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Comment by roamerz | Hacker News Reader

From the comments my views will definitely be in the minority here.

Personal experience: Every school I attended through 12th grade had corporal punishment in place. In 5th grade I was punished by a Catholic Nun who broke a ruler over my hands as they were laying flat on the desk. It was deserved and fixed the problem at hand and by example to the other students. (haha no pun intended). I actually have a fond memory of it now as they made my parents pay for the broken ruler. We laugh about it now and then. It happened again in HS and remember being scared shitless because it was being administered by a teacher with a good rep for painful swats. It solved the issues that time as well. Neither instance caused any psychological damage to me(that i’m aware of) and helped keep our learning environment a place where people can actually go to learn.

Corporal punishment is no longer practiced in my state. I would support it if it came back. It’s an effective tool.

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It is fairly normal for victims of violence to seek to explain away the abuse they were subjected to as deserved or necessary when carried out by someone in authority over them.

It doesn't change that it is harmful abuse. I'm sorry you were subjected to that kind of abuse, even though you believe it was justified.

There's nothing to suggest it serves a legitimate purpose.

> There's nothing to suggest it serves a legitimate purpose.

Well there's nothing if you disregard personal testimony as stockholm syndrome.

If it served a legitimate purpose you'd expect actual research showing it, not having to rely on the accounts of a subset of victims.

> Well there’s nothing if you disregard personal testimony as Stockholm syndrome

I don’t disregard anything as Stockholm Syndrome, since that doesn’t exist.

However, I do disregard anecdotal conclusory testimony about causative processes, as a general rule. I’ll accept testimony about facts plausibly within the knowledge of the person testifying as being (barring special reason for suspicion on those points) as trustworthy as the person testifying.

You disregard anecdote when it clashes with your priors.

> You disregard anecdote when it clashes with your priors.

No, I disregard anecdote to the extent it makes claims which are conclusory rather than observational.

I weight anecdote very lightly in any case, though.

Is there any evidence for it being "harmful" (specifically institutional punishment, not random poor parenting)? If anything, constant reported decline in kids' (and adults') mental health as schools and parents get more and more protective indicates coddling might be the harmful abuse.

Ah the old any other opinion is mental defect

No, a description of why personal anecdotes from victims of violence often contradict the total absence of data showing the purported benefits often used by said victims to try to justify and make sense of the abuse they were subjected to.

If there were data showing improved outcomes among this group compared to those not subjected to violence, there'd be reason to listen to their accounts, but since there isn't independent evidence to support these claims, and it's not a controlled sample, their anecdotes have little value.

>> There's nothing to suggest it serves a legitimate purpose.

Well nothing except my personal experience which you clearly disregarded by categorizing me without any evidence as a victim of violence nor do I see this as abuse(obviously).

No offense taken by the comment btw I just don’t believe you are correct in your attempt to analyze my particular situation.

> categorizing me without any evidence as a victim of violence

You literally describe the violence you were targeted with.

Your personal view that this violence was justified and is part of a beneficial pattern of violence does not negate that it is violence.

> remember being scared shitless

> Neither instance caused any psychological damage

Really now? I would consider acute fear to be, at the very least, psychologically detrimental, if not to you then to the vast majority of people. Generally, fear is not conducive to a healthy learning environment.

Right. Should well-behaved students fear their uncontrollable peers?

This comment seems to implicitly assume

a) that corporal punishment is the only or only effective way to ensure nobody or at least less students have to fear other peers b) corporal punishment is any effective at all c) the necessity to fear some peers has a strong connection to whether they are 'controllable'

All three claims seem to be disputed.

Have you been to an American school lately? If you have a better solution I’m all ears. Because whatever we are doing (and it’s overwhelmingly not corporal punishment, even in the states where it is legal) is not working. The inmates are running the asylum.

Better parenting. Almost all of it stems from homelife, bub.

Parents are notoriously shitty people.

I can say that, for me, being told by someone I respected that I was doing something wrong was always enough to stop poor behavior.

Hitting a child to teach them could be better than some alternatives. But it's definitely not the best approach. It seems like an option for those without any idea on what else to do.

Violence is the lsst resort of the incompetent (asimov).

I am also pretty sure that if violence is the only thing you respect, it's the only lever others have

Okay, now do a kid with bottom quartile impulse control.

If a teacher broke a damn ruler over my hands, let alone making my family pay for it when we grew up broke, I have to say, I would swing on her.

