What Happens When a Country Bans Spanking? | Hacker News Reader

What Happens When a Country Bans Spanking?

npr.org

21 pointsVarcht29 comments

On one hand quantitative data seems to suggest spanking had zero merit. On the other hand one I've heard from many parents that spanking was the only disincentive that could stop certain seriously bad behavior - revoking privileges, assigning chores, etc. did not solve the problem. The more extreme examples involved actions that put siblings in the ER, or behavior that would easily get kid expelled. I think it's possible for spanking to be ineffective in aggregate, but effective from the point of view of parents. If you need to stop your child from doing something right now because it could seriously impact their future life prospects, it may be a worthwhile trade-off to risk the chance that a child adopts more aggressive (but not intolerably so) behavior down the road. I'd be interesting in seeing the types and magnitude of behavior that instigated the spanking vs. the behavior spanked children do later in childhood.

While the quantitative data seems to suggest spanking is negative, the question still remains: when all other disciplinary options are exhausted, what can a parent do to stop truly intolerable behavior? The article suggests using other options, but does not list any.

There are no good reasonable answers to your questions. If you see how institutions or governments deal with difficult misbehaving kids, they give them medication, hell the US government was giving them anti-psychotic medication. Aggression is used to subdue and the prison is used to rehabilitate in society. The kids I grew up with who were generally bad apples, a significant number of them are in prison... how do you deal with such people as children.

I'm not a parent myself, so I invite you to apply as much sodium chloride as you deem necessary. But what I seem to think are guiding principles is to apply as little force as necessary, and only when the situation warrants it. And when it is applied, put forth a clear path to avoid the punishment in the future.

I have zero recollection of this episode, but my parents tell me that when I was very young (3-5 years old, somewhere in that range) I used to sneak off an hide in malls when my parents went shopping with me, and no amount of time outs or revoked privileges could keep me from doing this (probably because the ability to punish kids through confinement or chores is limited when you're out in public with them). This extended to the point that stores had to be shut down and staff called to help search for me. My parents tell me that my dad took me to the car, explained why this behavior was unsafe and unacceptable, and that they had exhausted other disincentives before resorting to physical punishment before proceeding to spank. Supposedly when I would start to wander off my parents reminded me of the physical punishment, and clearly explained that this would be the consequence if I repeated that behavior.

Society works similarly. When people do bad things that are not exceedingly harmful we fine them or revoke privileges. Drunk driving is almost certainly more serious than kids sneaking off in malls. And we rarely apply force in that situation, preferring to fine people and revoke their driving privileges. Physical punishment in the form of imprisonment is reserved for things that are exceedingly harmful and dangerous. And when physical punishment is issue for things that aren't truly dangerous, like drugs, it's recognized as an injustice - at least by a significant chunk of society.

That assumes they were using effective parenting techniques in the first place.

Siblings winding up in the ER?

Actually I wound up in the ES once come to think of it.

But being a parent now I get it. You do your best and unfortunately sometimes that's shit. I thought I would be a way better parent than I am but I try. Definitely no smacking because I worked out that at least that doesn't do anyone any good. In all my experiments of parenting so far the effective thing is making boundaries explicit and enforcing them consistently.

The hard part is consistency because kids are just relentless sometimes. But if you back down you lose. It takes patience and sometimes you just don't have it. S;me people lash out in those circumstance because the feedback is immediate and gratifying. It looks like it works.

I'm glad the data supports that while it works short term it's in aggregate more problematic long term.

> On the other hand one I've heard from many parents that spanking was the only disincentive that could stop certain seriously bad behavior - revoking privileges, assigning chores, etc. did not solve the problem.

Bad behavior is often not a root problem, but a symptom. Spanking may be the most effective way of treating the symptom (but even that is probably a post hoc rationalization that is not factually supportable), but it mostly adds to, or at best ignores, the underlying problem. Other punitive measures also tend to ignore the problem, though they tend not to make things worse in the way that the use of physical violence does.

Anecdote time: every time me and my wife have been busy and not had enough fun family time for a couple of days, my 2 year old starts breaking things and having tantrums. Sure, small kid, small problems, but actually spending time with him is waaay more productive than getting angry. It becomes a positive spiral.

Sure, i am tired and stressed out sometimes and that makes actually being above thinking he's just a shit kid very hard.

