The previous chapter provided evidence that, even though almost three quarters of Americans believe that spanking is sometimes necessary, a growing number are opposed to spanking and think it should be avoided. Paradoxically, however, almost all parents of toddlers in the United States continue to spank, as shown in Chapter 2. Similarly, a survey of the disciplinary practices and attitudes' of 1, 000 parents in N orthem Ireland found that the majority of parents have negative attitudes toward physical discipline. Nonetheless, many of the parents continued to spank despite the fact they do not believe it to be effective (Bunting, Webb, & Healy, 2010).
, The belief that spanking should be avoided may be even more true of professionals who provide information to parents, such as child psychologists, parent educators, nurses, pediatricians, and social workers. However, few of these professionals directly advise parents not to spank, and even fewer advise parents to never spank. And as was shown in Chapter 1, about one third had actually advised parents to spank in the previous 12 months (Knox & Brouwer, 2008). An article in American Family Physician (Banks, 2002) argued that other methods of discipline are more effective and cites numerous studies that have linked negative outcomes to spanking. However, the article also says that "spanking is inappropriate in children younger than 18 months" (Banks, 2002, p. 1450). This implies that it is appropriate for children over the age of 18 months, and there is nothing in the article that says it should never be used with children of any age.
The studies presented in the last parts of Chapter 2 and the previous chapter found that this high percentage of parents who spank young children has continued into the 21st century. As we pointed out in the conclusion to the previous chapter, it seems that, although Americans now believe that spanking should be avoided, most also continue to believe that it may sometimes be necessary when other methods have not served to correct repeated misbehavior, and they act on that erroneous belief. This contradiction between not favoring spanking yet using spanking has also been shown internationally by a 35-nation study (UNICEF, 2010). Given these paradoxical discrepancies, this chapter addresses the following questions:
* What explains the discrepancy between what professionals who advise parents believe and what they actually advise and the discrepancy between what parents believe and what they do?
* What are the implications of that explanation of the discrepancy for advising parents about spanking?
* Should parents be advised to never spank under any circumstance, and given the current research evidence, is such advice ethical?
The predominant approach is now to help parents use an alternative strategy rather than spanking. We prefer to say nonviolent discipline because referring to those methods of correction and control as alternatives implies that the basic method is spanking. Regardless of the terminology, advice to never spank, no matter what circumstance, is avoided by all but a few pediatricians and parent educators. The analysis will suggest a paradoxical aspect of focusing exclusively on nonviolent alternative discipline techniques rather than a clear never spank message: It unwittingly contributes to perpetuating the use of spanking.
The Three Paradoxes
It is important to identify the conditions that explain why almost everyone spanks toddlers because that can contribute to understanding disciplinary strategies and to developing methods to help parents shift to nonaggressive discipline strategies. Three paradoxes about spanking provide a framework for explaining why almost everyone spanks toddlers and what to do to change that.
Paradox 1: Approval of Spanking Has Decreased, but Spanking Toddlers Has Not
Most aspects of corporal punishment have decreased in major ways in the last generation. The previous chapter showed that the percent of parents who hit adolescents has also dropped by 56% for children age 13 and over and by 31% for children age 9 to 12, but only by 12% for children age 5 to 8 and 11% for children age 2 to 4. The positive side of this is the 56% decrease for teenagers. The troublesome part is that, despite the decrease, about one out of seven teenage children continue to be hit by parents. In addition, as we have pointed out repeatedly in this and previous chapters, despite these major steps away from corporal punishment, at least 90% of parents of toddlers spank. Moreover, other studies show that parents who spank toddlers did so an average of about 3 times a week (Berlin et al., 2009; Giles-Sims et al., 1995; Holden et al., 1995; Vittrup & Holden, 2010). Obviously, we need to understand why parents who don't believe in spanking continue to hit toddlers and do it so frequently
Paradox 2: Professionals Opposed to Spanking Fail to Advise Parents to Never Spank
Many pediatricians, nurses, developmental psychologists, and parent educators we talk to are now opposed to spanking, at least in principle. But there is evidence that, despite being against spanking, all but a small minority of professionals continue to believe that spanking may sometimes be necessary and advise parents to spank when necessary (Burgess et al., 2010; Schenck et al., 2000). The main reason for this contradiction may be that they believe that spanking works when other methods do not. For example, Marjorie Gunnoe, a psychologist who has done research on spanking, responded to a reporter who asked about her recent study: "I think of spanking as a dangerous tool, but then there are times when there is a job big enough for a dangerous tool" (Black, 2010). In other words, spanking is acceptable if it is used as a last resort. Another explanation is that social scientists, like other Americans, subscribe to the cultural myth that when loving parents spank to correct misbehavior, it is harmless if done in moderation, whatever that is. It is like the courts, until about 1870, _llpholding "physically chastising an errant wife," provided it is done in moderation (Calvert, 1974).