Beings that this was an approved and accepted method of discipline where I attended school your swing would have landed you an expulsion and hopefully a charge of assault by the authorities. If you happen to be a male your comment on swinging on a lady has significance beyond your understanding.

You can't possibly be serious. Her assault came first, it's just that it's somehow acceptable to you. It is perfectly reasonable to respond to assault with violence of your own to dissuade further assault especially if it is the only way to ensure that teacher doesn't break a ruler over your hands and possibly fracture a knuckle again.

You realize that in most states if someone broke a ruler smacking you with it, that would constitute an assault charge and self defense would be considered reasonable. The only difference is that adults are allowed to do so while children aren't in your example.

What you're telling people is that assault by the state against children is acceptable.

If an adult breaks voluntarily an item on me to cause pain, the instinct is to sue (a form of force), or respond with force (depends extremely on context) or flee. I don't think the situation you describe seems healthy.

I have at least 2 memories where I have been spanked really hard from my parents due to being misunderstood. What's the consequence of that? Who is going to punish the parent? In children's view, that's a major punishment for no correct reason, what does it teaches about law?

It can be an effective tool. Or it can be abused (and, in fact, be abuse).

My own memory is of the time I wasn't hit. I was in elementary school. The principal was out shoveling snow off of the sidewalk where it crossed a driveway. I was out on recess, and I hit her with a snowball. She didn't hit me, though school policy allowed it at the time. Instead, she just had me shovel the snow. (Duh... what did I think was going to happen?)

I don’t want to speak to your personal trauma, but child abuse is never an effective tool.

Defining corporeal punishment as "child abuse" is incorrect.

If it's abuse when done to an adult, it's abuse when done to a child. Doing any of this to an adult would be assault or battery in most countries. Of anyone hurt my child that way and the police didn't do anything, you can bet I'd find a way to give the abusers a taste of their own medicine.

It's always funny how, when you engage with the "kinder, gentler" crowd, they immediately prove themselves morally unsophisticated. Striking a child is abuse and if your child was struck, you would take revenge by hitting the perpetrator. Okay.

If my child is struck and there's no legal recourse, then yes, I would lower myself to their level.

If society creates an unsafe environment, then sometimes violence is necessary as a means to fight an abusive regime and cause change. That does not mean it's a nice thing - last resorts seldom are.

That you think I'm the "kinder, gentler" crowd is your mistake. I just don't like injustice, and punching down against someone unable to defend themselves is one of the worst forms of injustice.

Child abuse is any physical, emotional, or sexual mistreatment or neglect of a child.

Corporal punishment can be harmful to children and may lead to long-term negative outcomes, such as increased aggression, mental health problems, and poor academic performance.

That’s not to speak to who’s enforcing it and on who.

Parents are always experimenting on their children. Faddish observational studies reflect the biases of the researchers.

Also, there are legal and cultural definitions of child abuse and, at least where I'm from, corporeal punishment isn't necessarily abusive.

Regardless of cultural norms or what parents might try, it’s violence against people who can’t consent. Violence is always abuse.

Did God deliver you this information?

Statement of absolute are always wrong

What!

By this definition, depending on who gets to define "mistreatment", any negative reinforcement at all would count as abuse, not just corporal punishment.

Yes. Physical, emotional, or sexual mistreatment. Why would anyone need to engage in that kind of “negative reinforcement”?

Why? Because "emotional mistreatment" is a catch-all term.

For example, it's easy to make the argument that time-out, a common negative reinforcement strategy among parents, constitutes emotional mistreatment. After all it is just a form of solitary confident, and solitary is known for how it emotionally wrecks adults.

Violence is always abuse, and it’s significantly worse when an adult is targeting a child.

> Violence is always abuse,

So any form of self defense is abuse? I'm not sure you've thought this through. Trivializing complex issues is the kneejerk response for many, but there isn't a simple moral line of thinking that billions of people have overlooked.

Yes, it's abusive, and with self defence that is the point: your attacker has deprived you of safety and of another immediate recourse, so you're forced to lower yourself to their level.

It doesn't make it good; it makes it necessary, and for that reason we often consider it legitimate.

If an adult tried to assault my son, and he hit back, I wouldn't consider it good, but I would be proud he felt able to defend himself against a violent attacker. Even if that attacker was a teacher.

> > > Violence is always abuse,

> > So any form of self defense is abuse?