I think corporal punishment can work well under certain circumstance. The problem is on aggregate, effect is negative because People are so different and consistent and fairness in how it’s delivered wildly varies.

I got beat from my parents many times, and for the most part they were fair about it. But even after 30 plus years I still remember two instances where the punishment didn’t fit the crime and they acted on their emotion. The rest I don’t even remember.

Young kids know injustice.

I realize that this is an outlier.... But I was raised in an aboriginal type environment (and my children's early experience was in a similar environment by risk) when a single episode of unruly behavior could result in serious injury or death.

In this environment, spanking was used as a proxy for these irrevocable natural consequences, to give teeth to (an often invisible to a child) danger without letting iit bite.

I'm pretty sure that the use of (comparatively insignificant) physical punishment prevented serios injuries or death multiple times.

As a child gets to 4 or 5 years old and have had time to see obvious mortal dangers avoided and the counsel of their parents validated (backed up by the minimum necessary force and ample explanation and demonstration if possible), it is rare (in my experience of child raising) that a child won't heed the counsel that they have seen proven true time and again.

As a species, we've survived eons of dangerous environments, and it wasn't due only to watchful parents.... Children are no fools once they get get to 5 or 6 years of age and can navigate dangerous environments with skill.

OTOH, when almost all of the corporal punishment I have seen doled out in public has been reactive, not well considered, and not accompanied by proper counsel, as well as with children far too old to still need that kind of correction.... So IMO it is often misused.

Let's make this easy. My sister bit my dog on the face after the dog nipped at her.

Dog never nipped my sister again.

I'm happy to say these guys are the experts and know better than me but this really flies in the face of all the anecdotal evidence I've seen.

From my peers those that grew up in strict Muslim and Christian homes, where they did get corporal punishment, they were much better behaved. That has also translated into their success now they're in their 30s.

But those who also got corporal punishment in more dysfunctional households have had terrible outcomes. Their "punishment" was probably much closer to child abuse that those from the other group.

I was not spanked my self so I have no personal reference, only that I was far worse in self discipline than the first group. I'd have expected this study to show some correlation between self discipline and spanking. I can't help but think they've conflated child abuse and hitting out of anger with spanking.

That said, I'm no expert.

I’ve found that in those “successful” groups there’s a tendency to be extremely reserved, especially with emotions. Corporal punishment to me is almost always correlated with a lack of expressiveness later in life.

Perhaps but the lack of any good traits being correlated and the clear statement that they found none seems very counter intuitive.

All spanking is child abuse. Full stop.

From what you've described, there is zero reason to believe that the spankings your peers in the strict Muslim and Christian homes was a factor in their later success.

>All spanking is child abuse

I hope you understand the distinction I was trying to make.

I’d have expected a correlation to show up.

Do you think when Christian or Muslim parents are spanking their children that they are not angry?

I’m not assuming they are good at it but my understanding of traditional Christian doctrine is that it should never be done in anger. I’m not sure about the Muslim teaching on it but thought Jewish, Muslim and Christian teaching on this was similar.

There's a hell of a lot more different between the families you described then whether they used spanking.

I have to disagree with you here and agree with the person above you. There is a major and distinct difference between using negative reinforce and child abuse.

Also the study concludes that countries where spanking is bad results into adults getting in less physical confrontations. But do they chose that based on better solutions or does it mean a population afraid of serious confrontations.

One could hypothesise that being moderately abused makes you more subservient which could help in being (moderately) successful.

Yes, something need not have a net positive effect to yield correlations to some positives. It’s seems very strange to me that they could detect zero such correlations.

I have 6 kids, some got spanked others not at all. But when you have a 3 yr old who isn't listening and may put themselves in danger with their actions, sometimes a quick attention getting spank can save a life or at least a hospital visit.

Trying to place a black/white filter on something like this is intellectually vacuous.

I was spanked and I would never ever do it. It's abusive, confusing, weird, unconstructive, inarticulate and ultimately not in any way something a loving person would do to anyone. I think it says something about the person who does it.

I was spanked until I was 12, after that, I was lectured. But I knew I deserved a spanking when I got lectured. My folks only spanked when it was warranted and other parents always marveled at how well behaved I and my siblings were.

It wasn't child abuse by any stretch, and I benefited from the self discipline I learned.

