An Analysis of the Research on Spanking Part 4

Putting it All Together

After reading the last two posts, you might wonder if the pro-spanking and anti-spanking researchers are on different planets, because their research is so starkly different. There are studies saying spanking is the most effective way of reducing antisocial behavior, and studies saying that spanking causes antisocial behavior. There are studies saying that spanking two times a month is frequent, and studies saying that five times a day is moderate. There were studies saying that spanking was related to lower drug use, and studies saying that it caused rebellion, depression, and drug use. The research was split very nearly 50/50.

Who wouldn't be confused?

But I do think there are some trends that we can recognize. First, nearly all of the studies that accounted for spanking frequency showed that too much spanking can be bad. In other words, quality is much better than quantity. Second, the state of mind of the parent is also important. Don't spank in anger. Don't spank impulsively. Don't spank if you don't believe in it as part of your family's disciplinary strategy. And certainly don't spank if you have a history of abuse or other psychological issues. The studies that accounted for these behaviors nearly all showed that a parent who is in control of themselves and spanks purposefully gets better results than a parent who is apt to lose control.

And, apparently, white parents need to be more careful about this than black parents. Don't ask me why, but at least three studies showed that spanking was beneficial for black children but not as effective for white children. None of the research looked at Asian children. Naturally. ;-)

Also, much of the pro-spanking research indicates that the "sweet spot" for spanking is between 2 and 6 years old. In both younger and older children, you start to see negative effects. There were studies in the anti-spanking research that showed negative outcomes for the 2-6 age range. However, there were only three studies that exclusively looked within that age range, and they were all published this year. Most of the other studies looked at children under two or at elementary school children.

In fact, nearly all the research on elementary or older children showed some negative results, and nearly all the research on infants showed negative results. So if it were me, I would suggest not spanking a child younger than 1 or older than about 8. For young toddlers and for older elementary school students, use caution. Certainly don't do it frequently, and even then it should be a mild version of a spanking.

So, confession time - what do we do in our house? We really only "spank" for one offense right now, and that is touching the computers. She has already destroyed one laptop by kicking it in a fit of anger, and she has also poured water on a running computer which was very lucky to only lose a video card. But the end result is that she has lost computer privileges. She can look, but she can't touch. Here is what we do if she disobeys:

The first time she touches my keyboard I remove her hand and say firmly, "Do not touch Mama's computer. Do you understand?"

The second time she touches my keyboard within the same 10 or 15 minutes, I again remove her hand and say firmly, "Do not touch Mama's computer. If you touch it again I will give you a spanking. Do you understand?"

The third time she touches the keyboard (again, in a reasonable time frame so that she should remember what I said), she gets a mild slap on the wrists and a repeat of the previous warning: "Don't touch. If you do this again, you get another spanking. Do you understand?"

Etc. About once every other day or so I will "practice" on myself just to make sure I'm not hitting too hard.

Pearl is only 15 months old. I don't anticipate seriously expanding our "spankable offenses" until she is much older. I also plan to give her fewer warnings once she is old enough that I know she understands the house rules. At this age I think it is only fair for me to give her ample warning and attempt to solve the problem without spanking whenever possible.

What conclusions have you drawn from the research? How did or do you handle spanking in your house?

An Analysis of the Research on Spanking Part 3

The Case Against Spanking

Yesterday I shared with you 14 studies that made the case for spanking. Today I will discuss the 15 studies that make a case against spanking. Here, in brief, is what they said:

When parents spank their children, there is a higher rate of psychological reactance (that is, rebellion), more aggression, a greater tendency to solve problems with violence, and to engage in antisocial behaviors. There is a greater incidence in adulthood of anxiety and depression. There was a correlation between abuse and spanking (abusive parents were more likely to spank, not that spanking parents were more likely to be abusive). Infants who are spanked are more likely to be injured. The effect is greatest when the parent spanks impulsively and when they use an object, though negative outcomes were observed even when controlling for that.

Again, for those of you who are crazy like me, I have included summaries of each of the studies below. The number in parentheses is the link number at pubmed. Search for "spanking". Tomorrow we will put all the research together and attempt to come up with consensus.

1992 (102) - 169 adults were given a Narcissism test and a psychological reactance test. "Persons who were more narcissistic tended to score higher in reactance and had fathers who used monetary rewards more and encouraged independence to a greater extent. These results are contrary to those expected from Kernberg's and Kohut's views linking narcissism to less nurturance by parents. Higher psychological reactance scores correlated with less praise, more scolding, and more verbal abuse from both parents. Psychological reactance scores also correlated with more spanking by fathers and with their being described as being less fair. These results suggest that punitive disciplinary styles are not related to narcissism but are to psychological reactance."