> Yes, it's abusive

Abuse is a term used to describe impropriety of action. The idea that impropriety is used to counter impropriety is not coherent. Self-defense is proper (suitable, appropriate, etc) use of force, insofar as an individual values safety of their person. Self-defense is necessarily not abuse. I dont think any amount of rewording will change this.

Since English is my second language, I checked a few dictionaries just now to check if I got what I intended wrong. Only one (Cambridge) restricted abuse to only the sense of impropriety of action. The others included variations such as physical maltreatment (Merriam Webster, American Heritage Dictionary), to treat in a harmful, injurious, or offensive way (Collins / dictionary.com), "Abuse of someone is cruel and violent treatment of them" (Collins, collinsdictionary.com).

If we restrict it to the impropriety of action, then I agree it does not apply to self defence, but that was not the meaning of my reply. I of course can't speak to the poster of the original statement, so if we interpret it as impropriety of action, I agree with you; in the broader sense allowed by the other dictionaries I stand by what I wrote.

Same. We've been smacking kids for tens of thousands of years to protect them and society and somehow we went to the moon. There is a difference between smacking kids and abusing them.

I got smacked, but in a way that was traumatizing(?) as I remember every second of it decades later. Still, it did actually encourage me to improve the thing I got smacked about and probably led to me being as successful as I am (such as it were.)

> It’s an effective tool.

And if effectiveness were the only criterion against which to judge an act, then maybe one would be justified in supporting violence and threats of violence against children. (Although even there, in aggregate, I’m skeptical that corporal punishment is effective.) But in any case, not all effective actions are morally sound.

And you're right to be skeptical. There's evidence that it's an effective tool for securing short-term compliance, but the consensus, among dozens of studies, is that it's positively correlated with bad long-term outcomes; most famously, aggression and domestic violence, but also mental health problems.

I got beaten once in school by a teacher, and it was well deserved and fixed the problem at hand.

But my mother told me once, that when she was in school her teacher was fixated at one girl and did beat her often and mostly for no good reason. The girl was from a poor family, and my mother was upset by the unjustice, but never spoke up, IIRC.

So YMMV.

At the end, I think such occasional injustice is the lesser evil compared to the sheepish society and nanny states that are the consequence of the pathetic antiviolent decadence we have nowadays in most of the nation states.

> pathetic antiviolent decadence

Care to elaborate?

Is this really necessary?

The antiviolence should be clear reading the most comments to the original post. Denying the violent part of the nature of the monkey horde Homo sapiens is pathetic. And that in all industrialised nations - if not in all else as well-, throw-away society and obscene consumerism are the dominant hype should be obvious.

It's highly variable. I didn't go to a Catholic school but where I grew up there were religious camps parents could send their kids to, where they could be hit. Some of those kids had problems with drugs or aggression, but others were just queer in one sense or another. If the Catholics can hit then so can the Pentecostal and Baptist and Mormon teachers as well, and you might not have appreciated their discipline as much.

I agree. I’m an Asian immigrant and like most Asians my parents used corporal punishment sometimes and it was an effective tool. (Relevant: https://fb.watch/iaTKO2jJnB/?mibextid=vTn5qL.) I don’t use corporal punishment with my kids, because my wife is a white American, and well we’ll see how they turn out.

There is a rational argument for corporal punishment of kids. A human brain isn’t fully developed until age 25. You can’t reason with kids. There is a place for physical consequences that kids can understand with their limited cognitive capabilities.

The move to ban corporal punishment doesn’t seem to have produced equally effective alternatives. At least from my experience in America, it seems like parents just simply put up with poorly behaved kids. It’s a sort of luxury belief. In a subsistence economy you need kids to behave because mistakes can be fatal. In rich country, you can put up with poorly behaved kids because you just have so much margin.

> There is a rational argument for corporal punishment of kids. A human brain isn’t fully developed until age 25. You can’t reason with kids. There is a place for physical consequences that kids can understand with their limited cognitive capabilities.

Grounding and taking away their computer is a physical consequence that kids can understand with their limited cognitive capabilities. It's not clear to me why their still-developing brains would be an argument for inflicting violence on them. Is there any level at all of physical abuse you couldn't support with this logic?

> In rich country, you can put up with poorly behaved kids because you just have so much margin.

A self-sustaining long-term advantage.

“Abuse” is an emotive term you’re applying to punishment. My two year old smacks my four year old when he gets in his face. Neither kid is going to be permanently traumatized by that.

