the limitations of their own expertise (not specifically aimed at you). Primarily due to the repeated and ideologically driven foobars in the education system.
I’ve never been particularly concerned with the rights of the parent, but rather believe that the best interest of the child is what’s important, and that never receiving CP may not be in the best interest of the child.
Anyway, I think this dead horse has received enough corporal punishment for today.
Agree about the dead horse, but I wanted to return to the fray one more time to address particularly the issue of causation.
It has been suggested that the causation might flow the other way. I’d respectfully suggest that this beggars belief. What has been shown in the case of 2-4 year-olds is a smoothly graduated progression of cognitive ability foregone. The more CP the more cognitive ability foregone.
Consider the reverse – the more cognitive ability foregone for some other reason the more smacking.
All children would have been growing in cognitive ability quite quickly over the four years from age 2-4 to 6-8. My contention is that in this context such slight differences in cognitive ability would not be detectable subjectively by parents over a four year period. We are to believe that kids who have fallen behind two points against the norm over four years, while showing marked growth in cognitive ability all the while, are smacked twice a week rather than once for this reason. Literally beyond belief!
There is also an assumption, surely, that marginally smarter kids behave better. I can’t imagine any researcher would bother investigating that one.
The paper identifies some of the potential mechanisms which I find more than plausible. The more smacking the less verbal interaction, for example. Moreover:
Also
To be sure we’d need to review all these studies cited in detail, but CP doesn’t look like a good idea. Nevertheless a third of US infants, 94% of toddlers and a third up to the early teens experience CP.
LO said that nevertheless there was the possibility of an instrumental variable (IV), an unidentified factor that worked through the CP. It’s hard to think of any possible candidates. I do think that it’s worth exploring whether all smacking is adverse in its effects or whether it is particular kinds and/or intensities that cause the problem.
I would concede to Paulus @ 6 that “a light smack on the derriere” is unlikely as such to cause a measurable difference in IQ, but I’d suggest that it does matter how light, how often, for what reason, and what talk accompanied the smacks.
Remember also that there was probably under-reporting of smacking by mothers in the survey.
Perhaps they don’t behave better, but perhaps verbal interactions with marginally smarter kids are more effective? On the topic of education – a lot of the baby/toddler books I’ve read go into a lot of detail about the physical development you can general expect, but few go into just how early on they can understand what you are saying both verbally *and* through your body language even if they are unable to respond verbally.
Brian,
It’s important to note that the study is using academic achievement measures as a proxy for cognitive ability. While there certainly will be a strong link between the two, there will be other factors in how much a child learns. One important factor would be the amount and quality of learning time the child has, something which could be significantly impacted by (mis)behaviour patterns. These same (mis)behaviour patterns would lead to more disciplining by the parents and thus more corporal punishment.
I think it’s also important to note that the corporal punishment measure is based on two sample weeks, and not the whole study period. A “0″ in the study cannot be used to imply “never”, but rather only “likely less than the others”.
despis,
you keep on complaining about the design and aspects of it, but there is simply no perfect design for these studies. For example:
.
1) let’s say I gave you a bundle of money and you ran a perfectly randomized design, where you taught one group of parents to use CP more/less. This is already inherently confounded, because you are asking one group to do something within the social norm and another group to do something out of it. So you are going to have asymmetrical drop-outs rates, dishonesty rates when filling in the forms, and compliance with the protocol. So this design won’t answer your question, because what you think is random ends up as non-random. It isn’t like, say, sticking kids into two different programs to teach them mathematics.
.
2) Now take the approach the authors used, where you have a repeated measures design where two groups are matched at some baseline on various things, and then you look for the interaction. Now this is confounded with possible unmeasured variables that apriori differ between groups. So this you will complain about that and say they could explain the variance (although what proportion remains unknown).
.
So randomization has problems and so do non-random longitudinal designs. Now the problem with these sorts of studies is that you can always think of variables that _might_ confound the results somehow or other. However, when you are doing testing like this, you are simply limited in the number of things you can measure — people simply get sick of filling stuff in, so if you ask them to do too much you get higher and higher drop rates (generally not random) and more variance in what they fill in (again, generally not random).
.
This is why the best you can hope for is to look across studies that control for different things yet find similar results. If there really is some factor that causes both the IQ decline and massive differences in CP, then after the 100th study that’s found essentially the same thing, which is not true of intelligence but is true of social learning (although it is true of some aspects of cognition when looking at children who experience serious violence, which is no doubt similar to the serious end of CP), then the onus is really on the groups that say there is some sort of confound that falsifies the last 100 studies to tell people what it is. No doubt if there is one over-looked whizz-bang factor that kills off all the social learning stuff, someone will get a Nature for it, so people are surely looking yet not finding it.
conrad,
I’m not expecting a “perfect” study, merely expecting that the study acknowledge its own imperfections and hence the limitations of what can be concluded from it. While a randomised trial of parenting techniques won’t be perfect, they will provide much better information about the impact of the techniques than just observational studies.
