Pro-Spanking Study

[Liberty]

I am personally 100% against physical punishment of any kind. I see it as only contributing to violence, teaching children that hitting is okay, abusive, etc. Therefore, this pro-spanking article has me confused.

"The Science and Statistics Behind Spanking Suggest That Laws Allowing Corporal Punishment are in the Best Interests of the Child"
Jason M. Fuller
Akron Law Review, 2009

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid= ... y=CMi8uIQG

Can anyone help dissect this?

Here are some excerpts:

I. Introduction..................................................................... 244
II. Background: The Movement to Gradually Eliminate Spanking in the Home...................249
A. The Movement to Change Public Opinion ................... 249
B. How Foreign Governments Are Gradually Outlawing Corporal Punishment ......................... 252
C. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child Is Being Used to Abolish Spanking Worldwide ............. 256
D. America Is Following the Incremental Path that Leads to a Ban on Spanking in the Home ................... 259
III. The Problems Associated with Anti-Spanking Laws: A Look at the First Country to Ban All Physical Discipline......264
A. A Little Less Spanking, A Lot More Child Abuse ....... 266
B. A Little Less Spanking, A Lot More Teen Violence .... 271
C. Reflecting on Sweden's Spanking Ban: More Harm than Good ................................ 274
IV. Misleading Research and Media Coverage Virtually Monopolize the Spanking Debate ................277
A. The Research "Should Be Closely Examined for Evidence of Bias". .......................278
B. "The Methodological Flaws in the Cited Evidence Are of Concern" ............................... 281
C. "Avoid the Insidious Evils of Propaganda Favoring Particular Points of View" .......................... 292
D. "Risk... Alone Is Insufficient to Support Regulation" Because "It Is Always a Doubtful Course, to Argue Against the Use or Existence of a Power, from the Possibility of Its Abuse" ... 305
V. The Most Comprehensive Child Development Study Validates the Body of Research that Suggests Spanking Is Harmless ......306
A. Sound Research Indicates that Physical Discipline Does Not Inherently Harm Children ............309
B. Sound Research Indicates that Children with the Highest Optimism, Academic Achievement, and Self-Esteem Have Been Spanked...311
V I. Conclusion ...............................315

In 2005, a group of thirteen-year-old Swedish boys began terrorizing a family by threatening to kill the family's son, forcing the mother's car off the road and ripping open her rear door, publicly humiliating them, damaging and stealing their property, emptying and sabotaging their mailbox, brandishing planks at them, and surrounding them with weapons.' Over the next two years, the harassment became so intolerable that the father shot at the group of teens, killing one.

Were such a killing to occur in the U.S., the popular reaction would have been, "How can we prevent this from happening again?" In Sweden, however, youth violence and aggression has gotten so out-of-control that the reaction was, "Shoot another [one]." Sadly, many policymakers fail to realize how Swedish laws have contributed to growing youth violence, and consequently, to public resentment of Swedish youths.

In 1979, Sweden started an international trend by becoming the first country to ban spanking.

Today, six out of ten Swedish children feel vulnerable at school, and just as many have been victims of youth violence. This is consistent with the dramatic rise in youth violence since Sweden banned spanking. The very spanking ban that was supposed to help them seems to have betrayed them.

And yet, we don't talk about how many parents either do not or cannot maintain control when physical discipline is banned. We don't talk about how such parents tend to resort to helpless, aggressive parenting techniques, and even child abuse. Therefore, we don't talk about how children "are no more protected [under spanking bans] than they were before."

Similarly, we don't say how the most friendly, stable, and competent children come from "authoritative" families-families that raise children with both love and firm guidance. We don't say how the most sound, comprehensive research suggests that firm guidance includes at least occasional spanking. And we don't say how such physical discipline has shown no harmful effects on children.

Because we suppress information about spanking, many children forced to grow up without it are suffering because of their violent peers, helpless parents, and even their own misbehavior. They are suffering because of increased aggression, defiance, and antisocial behavior-the very vices that spanking appears to reduce better than any other
discipline method.

Because we suppress information about spanking, policymakers are insisting that children who learn best through physical discipline must mature only through mental discipline.415 This is like trying to force visual learners to become auditory learners. There are just too many variables from child to child, discipline method to discipline method, and misbehavior to misbehavior to justify a spanking ban. It is not in the child's best interests to require a one-size-fits-all discipline method, or to determine that a valuable discipline method like spanking cannot suit any child.

It is in the child's best interests to allow him to learn from a discipline method that he understands. It is in his best interests to allow his parents to take an active and loving role in his maturation, without making them feel helpless to control his misbehavior. Therefore, it is in the best interests of the child, the family, and ultimately society to allow corporal punishment. Anything less risks leaving our country feeling as helpless as those marching on the streets of Sweden.