When we have suggested to pediatricians, parent educators, or social scientists that it is essential to tell parents to never spank or use any other type of corporal punishment, with rare exception, this idea has been rejected. This is because many clinical child psychologists now believe that, although spanking is not desirable, it is sometimes necessary. Many academic developmental psychologists believe that the important thing is the overall pattern of parenting, not one behavior such as spanking (Baumrind et al., 2002; Parke, 2002). That is like saying that, in nutrition research and clinical advice, there is no point to focus on just one element, for example Vitamin C, because the important thing is the overall pattern of nutrition. A closely related objection to focusing on spanking is the belief that the problem is not spanking per se, but the overlap of spanking with harsh and incompetent parenting. The latter is not very plausible because over 90% of parents spank toddlers, although with greatly different frequency. Therefore, harsh and incompetent parents could only be the real cause of the harmful side effects of spanking if over 90% of parents were harsh and incompetent.
Rebecca Socolar, a leading behavioral pediatrician, told one of us she does not advise parents to never spank because that would tum off parents, and she would lose the opportunity to help them in other ways. Many professionals who advise parents have the same belief. Still another objection to advising parents to never spank is based on the assumption that some parents don't know what else to do or lack the verbal skills to effectively use cognitive correction. If so, preventing such parents from spanking could be harmful to children because they lack other means of fulfilling a parent's obligation to correct misbehavior.
One of us has been told many times in discussions with parent educators, child psychologists, and pediatricians that advising parents to never spank is a negative approach, and that a positive approach is needed, by which they mean teaching parents nonviolent disciplinary strategies. Teaching nonviolent strategies is very desirable. However, it is not a precondition for ending spanking because parents already use many other means of correcting misbehavior. As pointed out earlier, for most parents spanking is a last resort mode of discipline. If they .stuck to the other methods consistently and left out the spanking, that alone would usually make them more effective parents.
The cumulative effect of these objections is to say nothing about spanking or to avoid making a recommendation (see Chapter 1). Widely used parenting programs such as Parent Effectiveness Training (Gordon, 2000) and STEP (Dinkmeyer & McKay, 2008) provide nonviolent alternatives to spanking but are silent on spanking itself. Fortunately, this is slowly changing. A pioneer in this change was Penelope Leach. Her book Your Baby and Child (Leach, 1977) had six pages on never hit. In several editions, it has sold two million copies worldwide. It is widely believed to be influential, but for years was the only widely read book giving this advice to parents. Since then, although they are still the exception, an increasing number of books for parents, parent education programs, and guidelines for professionals, advise never, under any circumstance, to spank a child. Examples of programs that directly advise never spanking for which there is empirical studies of effectiveness, including randomized control trials for some, include:
* The Baby College (http://www.hcz.org/programs/early-childhood)
* Early Start Program (Fergusson, Grant, Horwood, & Ridder, 2005)
* Effective Black Parenting (Alvy & Marigna, 1987)
* Family Nurturing Program (Palusci, Crum, Bliss, & Bavolek, 2008)
* Nurturing Parenting Programs (Bavolek, 1992-2006)
* Parent-Child Interactive Therapy (Chaffin et al., 2004)
* Parent Management Training (Patterson, 1995)
* Parent Training (Beauchaine, Webster-Stratton, & Reid, 2005; WebsterStratton, 1984)
* Play Nicely Video (Scholer, Hamilton, Johnson, & Scott, 2010)
* Social Development Program (Hawkins & Haggerty, 2008)
* Tipple P (Markie-Dadds & Sanders, 2006; Prinz, Sanders, Shapiro, Whitaker, & Lutzker, 2009)
* VIPP-SD Program (Van Zeijl et al., 2006)
Both the movement away from spanking and a key limitation of that movement are illustrated by the publication of the "Guidelines for Effective Discipline" of the American Academy of Pediatrics (1998). This statement took years of controversy and negotiation to achieve and was an important step forward. Nevertheless, it also reflects the problem that is the focus of this chapter and that helps explain why almost all parents of toddlers continue to hit them. It recommends that parents avoid corporal punishment. However, as pointed out in Chapter 1, in order to obtain sufficient support for this guideline to be approved, it carefully avoids saying never spank. The difference between advising parents to avoid spanking and advising them to never spank may seem like splitting hairs. Unfortunately, the typical sequence of parent-child interaction that eventuates in spanking suggests that, for the reasons to be described later, in the absence of a commitment to never spank, even parents who are against spanking are likely to spank toddlers.