When attempting to understand any subject matter, observation will only get you so far. It’s only when attempting to control things and interact that many misunderstandings and assumptions are brought to light. While asserting control over child discipline technique might be considered unethical, anyone proposing policy to do just that has clearly already accepted such control as ethical.
If you two don’t stop it, I am going to count you as well!
Maybe with CP and difficult children, the one begets the other in a negative reinforcing cycle?
Apparently there are a lot of studies that show emotional neglect &/or abuse result in emotionally damaged brains. Maybe CP could be related to emotional neglect or abuse?
The early evidence of mental disturbance apparently came from a breeding study of a colony of monkeys at Uni of Wisconsin (1950′s). The baby monkeys were reared in isolation, in immaculately clean cages, supposedly to minimise the spread of disease. They grew up deranged, and were unable to interact socially, were hostile and lashed out in vicious acts of violence towards the other monkeys, as well as tearing themselves apart – one ripped out its fur in bloody clumps and another gnawed off its own hand.
The Romanian orphanages (1960′s) showed a similar trend in childhood behaviour, with hostile behaviour, violent rages, abusiveness towards each other and inability in even the most basic social interactions.
Studies of neglected toddlers from “families in stress” (1980′s) have shown that they lack normal emphathy and are prone to attacking other children, whether they have been physically abused or not.
Apparently the “mirror neurons” (which allow people to feel empathy) and the amygdala (which propagates aversive emotions) don’t develop normally.
Maybe initial emotional neglect &/or CP of small bubs results in emotional damage to the brain causing a difficult child (with tendancies as described above), which causes more parental “correction” efforts, etc, in a decending spiral of negative reinforcement?
desipis, the study does acknowledge its weaknesses. I can see the point of those who say that the conclusions go well beyond the evidence of the study. But I think the ‘no hitting under any circumstances’ conclusion is based on more than this study. Firstly, the study cites other studies. Secondly, Straus is one of these ‘leading authority’ figures, for whom this is just part of his longer campaign. I suspect that every time he gets the microphone, as it were, he uses it to put his message across.
I’m not defending this, BTW.
desipis @ 75, the authors discuss the problems of sample taking in this area. they are aware, and I’ve already pointed out that the 6.6% who were not hit during both sample weeks may have been hit at other times.
As to your ‘quality learning time’ point, the principal concern is with the 2-4 year-olds, who were then tested four years later. So the maximum age we are talking about is 8. Formal learning during these years is mostly at school. The main concern here is that CP might interrupt the quality of talking between parents and kids. That’s a no-brainer, I would have thought.
It’s not possible to comment further on the cognitive ability test used without seeing it, but it’s difficult if not impossible to get a test of cognitive ability that is uncontaminated by formal education.
Elise @ 79, I’m not sure whether this is responding directly to what you wrote.
The effect of CP, I think, is to use an external control of the child’s behaviour through the induction of pain, stress and fear. To me this has two negative effects (at least).
Firstly, it does nothing to internalise control and discipline. Early childhood specialists, from what I’ve seen, consistently try to teach kids through explanation and modelling to control their own behaviour in ways that are prosocial and bring their own intrinsic rewards. In this sense, the adults try to make themselves redundant.
Secondly, the pain, stress and fear will certainly interrupt and negatively affect the quality of interaction between adult and child. You only have to observe someone who is gifted in interacting with children to realise that smacking is about the last thing you’d want.
I think we grow personally through intersubjectivity, an interpenetration of personalities open to each other, and so become truly human, rather than as hard-shelled isolates firing bits of communication across the void.
In the end I suspect the consequences of CP are even greater for personality development than for cognitive ability as such.
Certainly endemic CP does little if anything, I think, to foster self-discipline in a child and hence does not make itself redundant.
Brian @81: “I’m not sure whether this is responding directly to what you wrote.”
I guess that I was coming in at an oblique angle, and you have countered with something equivalent!
Agree with all of what you are saying, by the way. Self-discipline and an internal locus of control are great goals, and emotional development through intersubjectivity makes excellent sense. Induction of pain, stress and fear leads very clearly to communication breakdown in adult relationships, and one could scarcely imagine the frightening impact on defenceless and dependent toddlers and young children.
The thread seemed to have revolved around the way parents try to “discipline” unruly behaviour in their children, and whether they should be using CP or not. There was a lengthy analysis of the faults of a study of CP and cognitive ability. It seemed to me that we were analysing methods of fighting a war rather than how to avoid war in the first place.
My first oblique attempt was to endorse from first-hand experience @48 your notion @15 that some societies (e.g. Scandinavian) seem to manage bringing up their kids to become responsible members of society without using CP. There appears to be another approach that works for these societies, which avoids the wear and tear of warfare.