1994 (99) - "Seventeen Hispanic elementary schoolboys with violent behavior problems were compared with 27 matched control students who were not overtly violent at school. Violent boys were significantly more likely to not live with their fathers, to have unmarried parents, to have more siblings, and to have fathers who never show them affection. Parents of violent boys were more likely than those of matched control students to use spanking for discipline and to admit that they rarely express affection for their sons."

1995 (95) - "Fifty-two Hispanic mothers attending an urban hospital clinic were given a questionnaire. Behavior problem scores were significantly related to the use of yelling and hitting/spanking as methods of discipline. Precarious health status and low enrollment in preschool programs also were reported."

1997 (84) - A longitudinal study of 807 6-9 year olds showed that, "Forty-four percent of the mothers reported spanking their children during the week prior to the study and they spanked them an average of 2.1 times that week. The more spanking at the start of the period, the higher the level of ASB 2 years later. The change is unlikely to be owing to the child's tendency toward ASB or to confounding with demographic characteristics or with parental deficiency in other key aspects of socialization because those variables were statistically controlled."

1998 (79) - The study followed 993 mothers of children aged 2-14. The study showed that, "the more CP experienced by the child, the greater the tendency for the child to engage in ASB and to act impulsively. These relationships hold even after controlling for family socioeconomic status, the age and sex of the child, nurturance by the mother, and the level of noncorporal interventions by the mother. There were also significant interaction effects of CP with impulsiveness by the mother. When CP was carried out impulsively, it was most strongly related to child impulsiveness and ASB; when CP was done when the mother was under control, the relationship to child behavior problems was reduced but still present."

1999 (75) - A survey of 9953 residents of Ontario 15 years or older found that, "[a]mong the respondents without a history of physical or sexual abuse during childhood, those who reported being slapped or spanked "often" or "sometimes" had significantly higher lifetime rates of anxiety disorders [...], alcohol abuse or dependence [...] and one or more externalizing problems[...], compared with those who reported "never" being slapped or spanked. There was also an association between a history of slapping or spanking and major depression, but it was not statistically significant[...]."

2000 (73) - "Parents of 631 behaviorally disruptive children described the extent to which they experienced warm and involved interactions with their children and the extent to which their discipline strategies were inconsistent and punitive and involved spanking and physical aggression. As expected from a developmental perspective, parenting practices that included punitive interactions were associated with elevated rates of all child disruptive behavior problems. Low levels of warm involvement were particularly characteristic of parents of children who showed elevated levels of oppositional behaviors. Physically aggressive parenting was linked more specifically with child aggression. In general, parenting practices contributed more to the prediction of oppositional and aggressive behavior problems than to hyperactive behavior problems, and parenting influences were fairly consistent across ethnic groups and sex."

2003 (45) - "We show here that subtle forms of maltreatment during infancy (below 1 year of age) have potential consequences for the functioning of the child's adrenocortical response system. Infants who received frequent corporal punishment (e.g., spanking) showed high hormonal reactivity to stress (a repeated separation from mother, combined with the presence of a stranger). In addition, infants who experienced frequent emotional withdrawal by their mothers (either as a result of maternal depression, or mother's strategic use of withdrawal as a control tactic) showed elevated baseline levels of cortisol. It was suggested that there are hormonal "costs" when mothers show response patterns (intentionally or unintentionally) that limit their utility as a means of buffering the child against stress. The hormonal responses shown by infants may alter the functioning of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis in ways that, if continued, may foster risk for immune disorders, sensitization to later stress, cognitive deficits, and social-emotional problems."

2004 (39) - The study followed 1966 babies from 0 to 24 months for 4 years. This is another study that found a difference between blacks and whites: "White non-Hispanic children who were spanked more frequently before age 2 were substantially more likely to have behavior problems after entry into school, controlling for other factors. For Hispanic and black children, associations between spanking frequency and behavior problems were not statistically significant and were not consistent across outcome measures."

2006 (34) - This was a longitudinal study of about 5000 infants (0 - 12 months) from mostly single parent homes. The study found that "Multivariate regression analyses revealed two significant independent risk factors [for infant injury in the first year of life], maternal alcohol use [...] and mother spanking child in the previous month."