[Liberty]

Found an article that summarizes this study and several others:

http://www.newsmax.com/US/spanking-stud ... /id/345669

Weirdly, this author compares studies like the one above to the climategate emails, but the comparison is not to say that both are wrong but that both are right. That sets off alarm bells.

Pro-Spanking Studies May Have Global Effect

Thursday, 07 Jan 2010 11:11 AM

By Theodore Kettle

Two recent analyses – one psychological, the other legal – may debunk lenient modern parenting the way the Climategate e-mail scandal has short circuited global warming alarmism.

A study entailing 2,600 interviews pertaining to corporal punishment, including the questioning of 179 teenagers about getting spanked and smacked by their parents, was conducted by Marjorie Gunnoe, professor of psychology at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Gunnoe’s findings, announced this week: “The claims made for not spanking children fail to hold up. They are not consistent with the data.”

Those who were physically disciplined performed better than those who weren’t in a whole series of categories, including school grades, an optimistic outlook on life, the willingness to perform volunteer work, and the ambition to attend college, Gunnoe found. And they performed no worse than those who weren’t spanked in areas like early sexual activity, getting into fights, and becoming depressed. She found little difference between the sexes or races.

Another study published in the Akron Law Review last year examined criminal records and found that children raised where a legal ban on parental corporal punishment is in effect are much more likely to be involved in crime.

A key focus of the work of Jason M. Fuller of the University of Akron Law School was Sweden, which 30 years ago became the first nation to impose a complete ban on physical discipline and is in many respects “an ideal laboratory to study spanking bans,” according to Fuller.

Since the spanking ban, child abuse rates in Sweden have exploded over 500 percent, according to police reports. Even just one year after the ban took effect, and after a massive government public education campaign, Fuller found that “not only were Swedish parents resorting to pushing, grabbing, and shoving more than U.S. parents, but they were also beating their children twice as often.”

After a decade of the ban, “rates of physical child abuse in Sweden had risen to three times the U.S. rate” and “from 1979 to 1994, Swedish children under seven endured an almost six-fold increase in physical abuse,” Fuller’s analysis revealed.

“Enlightened” parenting also seems to have produced increased violence later. “Swedish teen violence skyrocketed in the early 1990s, when children that had grown up entirely under the spanking ban first became teenagers,” Fuller noted. “Preadolescents and teenagers under fifteen started becoming even more violent toward their peers. By 1994, the number of youth criminal assaults had increased by six times the 1984 rate.”

Since Sweden, dozens of countries have banned parental corporal punishment, like Germany, Italy, and in 2007 New Zealand, where using force to correct children entails full criminal penalties, and where a mother cannot even legally take her child’s hand to bring him where he refuses to go.

The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, meanwhile, challenges laws permitting any physical punishment of children and has called on all governments in the world to prohibit every form of physical discipline, including within the family.

In the U.S., the National Association of Social Workers has declared that all physical punishment of children has harmful effects and should be stopped; social workers are being trained to advocate against physical discipline when they visit homes. And in 2007, San Francisco Bay area Assemblywoman Sally Lieber unsuccessfully proposed legislation imposing a California state ban on spanking children under the age of four.

Contrary to popular belief, the pediatrician and leftist political activist Dr. Benjamin Spock did not popularize parental leniency. In early editions of his famously bestselling book, “Baby and Child Care,” Spock did not rule out spanking, (although he did later); on the contrary, Spock called for “clarity and consistency of the parents’ leadership,” considered kindness and devotion to be a necessity for parents who spank, and believed that the inability to be firm was “the commonest problem of parents in America.”

Spock’s 21st century disciples, however, depart from his original precepts. DrSpock.com, which “embodies the strength and identity of world-renowned pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, providing parents with the latest expert content from today's leading authorities in parenting,” and embraces Dr. Spock’s “philosophy and vision,” declares that “Punishment is not the key to discipline.”

The parental guidance website contends that “Spanking teaches children that the larger, stronger person has the power to get his way, whether or not he is in the right.” DrSpock.com concludes that “The American tradition of spanking may be one reason that there is much more violence in our country than in any other comparable nation.”

Of like mind is the American Academy of Pediatrics, whose official policy says: “Despite its common acceptance, spanking is a less effective strategy than timeout or removal of privileges for reducing undesired behavior in children. Although spanking may immediately reduce or stop an undesired behavior, its effectiveness decreases with subsequent use.”

The academy adds: “The only way to maintain the initial effect of spanking is to systematically increase the intensity with which it is delivered, which can quickly escalate into abuse. Thus, at best, spanking is only effective when used in selective infrequent situations.”

“Timeout,” a widely popularized alternative to physical discipline in which a child is separated from a situation or environment after misbehaving, was devised in the 1960’s by behavioral researcher Arthur Staats as “a very mild punishment, the removal from a more reinforcing situation.”