> A self-sustaining long-term advantage.

The empirical evidence is the opposite: developed countries became rich under one kind of culture, and due to social changes in the last half century their social capital is crumbling. On myriad indicators, from loneliness to birth rates to social trust, these countries are on an unsustainable path. Literally: they have been reduced to importing people from countries with “backwards” (but perhaps, if we are honest, more viable) cultures.

According to Gershoff (cited elsewhere on this thread as well), in a study of 20,000 kindergarteners, Asian American families are the cohort least likely to employ corporal punishment.

I'm sure your kids will be fine; they have lots going for them.

The Reddit thread on the study you’re referring to aptly summarizes the problems with it: https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/10/02/why-asian-a...

One, this seems to rely on GSS data, which is conducted only in English and Spanish. Just 44% of for example foreign born Chinese Americans are proficient in English. So the GSS data is going to heavily skew towards assimilated, affluent Asians.

Two, the survey question is idiomatic English. It refers to a “good hard spanking.” I don’t think any of my immigrant family would say they do that to their kids, even they do use physical discipline. Non-native English speakers are going to be much less likely to understand what “hard” (or even “spanking”) means in this context.

Three, the survey is of Asian Americans, not immigrants. A survey of Latinos showed that the percentage that use corporal punishment drops dramatically in the second generation. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was true for Asian Americans also. But by the second generation, Asians enjoy no advantages in outcomes relative to other native born Americans.

Apart from that, even Asians who don’t use physical punishment use “socio emotive” discipline that people in this thread would deem emotional abuse: https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/10/02/why-asian-a...

What’s your standard for “fine?” It’s shocking how hard it is to keep kids from sopping up the worst aspects of American culture. Unfortunately I think there’s a good chance that one of the three will end up childless, unmarried, or divorced. Where I’m from I would have a reasonable expectation that none of those three would happen.

You linked the same thing twice, so I don't know which Reddit thread you're referring to. "Asian" is more than half the world's population; the "model minority" thing is problematic in part because lots of Asian families have poor socioeconomic outcomes in the US. But the cohort captured by the study overlaps pretty completely the cohort of children you're implying have unusually good outcomes.

And, of course, the other half of the argument is hard to knock down: incidence of corporal punishment clearly doesn't track good economic outcomes. The opposite is much closer to the truth; it probably is the truth, for in part mechanistic reasons (hitting kids damages them, impedes their ability to succeed).

> You linked the same thing twice, so I don't know which Reddit thread you're referring to.

Sorry meant to link this Reddit thread the first time: https://www.reddit.com/r/asiantwoX/comments/2ibwkq/why_asian...

> "Asian" is more than half the world's population; the "model minority" thing is problematic in part because lots of Asian families have poor socioeconomic outcomes in the US. But the cohort captured by the study overlaps pretty completely the cohort of children you're implying have unusually good outcomes.

Closer to the opposite is true. Well assimilated second and third generation Asians don’t do any better than similarly affluent white Americans. It’s the kids of poor Asians—children of Indian gas station owners or Chinese restaurant workers, etc.—that have unusual outcomes. Asian kids raised in the bottom 20% of the income distribution are 2.5x more likely to end up in the top 20% as comparably situated white kids: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/27/upshot/make-y....

It’s true that the “model minority” label is misleading as applied to Chinese or Indian people who come here under H1B to work at Google. The fact that those people do well is just filtering. But don’t forget that the American immigration system is one of chain migration. Those immigrants bring over family who often aren’t affluent. But the kids of those people also tend to do very well. And then there are the myriad groups who mostly didn’t come to America through systems like H1B that filter for educated, affluent people. The poverty rate among Vietnamese, who came here as refugees, in 1980 was higher than among black people. Today the median household income of US-born Vietnamese is significantly higher than for white Americans. The same is true for Filipinos.

I don't disagree with the thread that the headlines about the survey are bad and generalize ludicrously about a huge group of people with totally unrelated cultures.

My point is that when you allude to the academic success of Asian American families, you are discussing exactly the cohort that thread complains is overindexed in the study. The study (and the thread) support my argument, and gravely undermine yours.

Hitting children is not a good way to improve academic outcomes. All the evidence we have right now suggests that, at best, it does nothing; at worst, it damages children and leads to markedly worse outcomes.

