Hacker News Reader

Comment by rajin444 | Hacker News Reader

What makes you feel certain of this? I may be wrong, but a majority of human history seems to point to (roughly) "spanking is ok, anything more is not". Children do not understand logic the same as adults.

View on HN

I really don't believe this is true. I was spanked my whole childhood. It never taught me one single thing, because I just wanted to know "why" X was bad and I was never told.

It was no more effective than just telling me no.

People use spanking as a crutch, it really has no place in the child raising toolkit imo.

Depends on the kid, and depends on when. When you were one, you might have listened to "no", but there are plenty of kids who don't. And it matters because of things like wanting to play in the street. I can't tell a one-year-old what two tons of car moving at 30 miles an hour is going to do to them. But I can train them that every time they play in the street, it hurts.

That sounds cruel. On the other hand, letting them get hit by a car is much more cruel, and not all of us have fenced front yards.

I have no problem with spanking for safety issues. But be careful, because a kid in danger triggers fear and panic in parents, and once the crisis is over, that seems to almost automatically morph into anger. Do not spank in anger, ever.

The one time I remember being spanked as a child was -- many, many years after the fact -- explained to me in passing to be for the exact reason you describe. It seems neigh impossible to me to validate that the spanking was "necessary" in any reasonable interpretation of the word; sure, I was never hit by a car as a kid, but you can't really prove a negative either. I can say, unequivocally, however, that 2-year-old me experienced the spanking as a completely arbitrary and utterly humiliating display of violence with absolutely no rhyme or reason whatsoever.

Have you ever met 1 years old? Cause this sounds like you did not and are just imagining things.

I have, yes - four of them, up close and in detail.

One year old are just learning to walk. They are slow and dumb. If they play on street, it is 100% fault of adult. If adult is beating them after that, adult should not have a kid.

So the explanation is more important than the spanking (or other discipline).

There is a long, long history of research into the grim effects of corporal punishment in child-raising. As a starting point, see the widely cited 2002 meta-analysis by Gershoff [0] as well as this other meta-analysis they did more recently which I am less familiar with [1]. I also highly recommend going through the research work of the late Murray Straus at the University of Wisconsin [2] who spent much of his time systematically analyzing how spanking harms child development in just about every single way you can imagine.

[0] Gershoff, E. T. (2002). Corporal punishment by parents and associated child behaviors and experiences: a meta-analytic and theoretical review. Psychological bulletin, 128(4), 539.

[1] Gershoff, E. T., & Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2016). Spanking and child outcomes: Old controversies and new meta-analyses. Journal of family psychology, 30(4), 453.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_A._Straus

I'm generally not in favor of spanking, but just some observations:

- It's easy to find people who were spanked that are in favor of spanking, people who were spanked that aren't in favor of spanking, and people who weren't spanked that aren't in favor of spanking. People who weren't spanked that are in favor of spanking seem almost non-existent.

- Just perusing Google Scholar and reading abstracts, studies of spanking much more often than not link it to negative outcomes, most commonly "externalizing behavior". And while some studies find it not meaningfully linked to negative outcomes, no study I have seen links it to positive outcomes.

- Children not understanding logic the same as adults does not entail that physical punishment be necessary in child rearing.

Humans also owned slaves and treated women as domestic property for the majority of human history.

I was an elementary science teacher for 3 years, I found superior logic and intellect and explanation was better than any punishment I could dole out. Nevermind that causing physical suffering by violence is wrong.

For majority of human history, even sever child abuse was seen as unfortunate thing that however happens, so what.

The adult domestic violence was also accepted a lot.

Just because something was done historically doesn't make it right or correct.

I agree, and we're starting to get heavily in to epistemology here, but modern sciences do not have the ability to construct properly controlled studies, and "harder" sciences do not have enough understanding of the underlying biology to provide a definitive answer.

At best we can get a "we think it's like this", but I'm not sure I give that a higher epistemic status than tens of thousands of years of human history. This is probably a pointless discussion, since there is not enough information to reach a conclusion.

It creates child abuse apologists, like yourself

Reply on news.ycombinator.com