Gunnoe’s findings are being largely ignored by the U.S. media, but made a splash in British newspapers. It is not the first time her work has been bypassed by the press. Her 1997 work showing that customary spanking reduced aggression also went largely unreported.

Nor is she alone in her conclusions. Dr. Diana Baumrind of the University of California, Berkeley and her teams of professional researchers over a decade conducted what is considered the most extensive and methodologically thorough child development study yet done. They examined 164 families, tracking their children from age four to 14. Baumrind found that spanking can be helpful in certain contexts and discovered “no evidence for unique detrimental effects of normative physical punishment.”

She also found that children who were never spanked tended to have behavioral problems, and were not more competent than their peers.

As in climate change, politicians all over the world seem out of touch with the most rigorous science regarding parental discipline. The newest research could constitute powerful ammunition to parents rights activists seeking to reverse the global trend of intrusive governments muscling themselves between the rod and the child.

Read more on Newsmax.com: Pro-Spanking Studies May Have Global Effect
Important: Do You Support Pres. Obama's Re-Election? Vote Here Now!

[Akhlut]

A few things to consider.

1. Does the study about Sweden actually give juvenile delinquency rates over time to at least give us an idea about increases or decreases of violent behavior in children?

2. How accurate are studies from both sides?

3. Humans evolved from other apes which use violence (in moderation) to correct behavior.

Link

Long years of observation in Africa (summarized in her 1967 book My Friends: The Wild Chimpanzees) have convinced Zoologist Goodall that the chimps' treatment of their young produces well-balanced adults. In raising infants, for example, chimps practice discipline by distraction, a technique that worked very well with Grub; instead of punishing him when he was troublesome, his mother amused him by giving him her undivided attention. While human beings and hyenas often let their unhappy offspring scream interminably, Jane notes, "chimps keep their babies happy by cuddling them whenever they want it. I preferred the chimp way, so I cuddled Grub lots." In aping the apes, however, she was flexible. Young chimps, when they are naughty, usually get a quick bite on the hand, and then a consoling hug. Jane has never bitten Grub, but she does give him "a reassuring hug after a quick reprimand."

While we're obviously different from chimps, it does make me suspect that humans do need some measure of physical reprimands at times to dissuade certain behaviors.

4. Young children don't have much of a conscience, period. So, to that end, parents have to start instilling one in the children. So, by necessity, the parent has to act as an outside conscience until the child starts to develop one herself and that inner conscience is reinforced through more empathetic means rather than through physical force.

At least, that's what I've gathered through reading How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate by Steve Pinker.

[Lord of the Abyss]

I recall reading of studies claiming that spanking along with other forms of physical coercion increased not decreased aggression and disobedience in the long run. That is exactly what I would expect from people; you hit people, they want to lash out in retaliation. It would take some impressive evidence to convince me that spanking is such an exception to what is normally human nature.

Found an article that summarizes this study and several others:

http://www.newsmax.com/US/spanking-stud ... /id/345669

Weirdly, this author compares studies like the one above to the climategate emails, but the comparison is not to say that both are wrong but that both are right. That sets off alarm bells.

Newsmax is a right wing organization.

[Count Chocula]

My personal experience with my six-year old is that spanking is sometimes necessary, BUT just spanking a kid because he's annoying you seems counterproductive. When I spank my son, he knows exactly why I'm doing it and what behavior (disobedience, being a little smart-ass, disrespect, etc.) has earned him his swat. Like the primates in Goodall's study, I spank my monkey (cue Beavis & Butthead laughter) only to correct misbehavior, and I NEVER do it just to keep him on his toes. I've never struck him with anything but an open hand, and nowhere but on the ass, to reinforce the sting in one area with the punishment.

Similar to other parents, I suppose, I didn't START spanking my boy to correct his behavior until I saw that he was mature enough to understand consequences, which meant around 3 years old for him. The little booger learned fast; he gets maybe two-three swats on the butt a week now. I doubt I'll be doling out any physical punishment when he's eight.

To the point, my anecdotal experience is that spanking for reasons of discipline is effective and does not harm a child's self-esteem or expression when applied sparingly.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

To be fair, while the vast majority of studies I've read call corporal punishment a counter-productive measure that leaves kids off more anti-social than the norm, and it's been decried by basically every psychiatric and psychological institution of merit that I know of, in all the studies I've read I've never actually seen a significant correlation between mild, rarely-applied spanking (or 'mild swats', though I don't really know what that means beyond nuns with rulers) and developmental problems. It's anything more than, say, a couple times a month or whatever, that starts to result in messed up kids in a statistically significant way. Properly applied, I'm sure that corporal punishment could be an okay parenting technique, and probably there are in fact some kids who would learn better from that sort of negative reinforcement than some other techniques. It's just that it's so incredibly easy to apply improperly, so widely applied improperly, and is only a hop, skip, and a jump away from violent child abuse, that I still think it should never be used and will never use it on my kids, etcetera.