Paradox 3: Focusing Exclusively on Teaching "Alternatives" Results in Almost Everyone Spanking
The paradox that focusing exclusively on alternatives to spanking rather than on recommending never spanking results in almost everyone spanking, grows out of the combination of two factors:
* The high short-run failure rate of all methods of correcting and controlling the behavior of toddlers (see below).
* The myth that spanking works when other things do not.
When toddlers are corrected for a specific misbehavior (such as for hitting another child or disobeying), the recidivism rate according to one study is about 50% within two hours and 80% within the same day (Larzelere, 1996). As a consequence, on any given day, a parent is almost certain to find that so-called alternative disciplinary strategies such as explaining, deprivation of privileges, and time-out, do not work. They do not know that Larzelere found that spanking had the same two-hour and same-day failure rate. As a consequence, when the child repeats the behavior, because our culture teaches that spanking works when other things have failed, parents tum to spanking. The result is the infamous statistic: over 90% spank toddlers.
As shown in the previous chapter, about 70% of Americans believe that spanking is sometimes necessary. A generation or two ago, about that many probably believed that spanking was not only sometimes necessary, but that it was good for children. Today, although we do not know of a survey on this, we think that most Americans now also believe that spanking is something to be avoided. The contradiction between believing that it is best to avoid spanking and the belief that it is sometimes necessary is partly an example of the inconsistencies that occur when a society is changing. However, we think the contradiction is even more the result of the deeply entrenched belief that spanking works when other methods do not. That belief is why even parents and pediatricians who "do not believe in spanking" also believe that spanking is sometimes necessary, and why so many parents who are opposed to spanking spank. The same situation existed in Sweden 40 and 50 years ago. Surveys in the 1960s found that 45% thought that spanking was not a good thing to do, but 95% spanked toddlers (Modig, 2009). As described in our concluding chapter, Sweden resolved the contradiction by its 1979 law making spanking illegal and by a massive public information effort. Surveys in Sweden in recent years have found that only 10% approve of spanking, and only 11% spank (Modig, 2009).
Consistency is Confounded with Spanking
An important difference between spanking and other disciplinary strategies is that, when a child repeats a misbehavior for which he or she was spanked, parents do not question the effectiveness of spanking. The idea that spanking works when other methods of correction do not is so ingrained in American culture that, when the child repeats the misbehavior an hour or two after a spanking (or sometimes a few minutes later), parents fail to perceive that this indicates that spanking has the same high failure rate as explaining and deprivation of privileges. They spank again and then again, for as many times as it takes to ultimately secure compliance. Repeating the spanking or any other method of correction as many times as ,necessary is the correct strategy because consistency and perseverance is what it takes for a child to learn. However, spanking parents attribute the improved behavior to the~spanking, not to the consistency and perseverance in correction. What they and most parents do not know is that, given the same consistency and perseverance with a recalcitrant child, nonspanking methods would not only also work, but work better (Beauchaine et al., 2005; Capaldi & Eddy, 2000; Patterson, Reid, & Dishion, 1992) and not have the long-term harmful side effects documented in previous chapters.
Because these three paradoxes are rooted in cultural myths about spanking, it is necessary to consider the research evidence on the two most directly relevant of those myths about spanking: the myth that spanking may sometimes be necessary because it works when other methods do not and the myth that spanking is harmless if done by loving parents (see Straus, 2001 a, for other myths about spanking).
The Myth that Spanking is Harmless
The chapters in Parts II, III, IV, and the chapters that follow provide abundant evidence that spanking has serious and often lifelong harmful side effects. The meta-analysis of 88 studies by Gershoff (2002) analyzed 117 tests of the hypothesis that spanking is associated with harmful side effects such as aggression and delinquency in childhood, low empathy or conscience, poor parent-child relations, and as an adult, health problems such as depression, crime, and antisocial behavior. Of the 117 tests, 110 or 94% found results indicating a harmful effect. This is an almost unprecedented degree of consistency in research findings in any field of science, and perhaps even more unprecedented in social science. A number of these studies controlled for parental warmth and other context factors, as was done for the research in this book, and showed that spanking is harmful even when done by loving parents.