2008 (19) - A telephone survey of women with children under 18 years old revealed that, "Mothers who report that the child was spanked are 2.7 [...] times more likely to report abuse. Increases in the frequency of reported spanking in the last year are also associated with increased odds of abuse [...]. Mothers reporting spanking with an object are at markedly increased odds of reporting abuse [...]."

2009 (14) - The study followed 2573 toddlers aged 1-3. "Both spanking and verbal punishment varied by maternal race/ethnicity. Child fussiness at age 1 predicted spanking and verbal punishment at all 3 ages. Cross-lagged path analyses indicated that spanking (but not verbal punishment) at age 1 predicted child aggressive behavior problems at age 2 and lower Bayley mental development scores at age 3. Neither child aggressive behavior problems nor Bayley scores predicted later spanking or verbal punishment. In some instances, maternal race/ethnicity and/or emotional responsiveness moderated the effects of spanking and verbal punishment on child outcomes."

2010 (9) - The study followed 2461 3-year-olds until they were 5 years old. The study found that " Frequent use of CP (ie, mother's use of spanking more than twice in the previous month) when the child was 3 years of age was associated with increased risk for higher levels of child aggression when the child was 5 years of age [...], even with controlling for the child's level of aggression at age 3 and the aforementioned potential confounding factors and key demographic features [ including maternal child physical maltreatment, psychological maltreatment, and neglect, intimate partner aggression victimization, stress, depression, substance use, and consideration of abortion]." (Remember the pro-spanking study from yesterday that showed that moderate spanking was up to 5 times a day? It's all in how you run the numbers....)

2010 (4) - In 102 families with children aged 3-7, "[c]hildren whose parents approved of and used CP were more likely to endorse hitting as a strategy for resolving interpersonal conflicts with peers and siblings. Frequent spanking was the strongest predictor of children's acceptance of aggressive problem solving, above and beyond parental acceptance, parental experience of CP, and familial demographics."

2010 (2) - The study found that in a sample of 1997 3-year-olds, "[O]f couples who reported any family aggression (87%), 54% reported that both CP and IPAV occurred. The most prevalent patterns of co-occurrence involved both parents as aggressors either toward each other (ie, bilateral IPAV) or toward the child. The presence of bilateral IPAV essentially doubled the odds that 1 or both parents would use CP, even after controlling for potential confounders such as parenting stress, depression, and alcohol or other drug use. Of the 5 patterns of co-occurring family aggression assessed, the "single aggressor" model, in which only 1 parent aggressed in the family, received the least amount of empirical support."

An Analysis of the Reasearch on Spanking Part 2

The Evidence For and Against


The Evidence For Spanking:

There were fourteen studies that showed either a neutral or a net positive effect of spanking on children. The quotes below from the studies are tedious, so I will sum up here. Spanking is effective at reducing antisocial behavior. It is more effective in black families than white families, and more effective for younger children (about ages 2-6) than older children and infants. Spanking has no effect on self-esteem, reduces the likelihood that the child will do drugs, and rated similarly with other methods of discipline. Above-average use of spanking produces adverse effects, but moderate use is associated with greater nurturing on the part of the parent than below-average use of spanking.

So as you can see, there is significant research spanning 4 decades that suggests that not only is spanking not harmful to children, but that it can actually be beneficial. Anyone who suggests otherwise either doesn't know what they're talking about or has an agenda.

But that doesn't mean that there are no ill effects from spanking. The research behind childhood aggression and spanking is well-documented, as we will see tomorrow with the case against spanking.

Until then, here are the studies in greater detail for those of you like me who are crazy enough to want to read about them (the number in parenthesis refers to the number of the study on pubmed after searching for "spanking"):

1975 (115) - A study of 5,044 US Army soldiers showed that, "Childhood antecedents [...] associated with non-use of illegal drugs and which showed as much as a 20% difference in reported occurrence between abusers and non-users of illegal drugs were: spanking, church attendance, first alcoholic drink after 15 years, and perceived "happy" parental marriage." No such relationship (positive or negative) was seen for alcohol abuse.

1989 (106) - The abstract, in full (emphasis added), reads: "Punishment has long been a controversial topic in psychology, perhaps partly because its effects are different under different circumstances. This study used retrospective reports from college students to examine the effects of spanking, a common aversive punishment, on self-esteem and perceived fairness of parental discipline, while taking the effects of other parental characteristics into account. No parental characteristic interacted with the slightly negative effect of spanking on self-esteem and fairness. However, controlling for positive communication or for a parent-oriented motivation for spanking eliminated the negative effects of spanking, suggesting that the negative effects reflected use of spanking as a replacement for positive communication with the child."