My dad grew up in Shanghai and often made a point of emphasizing how lucky we were to be children in America. We were spanked and occasionally slapped in the face, sometimes for small acts of disobedience or unhappiness. Though I suppose it could have just felt that way from our perspective.

I can tell you though that getting hit didn't teach me anything useful at all. Certainly not about reason. It taught me that when reason fails you just rely on your temper. We weren't "corrected" by the punishment in a long term sense, both of my brothers and I just emulated it (to varying degrees).

If you have boys, be careful about modeling physical aggression for them as a norm. You might, say, hit the oldest one as punishment and then weeks later the younger one somehow has a broken arm. Or something happens at school.

We weren't exposed to the world that my dad was growing up in WWII China -- an occupying army, nearby factories blowing up, etc. That doesn't make it a luxury belief that you shouldn't hit your kids. There are consequences to it that go beyond the lessons you want to teach them.

> There is a rational argument for corporal punishment of kids. A human brain isn’t fully developed until age 25

How exactly is this a rational argument? You're essentially arguing in favor of corporal punishment against people until the age of 25, since you stated that a 'human brain isn't fully developed until 25' and 'you can't reason with kids'. Do you believe that college students should also be beaten by their professors for being disruptive?

And in comparison it's common knowledge that the worst way to train animals is through violence. We can reason even less with a dog or a cat than we can a teenage individual, but in your view it's rational to punish kids with violence but doing the same to an animal is abuse.

It's completely vacuous. A human brain isn't fully developed until 25; therefore you can do whatever you want to under 25s? No, that's obviously stupid.

(Deleting, as I shouldn't have joined this conversation, but I can't seem to delete a post that has a reply. Apologies for the loss of context!)

It's their personal anecdote.

"We don't hit" as the teacher spanks you.

> a Catholic Nun who broke a ruler over my hands as they were laying flat on the desk

What the fuck kind of shitty human being is this? Can you even imagine doing that? Putting someone’s hands flat on a desk and hitting as hard as you can with a ruler? That’s some next level twisted psychopathic shit here.

> I actually have a fond memory of it now

There’s your psychological damage. That’s not a normal reaction, even years after.

> It was deserved and fixed the problem at hand and by example to the other students

2 questions for you:

- did it fix anything? Did you learn a lesson or were you just scared of getting caught? I guarantee the only lesson other students learned was « don’t get caught »

- assuming it fixed the issue somehow, was physical abuse the only way to do that?

> (that i’m aware of)

Stressing this out is enough of a reply.

That’s quite the rose gold view.

> It’s an effective tool

Said no modern, respectable scientist who has studied the phenomenon within the last thirty years.

> Said no modern, respectable scientist who has studied the phenomenon within the last thirty years.

...said some guy on a forum.

From 2006: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-1284596.pdf

https://www.unmc.edu/newsroom/2002/06/28/dr-larzelere-featur... - "There is general consensus that corporal punishment is effective in getting children to comply immediately while at the same time there is caution from child abuse researchers that corporal punishment by its nature can escalate into physical maltreatment," - E. T. Gershoff

The meta-analysis study that "decided things" in 2021: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34197808/

A critique to that point in 2022: A Response to Heilmann et al.’s (2021) Narrative Review - https://psyarxiv.com/5xbnm/download?format=pdf

Much like Abraham Wald pointed out in WWII, many studies are unintentionally magnifying the statistical outliers incorrectly. As Greg Wilson once said - (summarized) Gender inequity in science being biologically gender influenced is settled as false. The efficacy of corporal punishment is a scottish verdict.

The efficacy and/or benefit of corporal punishment, is undecided.

Violence is also effective at getting immediate compliance from adults, so I guess we should allow it in the workplace.

Or maybe, just maybe, go the other way and treat kids like people and avoid teaching them that abuse is normal.

> I guess we should allow it in the workplace

Violence is the second most effective form of persuasion known to man, following shame.

We do use violence in limited fashion, around the world, today. In some societies, unmitigated violence was acceptable for a time. Why is it always curtailed? Unequivocally, murder is more effective at achieving settlement in many disputes. Expediency is not the only concern. Society is built on maintained relationships and mutual agreements, not wanton acts of passion to form networks that are more effective and stable than the individual.

Children are not considered fully informed or stable. Shame is difficult to instill, when there is no preconceived notion of social acceptance. Violence is the natural fallback. Is picking up a child and moving them out of the way of a vehicle, when they don't want to be moved, violence? No. Violence isn't simply an action, but the act and intention and efficacy. Modern societies have balanced these concerns for adults and children. Self-defense and purposeful administrative allowances for violence (police, army) are the norm.