Aside from the fact that I just think it's kind of fucked up to physically hurt people you love to get them in line. But that's a normative statement so I wouldn't force anyone to agree with it.

[RIPP_n_WIPE]

There are some kids that psychologically respond primarily to physical coercion. I distinctly remember being put in time out around 6ish and thinking "Hey wait a second. No one is actually forcing me to sit here." and promptly getting up and going about my business until I was put back in place. I learned "No." very early.

I don't think when my child is old enough to be spanked that I will use the same techniques though. I much prefer the "timeout" box or physical exertion (push-ups, sit-ups, thinking chair) and hopefully they won't get my oppositional genes and will be more compliant.

[Purple]

As RIPP_n_WIPE said, No is a powerful thing to learn early. And once a child realizes that you won't physically force him into something there really are no tools you can use. Time out? Yea, what ever, make me. No TW/Internet/Games? What you gonna do, unplug the antenna? I'll just plug it back in. No going out? What you gonna do, lock me in the house? There does not need to be violence, but the threat of violence is still needed as it gives the parent power over the child. Without that, the parent can easily be trapped in a situation where he is powerless to force his will on the delinquent.

By now you can guess I am talking out of personal experience. And no, I am not a delinquent. And no, the logic does not apply to all situations. But there are situations and children where it does apply. And a blank ban by law is a bad thing.

[Spoonist]

I'll return later tonight, but I'll give a short headsup right now.
The stats from Sweden is totally bonkers. It has been cherrypicked beyond reason and shows no such correlation at all, instead the reverse is true.
Its the regions where spanking etc is most prevalent that also have the most teenage violence, not the other way around. Those regions are low-income and high percentage of immigrants.
So expect lots of bullshit exclamations.

[Purple]

Its the regions where spanking etc is most prevalent that also have the most teenage violence, not the other way around. Those regions are low-income and high percentage of immigrants.
So expect lots of bullshit exclamations.

So what you are saying is that there is a chance, as unlikely as it sounds[/sarcasm] that the high teenage violence is due to the economic and social problems of those regions independent of the way the children are raised?

[Simon_Jester]

To be fair, while the vast majority of studies I've read call corporal punishment a counter-productive measure that leaves kids off more anti-social than the norm, and it's been decried by basically every psychiatric and psychological institution of merit that I know of, in all the studies I've read I've never actually seen a significant correlation between mild, rarely-applied spanking (or 'mild swats', though I don't really know what that means beyond nuns with rulers) and developmental problems. It's anything more than, say, a couple times a month or whatever, that starts to result in messed up kids in a statistically significant way. Properly applied, I'm sure that corporal punishment could be an okay parenting technique, and probably there are in fact some kids who would learn better from that sort of negative reinforcement than some other techniques. It's just that it's so incredibly easy to apply improperly, so widely applied improperly, and is only a hop, skip, and a jump away from violent child abuse, that I still think it should never be used and will never use it on my kids, etcetera.

Aside from the fact that I just think it's kind of fucked up to physically hurt people you love to get them in line. But that's a normative statement so I wouldn't force anyone to agree with it.

The issues with corporal punishment of children that strike me as borderline enough to be relevant is:

What if you're trying to condition a child against something that could actually get them seriously hurt, on par with the famous "sticking a fork in an electrical socket" case? At that point, the case for using mild pain as a conditioning/enforcement technique becomes a little better. Your goal really is to get the child to associate doing it with pain, because if they do that, they'll get seriously hurt. If corporal punishment can serve as the 'big guns' of child behavior modification, that's the situation where you'd break them out.

Then there's the question of what you do when a child is already acting in ways that harm other children- lashing out and hurting people on a whim, or the like? Can spanking be a useful way to get the message across that no you do not do that to people, or will it create more problems than it solves?

[Count Chocula]

Then there's the question of what you do when a child is already acting in ways that harm other children- lashing out and hurting people on a whim, or the like? Can spanking be a useful way to get the message across that no you do not do that to people, or will it create more problems than it solves?

Ahh, that's a tough one. My son has said a few nasty things to his pre-K and Kindergarten classmates and basketball teammates, and vice versa. Thankfully we haven't had any physical fighting. I suppose you could spank your child if you come home from work and find out he's said something cruel about a classmate...but...I don't do that. When it comes to being cruel to classmates, booing opposing team members, or razzing a teammate who misses a shot, my wife and I use verbal jiu-jitsu to get the message across. This consists mainly of asking if my son would like it if I said those things about him, or saying "you stink!" to get a reaction then explaining why I said it, to try and get him thinking about the consequences of his words. Kids really have no filters. I save corporal punishment for direct, observed, recent transgressions.