1991 (103) - The study measured the self-esteem scores of 134 college students, and also rated the students' perceived fairness of their parents. Children perceived parents who "used spanking, grounding, or scolding more, and had been over-all stricter" as being more unfair. However, "[t]here was no evidence that spanking, grounding, scolding, or monetary rewards had any effect on children's self-esteem scores, whether these methods were used by mothers or by fathers."

1997 (86) - " Five articles that met selection criteria revealed that abusive parents spanked their children more often than did nonabusive parents. Aggregated data from nonabusive parents were used to compute a continuum or "normal range" of daily spanking frequencies from 0 to 5.73 (M = 2.5) times in 24 hours." This is interesting to me, since one of the anti-spanking studies I'll show tomorrow defined "frequent" spanking as twice in a month. Definitions, definitions....

1997 (83) - This is an especially interesting study of 1,112 4- to 11-year olds. It is the earliest study I've seen that looks at spanking and race (and it's not the last study we'll see that addresses this). Very, very intriguing: "[S]panking predicted fewer fights for children aged 4 to 7 years and for children who are black and more fights for children aged 8 to 11 years and for children who are white. Regression analyses within subgroups yielded no evidence that spanking fostered aggression in children younger than 6 years and supported claims of increased aggression for only 1 subgroup: 8- to 11-year-old white boys in single-mother families." Incidentally, this was also the only study I found where spanking was not largely linked to aggression.

1999 (74) - An analysis of the data 20 years after Sweden enacted a spanking ban showed that, "the spanking ban has made little change in problematic forms of physical punishment. The conclusion calls for more timely and rigorous evaluations of similar social experiments in the future."

2000 (59) - Another study shows a difference between spanking in black families and white families: "Although a positive correlation between the use of physical discipline (i.e., spanking) and disruptive disorders in children is found in studies of European American families, research on African American families has found a negative association or none at all. Moreover, a review of the literature indicates that the positive association between spanking and child behavior problems is bidirectional for White families, whereas it is the product of reverse causation (i.e., negative child behaviors result in spanking) in Black families."

2000 (57) - A review of the published literature on spanking: "All six studies that used clinical samples (including four randomized clinical studies) and all three sequential-analysis studies found beneficial outcomes, such as reduced noncompliance and fighting, primarily when nonabusive spanking was used to back up milder disciplinary tactics in 2- to 6-year olds. Five of eight longitudinal studies that controlled for initial child misbehavior found predominantly detrimental outcomes of spanking. However, those detrimental outcomes were primarily due to overly frequent use of physical punishment. Furthermore, apparently detrimental outcomes have been found for every alternative disciplinary tactic when investigated with similar analyses. Such detrimental associations of frequent use of any disciplinary tactic may be due to residual confounding from initial child misbehavior. Specific findings suggest discriminations between effective and counterproductive physical punishment with young children."

2001 (32) - A study of 2017 parents of children under 3. Parents with "above-average use of spanking shared a high prevalence of parent depressive symptoms and a low level of nurturing [...] Parents who used average levels of spanking made frequent use of nonphysical disciplinary strategies and had high levels of nurturing interactions. Parents who reported below-average spanking had relatively low levels of both disciplinary and nurturing interactions."

2005 (35) - A meta-analysis of 26 studies showed that, "effect sizes significantly favored conditional spanking over 10 of 13 alternative disciplinary tactics for reducing child noncompliance or antisocial behavior. Customary physical punishment yielded effect sizes equal to alternative tactics, except for one large study favoring physical punishment. Only overly severe or predominant use of physical punishment compared unfavorably with alternative disciplinary tactics."

2007 (25) - I won't quote from this one, because the language is a bit frustrating, but the gist is that when the mother endorses the use of spanking, both she and the children suffer from fewer depressive symptoms. For mothers who did not endorse the use of spanking and yet still spanked, there was a link between depression on the part of the mother and the child.

2008 (22) - A longitudenal study of 1,863 infants showed that, "Spanking during infancy predicted slightly more severe conduct problems, but the prediction was moderated by infant fussiness and positive affect. Thus, individual differences in risk for mother-rated conduct problems across childhood are already partly evident in maternal ratings of temperament during the first year of life and are predicted by early parenting and parenting-by-temperament interactions."

2010 (11) - This study re-analyzed a 1988 study of 785 children born between 1979 and 1982. The original study only analyzed the effect of spanking on antisocial behavior. This study looked at the effects of grounding, privilege removal, sending children to their room, and psychotherapy. The study found that, "[a] similar pattern of adverse effects was shown for grounding and psychotherapy and partially for the other two disciplinary tactics. All of these effects [including spanking] became non-significant after controlling for latent comprehensive measures of externalizing behavior problems."