The question of what the limits of perceived violence for children is optimal, is still debated.

Violence is effective at getting immediate compliance. It is not effective at producing well adjusted people with a healthy attitude to violence, nor is it effective at producing lasting compliance.

That you seek to compare abuse with saving a child from being hit by a vehicle is a astonishing. We recognises the necessity of physical contact that would sometimes be unlawful when that contact is necessary all the time, irrespective of age.

This attempt at acting as if this has anything to do with children's age or development in order to allow it to be used to justify abuse of children that'd be a crime when carried out against adults fails in that basis: we know how to recognise the difference.

Yet somehow we are told to accept violence against children we're not ourselves willing to be subjected to.

> It is not effective at producing well adjusted people with a healthy attitude to violence, nor is it effective at producing lasting compliance.

I don't know what "healthy attitude to violence" is when there's a disagreement by what "violence" means. So I'll have to await some clarification, other than simply sharing your unspecified views. Police carry weapons in modern societies across the globe. Claiming violence does not produce lasting compliance is an interesting belief that is not shared by the majority of the world, so I find this claim uncompelling. There are exceptions ofc, like Japan, where a large part of the peacekeeping force patrols without weapons. While it is effective at times, the lack of efficacy can also be seen on Youtube.

> That you seek to compare abuse with saving a child from being hit by a vehicle is a astonishing

I did not compare them directly. I illustrated the use of the term "violence" is overly broad, as unconsented forceful action is not unwarranted. The question is degree, intent, and efficacy, as stated. Please don't misrepresent my statements. You are imagining I meant "abuse", which is another broad term that is dishonestly equated to "corporal punishment" or "violence". I have trouble teasing out what you specifically trying to communicate, other than a strong disdain for corporal punishment without qualification.

> Claiming violence does not produce lasting compliance is an interesting belief that is not shared by the majority of the world, so I find this claim uncompelling.

It's a belief that is backed by the total absence of evidence of a lasting effect on compliance from the use of violence. That societies continue to condone the use of violence despite the total lack of anything to suggest it works speaks to the pathology of the political process, not to the efficacy of violence.

There are situations where violence becomes necessary, such as self-defence or a defensive war, as a means to achieve short term compliance absent other alternatives, but anyone who believes in a beneficial long term effect on compliance is a fool.

This is written authoritatively but, to say the least, doesn't track developmental psychology science.

> doesn't track developmental psychology science

What does? citation obv

A broad consensus that application of corporal punishment in children is positively correlated with aggression, poorer mental health outcomes, and domestic violence.

A quick, preemptive edit:

If you take the time to get the ranked list of journals in developmental psychology and then search for this question in those journals, you'll find the consensus gets significantly stronger. As you've already shown us, if you instead go the other direction, and find un-reviewed papers co-authored by professors at private Christian colleges, you can find counterexamples.

Since you're very busy replying to my posts with non-citations, let's go through some of additional ones, most of which cite the study by ET Gershoff.

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/21/04/effect-spanking-br... - This study determines that spanking (as well as other stimuli, like observed violence) may influence behavior negatively. This is used as justification to determine that spanking is detrimental. The study does not expand this to corporal punishment overall, state sponsored or otherwise.

https://sites01.lsu.edu/faculty/pfricklab/wp-content/uploads... - This had 98 subjects recruited from two school systems in the southeastern United States.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3447048/ - This is basically a narrative summary of some existing studies, leaning heavily on -

* https://www.repeal43.org/docs/CP%20research%20US%20Nov%2012....

* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5094178/pdf/nih...

* https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261705604_The_effec...

Getting access to papers directly is often troublesome, so there may be an additional step of clicking on a link to get the PDF. 2/3 of these papers focus on effects of pre-school corporal punishment (ages 2-6) exclusively, which is hard to correlate to the topic but provides solid evidence that corporal punishment (without qualification) for infants correlates to behavioral problems.

I would not agree that there is consensus nor is there conclusive data in regard to corporal punishment in schools (post-preschool). This is not an issue of convenience, but has large social implications. If you could provide something a bit more compelling, I'm open to it. I don't have a vested interest, other than a higher standard of proof, such that I can defend conclusive evidence.

This is a strange response, because every single paper you've linked to supports my argument, directly.