To your point, I feel that spanking my son to punish him because he hit someone would be counterproductive. I'd rather shame him with words and take away something he likes to reinforce a "don't fight just because you feel like being an asshole" lesson than open the can of whoop-ass. Keeping him away from school and his toys, alone in his room, would probably be a better lesson.

Of course, Simon's worst case scenario may indicate an underlying medical problem. If antisocial behaviour and lashing out persisted, I'd take my kid to the doctor(s) for evaluation.

[sbvera13]

Being an educator of children with autism/ED/other disabilities, I understand the role of physical reinforcement in discipline. Some children, for a variety of reasons, fail to respond to emotional stimuli. Physical discipline is appropriate in these limited situations, given some criteria.

1. The child does not respond to normal forms of discipline. Age is a factor in this as well, if physical discipline is both required and withheld until the child matures enough emotionally project (in normal development, roughly 6 years) then it won't be effective and will merely be traumatic.
2. The child is made to understand the connection between their action and the punishment before the punishment takes place.
3. The goal of the punishment is to create an empathic response by connecting the pain/discomfort of the punishment to the pain inflicted on others by the childs' actions (making physical punishment only appropriate for cases of bullying, hitting, etc).
4. The punishment is inflicted with only enough severity to create these emotional connections in the child. The severity required for this is actually extremely mild; painful discipline such as spanking may not even required. In the rare case that pain is an appropriate reinforcement, it is applied in a controlled manner with respect for the childs' dignity. Building emotional bridges to physical actions is the goal, not compelling obedience through fear.
5. When the child is emotionally ready, a shift to normal discipline methods is made.

Now, in the case of autistic children, non-violent physical restraint is a common application of these principles, and does not need to involve any kind of painful discipline. There are professional procedures and guidelines on this kind of discipline. The idea of physical reinforcement discipline is sound; whether to advance to painful reinforcement is a sensitive subject that needs to be approached with caution and on a per-child basis. Personally, I don't see painful discipline ever being needed in a normally developing child. Autism or other disorders can be a different story. At a certain point, non-painful reinforcements can become ineffective. For example, because a child has learned to game the discipline system and likes to be restrained for fun. Usually this is a result of an undisciplined home environment and no amount of discipline can correct it at that point.

[Spoonist]

This is going to be a series of posts instead of a long one due to time constraints.

Let's start with the source. Its an article not a research paper/study. The article was published in the http://www.uakron.edu/law/lawreview/ which staff is mainly made up by students of University of Akron School of Law. The staffs job is not to check out opinions or angles, but to go through citations etc.

The author Jason Fuller seems to be a high end student when he wrote this.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsB ... id=1226573
Now since the title Symposium Editor is not mentioned in the review bylaws I'm guessing that its for the symposium only.

What this means is that as long as its well written and the citations hold up it can be selected for publication. It also seems that he is on the editorial staff and thus edited by his peers, as in other law students.
Due to privacy issues I can't go further into who he is etc. Its not relevant anyway.

So its not a social sciences study. There is no rebuttal and no cites to this. etc.
Just based on this it is suspect, if someone indeed had proof of 30 years of social science research being wrong it would have had a huge impact.

Its also telling that people need to dig so hard for something that supports their view that this is what they find. A law student paper written as an article.
While the opposing view have peer reviewed huge studies and research with the backing of psychiatrists, social sciences and child behavioralists.
Nice going there. I'm guessing your parents right?


So lets go into what the article/paper actually says. However this is going to be difficult since we are not allowed to quote passages from the text as per the license agreement of the text. (Liberty you might want to check that out and get a mod to edit your post its a law school after all).
So if you want to follow you need to have the article open at the same time.

It starts with a shotgun shootout just like most scientific studies...
Yes that's right it starts with a slanted anecdote regarding a horrific case taking place in Sweden. This is the case in question:
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skotten_i_R%C3%B6deby
Use google translate for details.

So for shock value only he describes a tragedy without any connection at all with his assertions. Then he tries a terrible segway over to what he thinks is his point. That Sweden banned spanking in 79 and that therefore Sweden has rising youth violence which according to him is proof that spanking prevents youth violence.
So first a heartfelt fuck you to Jason for using a tragedy in this way, its as stupid as bringing up columbine as an example of what spanking leads to in the US. Jason does not know whether the delinquents were spanked nor does he care. The cite "Shoot Another" that he uses as a 'proof' of swedish attitude vs delinquents is telling, its a fabrication, instead of general attitude it was a graffiti note put up by an unknown in the school of the delinquents, where they had been violent bullies and registered offenders etc.

Nowhere does he cite any studies on sweden proving any correlation between the non-spanking and youth violence, or any such thing. Want to guess why? Yupp that's right, because they say the reverse and he thinks that all of those studies are wrong.