An Analysis of the Research on Spanking Part 1

As a mom, I am so sick of all the debates in the so-called Mommy Wars. One side vaccinates, the other doesn't. One side spanks, the other considers it child abuse. One side says let the baby cry it out so they can learn to self-soothe, the other side says never leave a crying baby. On and on and on it goes, and the truth is that it is hard for the average mom to determine what is right.

So it is with the spanking debate. And I, as a scientifically-minded mom, wanted to know what the research actually said. So I went to pubmed and searched for spanking. There were 151 studies that showed up, although only 33 of them included viewable abstracts that were relevant to the spanking debate. I read through each of those abstracts and made notes of what the researchers had discovered. And now I will present it to you.

But first I want to remind everyone that all research has a bias, and that it is incredibly easy to manipulate the data to get a desired result. My engineering professors demonstrated this to our class several times, and I myself witnessed it in the lab. This does not mean that the research is useless, per se - published research is often the best tool we have to help us make informed decisions - but it is a wise observer who recognizes that the bias does exist. When reviewing the literature on spanking, I saw bias on both sides of the debate, though honestly most of the bias I saw was on the anti-spanking side (though perhaps that was only because there were more anti-spanking studies than pro-spanking studies).

The biggest oversight I saw from the anti-spanking crowd was completely dismissing degrees of spanking. That is to say, they did not seem to differentiate from infrequent spankings given when the parent wasn't angry and frequent spankings given during a fit of rage. Is there a difference between the two? Maybe, maybe not, but if I'm going to take an anti-spanking study seriously they'd better account for it. Some of the anti-spanking studies accounted for this, but not the majority. On the other hand, the vast majority of the pro-spanking studies accounted for this difference, and all of them found a difference in the two approaches.

It also bugged me that the anti-spanking studies would frequently phrase their findings in what I think is a backwards fashion. Like saying "A square is a rectangle. Squares are bad, therefore rectangles are bad." I'll give two examples from my reading.

The first study I read said that in homes with domestic violence, parents were two times more likely to use corporal punishment. OK, got it. And how about the reverse? Are homes that use corporal punishment more likely to have domestic violence? The rate of corporal punishment in the US is significantly higher than the rate of domestic violence, so to me it seemed logical to at least show the reverse statistic as well.

Another study said that mothers who used psychological aggression were more likely to use corporal punishment on their children. So what can we take away from that study? That corporal punishment is equivalent to psychological aggression? Certainly not. That the use of corporal punishment leads women to psychological aggression? Of course not, that's not what that data showed. Unless you demonstrate which is the cause and which is the effect (if there even is a causal relationship between them), any conclusions you draw from a study like that are merely thought pieces. They shouldn't be used to drive the way families operate, and they certainly shouldn't be used to drive public policy.

Again, this type of backwards logic popped up over and over again in the anti-spanking studies. They made spanking out to be the cause - which it might be, I'm not taking sides here - but their research doesn't support that claim at all. Rather, it showed it to be the result of something else in some cases.

And the final thing about the anti-spanking studies that really bugged me is that over and over again, they would research something completely unrelated to how spanking affects children (the rate of corporal punishment in the US, or the predictors for who will spank their children - overwhelmingly those who were spanked as children, by the way), and then the conclusion to the study would be that since spanking is bad for children, this is a disturbing trend that needs to be addressed by public policy. First of all, your research didn't even touch that subject. Second, based on my research, there is no consensus in the literature about this. The closest to a consensus I could determine was that some forms of spanking cause aggression in certain segments of the population (more on that below), and that is hardly cause for a change in public policy. So please, stick to your actual body of research in your conclusions.

My main objection to the pro-spanking studies is that they largely ignored the spanking-aggression link that most of the anti-spanking studies addressed. Instead they focused on how spanking reduces antisocial behavior in children and the psychological effect of spanking on children. They were also a few statements that bothered me, such as how the anti-spanking studies would show "the same results for other methods of punishment if the same methods were used." OK... did you actually do studies on time-outs, loss of privileges, etc, and run the numbers? Or is that just supposition?

The point is that both sides have a tendency to present the data in a way that favors their side. This doesn't make the researchers evil - every researcher does this to a certain extent. But as we go forward in this series of posts, I want you to keep this in the front of your mind. It is healthy to read research with a good amount of skepticism.

To be continued in Part 2 - The Evidence For Spanking