It's not strange _at_all_ to present all aspects of an unknown in a good faith effort to determine the truth. That being said, it's not surprising you decide something is settled only based on things you agree with.

We are definitely the only two people reading this, and you're likely to have the last word because it's not going to occur to me to go back and reread a 2-week-old thread, but if you'd like to rebut anything I say in the future, I recommend presenting evidence that contradicts my argument rather than evidence that supports it. Your problem isn't that I refuse to read things I disagree with; it's that you didn't find anything for me to disagree with.

So far you have dismissed some studies as poisoned by contradictory interest and characterized some studies as supporting.

I claim undecided.

You claim "broad consensus", for some value of broad that you have curated from sources...at least nothing beyond what I've cited.

I don't think anything has changed. GL

Do you honestly put any stock in that stuff? We have had decades of research into child rearing and education in the west. If it was actually reliable, it should have produced better behaved kids that do better in school and have better outcomes. The absence of any evidence of that is glaring.

The greatest generation that built this country into what it is were subject to corporal punishment. Today, Asian immigrants use corporal punishment and their kids vastly outperform the children of native born Americans. Maybe there is no correlation between those things, but that is much more concrete evidence than some papers in a psychology journal.

Yes, I do: parental corporal punishment is, unfortunately, most common in the families with with the worst outcomes. Asian American parents are among those least likely to employ corporal punishment. That's unsurprising to me; I have a generally favorable opinion of the parenting culture you're alluding to (even though I wouldn't have considered it for my own kids), and corporal punishment is (what's the right word?) stupid.

As my sibling commenter notes, we have a neat little case study here, too: we allow corporal punishment in public schools in a minority of states. Overlay outcomes by school district; how's it working out?

If violence was effective, we should have plenty of comparative proof from the US states where it's still allowed.

We don't

As another poster said, multiple states have corporal punishment as not only allowed but encouraged, and so far we haven't seen the better outcomes you claim in terms of better behaved kids.

So in the absence of any evidence that corporal punishment works, the obvious answer should be to not do it.

The first link you provided, which does not appear to support corporal punishment, does not contain the string you quoted; in fact, the word "corporal" appears in it only twice.

The last link you provided is a methodological critique of another study, and its authors are of questionable authority (for instance, a dev psych professor at a private Christian college).

> The first link you provided, which does not appear to support corporal punishment, does not contain the string you quoted; in fact, the word "corporal" appears in it only twice.

Gershoff's contributions to the debate are not a singular paper.

https://www.unmc.edu/newsroom/2002/06/28/dr-larzelere-featur... includes a response from Robert E. Larzelere, Ph.D., which quotes Gershoff as the source of the quote referenced.

All I can tell you is that you provided a link that did not say what you said it did, and attributed to it a quotation that did not appear in the article.

I think you misinterpreted the post. I have made it more explicit.

I reloaded it and searched for the word "comply", which seems unlikely to have been a typo in your original quotation, and: no, that quotation is not present in the article.

> Said no modern, respectable, progressive, white, American scientist who has studied the phenomenon within the last thirty years.

Fixed it for you.

Here's the basic problem:

- Most punishments for kids outside of mainstream cultural norms are harmful

- Most punishments in anger are harmful

Living within that context, I don't use corporal punishment, and I think it would be harmful to my child. However, I am not at all ready to generalize the results to outside of that context.

Another way I'd frame it: The research evidence is at the level where I'm glad to call it a best practice (which I follow), and encourage others to do so. It's not yet at the level where I'm ready to judge people -- especially in other cultures -- who don't.

I worked with an older african american many years ago who in his own words grew up in the ghetto. He told me once that, "If we don't beat our kids at home the cops will do it in the street." Not advocating either way, but the perspective stuck with me.

> I wotked with an older african american many years ago who in his own words grew up in the ghetto. He told me once that, "If we don't beat our kids at home the cops will do it in the street."

I suspect a thorough investigation of the African Americans beaten in the streets by cops would find that being beaten by their parents as a child is not substantial protection against being beaten in the streets by cops.

Its a convenient rationalization, though.

Entirely possible. I don't know that he was rationalizing as much as passing on accepted wisdom. Undoubtedly escaping depends on more than one variable.

I would like to see a thorough investigation BY African Americans rather than merely OF by African Americans.

We have an unfortunate history where investigations OF African Americans BY white Americans led to not only incorrect but also very unfortunate conclusions.

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