Lets look at some of his footnotes for more examples of this bias.
Footnote 12, where he cites swedish sources saying child abuse is up 600% since spanking became illegal. Well, duh, anyone with a reasoning brain can figure out that outlawing something would lead to more convictions over time as the population becomes more prone on reporting and less accepting of the illegal behavior.
Its akin if you'd lower the BAC of DUI from .08 to .04, would you expect more or less convictions of DUI?
In the same footnote he cites "ROBERT E. LARZELERE, PH.D., SWEDEN'S SMACKING BAN: MORE HARM THAN GOOD (2004)" where Jason copied the whole idea of 'his' paper/article from, including the 600% figure and the youth violence conjecture. However Robert's article is a critique of Joan Durrant's earlier anti-spanking article, what is unfortunate for Jason though is that searching on Durrant easily finds a response to Robert in 2005:
http://umanitoba.ca/faculties/human_eco ... rant_2.pdf
That is 4 years before Jason writes his article/paper. Nice omission there.

But lets ignore the Durrant vs Robert argument for a moment because both are biased observers. Instead lets focus on what Jason is saying, that no-spanking would lead to increased youth violence. How do we prove such a hypothesis? By looking for positive data only? Of course not, we do that by testing for negative data to see if we can disprove the hypothesis.
Can we find similar countries that continued to allow spanking which have a similar increase in youth violence between 1970s and 1990s, yes we can.
Can we find populations in sweden that continued spanking even after the ban and see their offsprings record? Yes we can, spanking is more common in immigrant populations, spanking is more common in low-income families, spanking is more common in low-education families. All of which have higher rates of criminal behavior including violence as teens. To boot we can see that spanking is more common among the unemployed and those who live in cramped condition, and yes we can see increases in spanking and child abuse during recessions and decreases during economical growth.
While none of this proves any correlation between spanking and criminal behavior, except for the obvious of being illegal in Sweden, it does disprove Jasons idiotic hypothesis. In that the very groups that statistically more commonly practice spanking is not better off vs teen violence than the norm. (What is shown is a likely correlation between hardship and aggressive teens which should be a no-brainer).

So the non-spanked are at least as successful at life as the spanked, including being law abiding citizens. Which gives that the best case scenario for pro-spankers is that you are willfully inflicting pain on your own child without any good long term effect at all, congratulations.

I'll go through more of Jasons arguments later.

[ArmorPierce]

Nothing wrong with spanking if it is done right along with all other aspects of parenting. Problem is that it's usually done wrong (spanking out of anger that the kid annoyed you for example).

The vast majority of studies that correlate corporal punishment with increased violence doesn't take into account that spankers tend to be first worse parents overall and does not differentiate between degrees of corporal punishment.

[Spoonist]

...What if you're trying to condition a child against something that could actually get them seriously hurt, on par with the famous "sticking a fork in an electrical socket" case? ...Your goal really is to get the child to associate doing it with pain, because if they do that, they'll get seriously hurt...

Sorry but it doesn't work that way. The only thing the child has learnt is not to stick the fork in the electrical socket while mom/dad is around. It has not been taught WHY it shouldn't stick the fork in the socket.
Instead the increased trauma of the event will more likely make the child more curious about the object in question and it will be more likely to investigate it without parental supervision.
As you can imagine there are studies that have shown that spanking parents statistically spend less time explaining what is right and what is wrong and why. Instead they go for the 'quick solution'.

If we go to the extreme case which is abuse, lots of abused children cannot say what exactly they got abused for. While the parent thinks its the opposite. Especially for the devotedly religiuos.

Where spanking does work is in the case of "because I said so" - as in blind obediance, i.e. fear of the parent.

Compare this to 'spanking' like procedures in the military which used to be the norm. It didn't teach you how to do stuff, but it did teach you to obey. Just like with wife-beatings.

Nothing wrong with spanking if it is done right along with all other aspects of parenting. Problem is that it's usually done wrong (spanking out of anger that the kid annoyed you for example).
The vast majority of studies that correlate corporal punishment with increased violence doesn't take into account that spankers tend to be first worse parents overall and does not differentiate between degrees of corporal punishment.

You again...
Note what is wrong with your conclusion? By saying 'vast majority' you acknowledge what I already pointed out to you in another topic. That there are studies that take that into account, both social situation and degree of violence, comparing parent and child testimony. Still show that non-spankers are equal or better of than the spanked.
Second problem is that a parent that is pro-spanking is more likely to cross the line into abuse as well. While parents that are anti-spanking still spank with almost the same frequency when you ask the child.

[Simon_Jester]

...What if you're trying to condition a child against something that could actually get them seriously hurt, on par with the famous "sticking a fork in an electrical socket" case? ...Your goal really is to get the child to associate doing it with pain, because if they do that, they'll get seriously hurt...