Guy-guessing: Some people and some cultures believe spanking is the same as caring ("Spare the rod and spoil the child") and in such cultures or such families a certain measure of spanking might actually be an indicator of better home conditions.

Based on just your comment, the correlation fails.

I mean, if such individuals are indeed more successful, it’s significantly more likely because of the fact that they’ve been raised in strict Muslim or Christian households, and the plethora of things that go with that, rather than the fact that one of those many things is spanking.

Just as an example, in a strict Muslim household you wouldn’t be drinking alcohol. Of all the factors that would affect success, spanking would probably be dwarfed by just that single factor.

This is just another data point in a long, long line of research demonstrating that spanking and corporal punishment in general is harmful. It is very frustrating to watch people (in this thread and elsewhere) blithely continue to believe what they want to believe contrary to the large bulk of evidence--it's as if, confronted with truth and reality, they think that there can be some argument or rhetorical gambit that makes the conclusions that they would prefer correct. That's not how truth works.

Do you have any links to this long line of research?

I see this kind of response a lot, and unfortunately it's difficult to respond to you without taking what I feel you would interpret as a patronizing tone.

If you read the article, you would find links to research articles and additional literature related to the topic at hand. If you were in turn to read each of those articles, you would find that they are thoroughly researched and contain a large number of citations themselves. If you truly did not understand that you can educate yourself about a topic in this manner, I hope you are ecstatic upon learning to follow this great chain of research, as this is how every scientist educates themselves.

So, here's a link to the article that we are all discussing, go ahead and read it if you haven't already:

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/10/25/6601918...

Here are some sources linked in the article. Some are peer-reviewed research articles, while others describe and cite peer-reviewed research:

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/8/9/e021616?int_source=trend...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3768154/

https://www.unicef.org/publications/index_101397.html

Now here's the key insight into this process of learning--if you read the articles linked above, you will find citations of additional research in this area. These publications are usually not too difficult to find. Here are a few pertinent publications, but there are many more cited in the publications linked above--which I remind you were themselves linked from the original NPR article that we are all discussing.

Gershoff ET. Corporal punishment by parents and associated child behaviors and experiences: A meta-analytic and theoretical review. Psychological Bulletin. 2002;128:539–579.

Gershoff ET. More harm than good: A summary of scientific research on the intended and unintended effects of corporal punishment on children. Law and Contemporary Problems. 2010;73:33–58.

Sheehan MJ, Watson MW. Reciprocal influences between maternal discipline techniques and aggression in children and adolescents. Aggressive Behavior. 2008;34:245–255. doi:10.1002/ab.20241.

Hoffman ML. Affective and cognitive processes in moral internalization. In: Higgins ET, Ruble DN, Hartup WW, editors. Social cognition and social development. Cambridge University Press; New York: 1983. pp. 236–274.

Eron LD, Walder LO, Lefkowitz MM. Learning of aggression in children. Little, Brown, & Co.; Boston: 1971.

Durrant J, Trocmé N, Fallon B, Milne C, Black T, Knoke D. CECW Information Sheet #41E. University of Toronto, Faculty of Social Work; Toronto, ON: 2006. Punitive violence against children in Canada. Retrieved from www.cecw-cepb.ca/DocsEng/PunitiveViolence41E.pdf.

Obviously this is just a tiny selection based on a few minutes of research (which I remind you you could have easily done yourself!)

Now, I leave you with a question: did you really not know how to do this yourself, or were you trying to imply that because this "long line of research" was not handed to you on a silver platter it does not exist? Am I right in thinking that you might also be a little pleased that I wasted my time educating you when you transparently have no interest in being educated?

To conclude, I can't read for you, I can't learn for you, I can't think for you (and I don't mean thinking of clever little rhetorical gotchas, I mean real thinking with the aim of comprehending truth and reality), and unless you have at least attempted to read and learn and think for yourself, you have no foot to stand on when you argue against research that you (for some reason) disagree with.

> Although spanking is traditionally supposed to teach a lesson to correct bad behavior, children who were spanked were neither more compliant nor better behaved.

This accords with my experience of primary school in the UK in the early 1960s. It was nearly always a specific small subset of the pupils who were punished and they continued to misbehave while those who were generally well behaved anyway but once did something stupid became more careful.

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