The second oblique attempt, was to make a stab at a possible original cause, rather than treating the symptoms – unmanageable kids and desperate parents using CP.
The suggestion was, perhaps even before we get to unmanageable toddlers and CP, there is simply unintended neglect due to the way our modern society operates? It is clearly much milder than what happened to those unfortunate monkey babies and the Romanian orphans, but in the same direction.
Having lived in Sweden and Norway for more than 6 years, and seen how they integrate family and work commitments, I really do sincerely believe that our Aussie society has become child-unfriendly. Aussie children wind up on the periphery, collecting the crumbs of attention after work has devoured their parent’s energy. We wind up outsourcing them for much of their waking hours, from when they are tiny bubs.
Aussie parents (mums and dads) are NOT given enough parental leave with their new-born babies in the critical first year, work creches are the exception rather than the norm (so very young bubs don’t see their parents for what must seem a frightening eternity), and we tend to leave small bubs in prams and separate bedrooms from birth. It may not be the best answer.
Generally, Aussie parents both work, typically some of the longest hours of the OECD countries, come home exhausted from a possibly often stressful day, and have to somehow tend to the kids while cooking, cleaning, paying bills etc, in the residual time before bed. One could easily speculate that Aussie children feel increasingly emotionally neglected by their tired and overworked parents.
I look at Australia from the alterred perspective of those years in Scandinavia, and wonder how on earth Aussie parents manage these days.
Some small changes in the way we do things could make a huge difference, both to the parenting experience and the emotional needs of our next generation/s.
You are right, Brian, I was coming in at an angle to the arguments about CP, but still trying to address an underlying problem hopefully?
Elise, a few years ago I heard an interview with Ronald Wright who reckons that for 98% plus of our evolutionary history we lived in groups of up to 30 or 40 adults, perhaps 100 counting kids. While he recognised our aggressive tendencies, especially towards outsiders, he considered our outstanding feature was our cooperation.
I don’t want to romanticise our ‘primitive’ past, but growing up in larger families in a group setting is probably how our species evolved, which makes the present day nuclear family with very small families quite unusual. It puts a lot of pressure on often a single relationship between adult and child in circumstances where there are too many other calls on the adult’s attention. It seems the Norwegians have developed patterns of interaction which retain features that are more appropriate to the growing child.
Back @ 22 Naomi mentioned the importance of positive engagement with toddlers and the importance of putting in the time especially with play as the basis of discipline.
I was going to make the point there that the time and work put in prior to age two is important to what happens thereafter, but I didn’t want the thread to track onto the child care issue, which is not irrelevant.
My brother and I rarely got smacking and spanking, and I found I more cleaver than him… That’s such of thing doesnt really influence kids IQ. My step kids always playing and fighting really cruel each other, if we say nice or even yelling to them to stop, they dont want to listen, they only scared with wooden spoon, when I show wooden spoon, they run to their room and I save their life from injury from each other.
But yesterday after watching tv, that parent will get fine if spank their children, they learning that nothing need to be worry about cause we not gonna spank them again. I imagine in the future, what they would be if there is nothing we can do about it…
“Honey, I outsourced the kids”
“You did?”
“Yep. Non-core activity. Not value adding.”
Child buttock-battering vs. DISCIPLINE:
Child buttock-battering for the purpose of gaining compliance is nothing more than an inherited bad habit.
Its a good idea for people to take a look at what they are doing, and learn how to DISCIPLINE instead of hit.
I think the reason why television shows like “Supernanny” and “Dr. Phil” are so popular is because that is precisely what many (not all) people are trying to do.
There are several reasons why child bottom-slapping isn’t a good idea. Here are some good, quick reads recommended by professionals:
Plain Talk About Spanking
by Jordan Riak,
The Sexual Dangers of Spanking Children
by Tom Johnson,
NO VITAL ORGANS THERE, So They Say
by Lesli Taylor M.D. and Adah Maurer Ph.D.
Most compelling of all reasons to abandon this worst of all bad habits is the fact that buttock-battering can be unintentional sexual abuse for some children. There is an abundance of educational resources, testimony, documentation, etc available on the subject that can easily be found by doing a little research with the recommended reads-visit http://www.nospank.net.
Just a handful of those helping to raise awareness of why child bottom-slapping isn’t a good idea:
American Academy of Pediatrics,
American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry,
Center For Effective Discipline,
PsycHealth Ltd Behavioral Health Professionals,
Churches’ Network For Non-Violence,
Nobel Peace Prize recipient Archbishop Desmond Tutu,
Parenting In Jesus’ Footsteps,
Global Initiative To End All Corporal Punishment of Children,
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
In 26 countries, child corporal punishment is prohibited by law (with more in process). In fact, the US was the only UN member that did not ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child.