Sorry but it doesn't work that way. The only thing the child has learnt is not to stick the fork in the electrical socket while mom/dad is around. It has not been taught WHY it shouldn't stick the fork in the socket.
Instead the increased trauma of the event will more likely make the child more curious about the object in question and it will be more likely to investigate it without parental supervision.
As you can imagine there are studies that have shown that spanking parents statistically spend less time explaining what is right and what is wrong and why. Instead they go for the 'quick solution'.

I suppose what's tripping me up is the naive expectation that the spanking is combined with quasi-competent parenting- the key point being the need to explain what is going on; obviously no punishment is going to do a damn bit of good if you don't explain why it's being given, whether it's spanking or "go to your room!"

Whereas this doesn't necessarily bear any relation to how spanking is actually used by the average parent who does it- I have no way of knowing what percentage of parents spank as a routine substitute for explaining what their kid did wrong, versus what percentage of them spank as a supplement to explaining what their kid did wrong in extreme circumstances.

In the former case, I'm not saying it works, but it strikes me as an idea which cannot be trivially dismissed- "does it work?" does not feel like a question I'm qualified to answer for that case. That doesn't mean other people are not qualified to say, or that studies haven't been done.

Are there studies that control for the frequency with which spanking is used, and whether it is used casually in cases where it's definitely counterproductive (like "don't talk back to me, you little brat!"). Are there even parents who do manage to restrain themselves from using it casually?

I don't know.

[Starglider]

I was a moderately difficult child. I was spanked a few times a year from age 5 to 9 ish. On one occasion I was caned with a leather strap, as I recall because I bit someone.

In retrospect completely agree with their decisions, I think it was a reasonable and effective punishment regieme (as I got older obviously there were groundings, extra chores and revokation of various privilidges too), and I think my parents generally did a great job.

[Dave]

Are there even parents who do manage to restrain themselves from using it casually?

Yes, of course, there will be some parents who employ spanking in a limited fashion and only to correct the rare occasion of extremely out of line behavior -- my parents, for example.

Seriously, there are anecdotes ahead, because it's the best I have to offer, but I still think them valuable.

I vaguely recall getting spanked for straight up lying to the teacher in second grade, and I presume it came with a detailed explanation as to why I was being punished. The more common punishment was to "sit on the [stair]step" for a few minutes, and even that came with an explanation. I was also offered a spanking as an alternative for sitting on the step when I balked at the punishment. Subsequently I was much more amenable to sitting on the step than before.

I was discussing this thread with my mother and she had a few points:
* Explaining things to a child before they have reached the age of reason is difficult, and does not always get the point across. From the "fork in the electrical socket" example: how do you explain to a one-year or two-year old that this is a bad idea? Explain to them gently that this unsafe? The kid is two -- they have no concept of danger, no lasting memory of injury, no real understanding of death. Explaining things effectively goes in one ear and out the other. (Are teenagers much better? ) A swift temporary sting would get their attention and (hopefully) associate pain with sticking things in electrical sockets or running into the road.

* My parents drew a line: Once the kid has reached 4, it is no longer appropriate to spank him except in extreme circumstances (example: bald-faced lies to the teacher) .
Also, the instrument for spanking is to a dedicated instrument (say, a ruler) that is reserved only for spanking (so you know that you only get spanked with that and not with just anything at hand), it is stored in an inconvenient location in the house (so the parent has to walk to get it, cooling down in the process), and you never spank the kid in anger. Ever.

* As for yelling at the child, yelling (as explained by my mother) represents a lack of control and restraint on the part of the parent, which is undesirable. Also, this can encourage the kid to shout right back, which can swiftly degenerate to a screaming match. This doesn't teach the kid anything productive.
- The example my mother gave was when she was driving my little brother home from school. He and his friend were yelling in the car, and to avoid distraction my mother asked politely that they stop or she would pull the car over. They didn't and she did, stopping the car and simply waiting for a few minutes after they stopped yelling. It was a memorable experience she said; the next day they were quiet and commented as they drove by "That's where you stopped because we were yelling."

* Finally, there is real value in having two caregivers, so that when one parent cannot stand another minute of Alice's tantrums, the other parent can step in while the first takes a walk to cool down. My mother speculated that this is a real challenge in single parent families, since there's no one to fall back on.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Are there even parents who do manage to restrain themselves from using it casually?

Mine, apparently. I was too young to remember, but my mother told me that she spanked both me and my brother when we were very young for respectively my fooling with light sockets and my brother constantly trying to run into the street. She never spanked us when we were old enough to reason with/threaten (and doing less suicidal things). She figured that even if spanking had any long term bad effects, it was worth the tradeoff if we were still alive to have long term effects.

[DudeGuyMan]

Some kids need an occasional swat on the ass or wrist to remind them that the yammer coming out of your mouth is more important than the amusement they derive from whatever stupid thing they're doing. At least when they're not old enough to comprehend why it's stupid. But if you still feel the need to swat them once they're too big to put over your knee without feeling like an idiot, then yeah, you've probably fucked up along the way.

I mean let's recognize, there's a world of difference between slapping a 4 year old on the wrist so he knows he's not supposed to try to drag the dog around by it's tail like a stuffed animal, and wailing on a 14 year old with a belt because he just called you a cocksucker. In the former case you're just giving an underdeveloped brain some stimuli that'll stick with it. In the latter you're dysfunctional as shit.

[Spoonist]

Could we stop with the useless personal anecdotes?
Especially since they are based on flawed reasoning.

Its the same flawed reasoning that the religious use when they say they are more moral than unbelievers. Its a version of the true scotsman fallacy where they use their own subjective view on morality. However when comparing to societies norm in the form of law-breaking atheists are under represented and all those religious devotees are over represented.

If the conjecture of your anecdotes were correct then how come the US has higher rates of teenage pregnancies, teen violence, teen crime, teen gangs etc than most other similarly rich nations? If spanking and other forms of parental violence are so effective how come so many teens chose to rebel against their parents and their society knowing the consequences?
Guess what, spanking isn't statistically as effective as you imply.
Instead its all those other factors that make a bigger impact.

Would me giving counter anecdotes help anything? Of course not.

[AniThyng]

Anecdotes on either side are going to be pretty worthless anyway since in order for us to be here giving the anecdotes in the first place we'd have already self-selected to be relatively functional regardless of how little or much we got spanked?

That being said, it's pretty "normative" in East Asian societies, at least for my generation to have experience with corporal punishment? But I guess we already did this with the whole Tiger Mom thing. But then again the entire society is built on forced conformity so perhaps it's a lot more complicated then just weather spanking is OK or not..

[Simon_Jester]

Could we stop with the useless personal anecdotes?
Especially since they are based on flawed reasoning.

Haven't been using them.

Its the same flawed reasoning that the religious use when they say they are more moral than unbelievers. Its a version of the true scotsman fallacy where they use their own subjective view on morality. However when comparing to societies norm in the form of law-breaking atheists are under represented and all those religious devotees are over represented.

I didn't say spanking makes mentally healthy children- obviously, there are so many other ways to screw it up, and such a large fraction of parents who can say "I spank" will also say "I beat my child with a leather belt for insulting me," at which point they're definitely, clearly being abusive enough to harm their children.

What is genuinely not clear to me is what the effects of spanking are when used in a restricted fashion- not by people who hit their kids for every perceived infraction, but by people who are holding it in reserve for the most extreme cases of bad behavior, under circumstances where it's impossible to explain what's wrong or a literal matter of life and death that they stop doing whatever they're doing.

I do not know if the results we get from observing parents who beat their children harshly for minor perceived infractions can be generalized to parents who spank their children infrequently for extreme and dangerous infractions. Literally do not know. I would like to see a study that controls for that. I have no idea where to go looking.

If the conjecture of your anecdotes were correct then how come the US has higher rates of teenage pregnancies, teen violence, teen crime, teen gangs etc than most other similarly rich nations?

Because it has higher poverty rates, inferior social programs to deal with those poverty rates, a massive drug and incarceration problem among communities affected by those poverty rates...?

With the odds that stacked against the US, I'd expect higher rates of teen pregnancy, teen violence, and teen gangs whether spanking was practiced in the US or not.

[Dave]

Could we stop with the useless personal anecdotes?
Especially since they are based on flawed reasoning.

Excuse me, the reason I posted my anecdotes was because Simon asked:
"Are there even parents who do manage to restrain themselves from using it casually? "

At which point, if I can point to ANY set of parents who do not use spanking casually (including mine), then I can answer that question with "Yes, there exist parents who do not use spanking casually."

I know that anecdotes don't mean anything, but to answer Simon's question, they were useful.

If the conjecture of your anecdotes were correct then how come the US has higher rates of teenage pregnancies, teen violence, teen crime, teen gangs etc than most other similarly rich nations?

Now wait just a minute here, I don't think anyone actually has hard evidence to show that spanking your children in an appropriate manner actually improves their behavior.
I also don't see anyone further claiming that a significant fraction of parents employ spanking in an appropriate manner (and thus we would expect gross improvement in common societal health metrics over time).

Also Simon is right on the money by pointing out that the US has other significant problems that are much more likely to contribute to the symptoms you were pointing out, and the effect that spanking would have on these symptoms is effectively unknown and could even be lost in the noise of the data.

So I think the statement "The US leads the world in <problems>. spanking should have reduced this, thus spanking failed", which appears to be roughly what you said, is really about 5 premises short of a conclusion.