Most of the studies reviewed by Gershoff were cross-sectional, thus, it is plausible to interpret the relationships as showing, not the harmful effects of spanking, but that misbehavior, delinquency, and mental illness cause parents to use spanking to deal with those problems. That interpretation has become dramatically less plausible since 1997. At least 14 studies since then, including three in this book and others summarized in the next chapter, mark a watershed change. These are prospective studies that take into account the child's misbehavior at Time 1 as well as whether the parents spanked. They examine the change in behavior subsequent to the spanking. These studies, therefore, provide evidence on two opposite views about the effect of responding to the misbehavior by spanking. One view is that the appropriate use of spanking not only stops the misbehavior, but also results in the child ultimately becoming better behaved. We have called this the "teach them a lesson they won't forget" view of spanking. The other view is that, on average, spanking increases the probability of antisocial behavior and other problems~.We call this the universal harm theory because we believe it applies in all nations and cultures.
The idea that spanking teaches children a lesson they won't forget is a deeply ingrained part of American culture. The other view is that, although spanJ.9ng usually does stop the misbehavior in the immediate situationin the longer run-it results in an increased probability of misbehavior, a lower IQ and educational progress (Part III), and an increased probability of antisocial and criminal behavior (Parts II and IV). We have called this a boomerang effect. Consistent with the 94% of agreement between the studies reviewed by Gershoff, the 18 longitudinal studies presented or reviewed in this book, all found harmful effects. All were based on community samples of children, and none of them depended on adults recalling what happened when they were children. All controlled for many variables (see the list in Chapter 1) such as socioeconomic status and parental warmth and support that could be the real cause of the link between spanking and crime and other antisocial behavior as an adult. These studies found that, on average, spanking was associated with a post-spanking increase in many forms of antisocial behavior and crime.
The Myth that Spanking Works When Other Methods Fail
The idea that spanking works when other methods are not successful may be the most prevalent of the 1 0 myths that perpetuate spanking about spanking described in Straus (2001e). As pointed out previously, even people who "do not believe in spanking" on philosophical grounds or because of the evidence of harmful side effects, tend to think that spanking works when other methods have not served to correct the problem. For example, Dr. Lewis R. First, when Director of Child Protection at Children's Hospital, Boston, stated that he was opposed to corporal punishment but also said, "if a child repeatedly runs into traffic, for example, you may want to play the big card" (Lehman, 1989). This seeming contradiction probably occurred because, for Dr. First, protecting the safety of the child was even more important that avoiding spanking. But it can only be more important for the safety of children because it is based on the mistaken assumption that spanking works when other things do not.
Immediate, Short-Term, and Long-Term Effectiveness of Spanking
To adequately examine the effectiveness of spanking it is important to distinguish between effectiveness in three time periods: in the immediate situation, in the short run (the next few hours or days), and in the long run (months or years subsequent to the misbehavior that was corrected). This is summarized in Chart 18.1.
Parents can easily observe that spanking does usually work in the immediate situation. Nonviolent discipline methods also usually work in the immediate situation, including just telling the child "No. Stop that." The child is very likely to stop, at least for the next few minutes. More generally, nonaggressive discipline techniques, starting with saying "No" and explaining why the child should or should not do something, moving a child, separating quarrelling siblings, and/or using time-out are just about as likely to stop misbehavior such as fighting, at least for a time. If all of these techniques are effective in the immediate situation, the question then becomes, which techniques are more effective in the short run such as the next few hours and in the long run. The following sections discuss research that has examined the effectiveness of spanking across these two time periods.
The short run. The most definitive evidence that spanking is no more effective than other modes of discipline is from experimental studies that randomly assigned spanking as one of the means of correcting a child who leaves the time-out chair before the time is up. Experiments by Roberts and colleagues (Day & Roberts, 1983; Roberts, 1988; Roberts & Powers, 1990) demonstrated that spanking was not more effective than other methods of training a child to remain in time-out for the specified time. An example of a nonviolent method of teaching time-out is what they call the escape-barrier method. For this method, a child who breaks time-out is placed in a room with a waist-high piece of plywood held across the open door for a period of only one minute while the parent is standing there. The barrier method required an average of eight repetitions before the children were trained to stay in time-out by themselves. When spanking was used, it also required an average of eight repetitions. Thus, spanking did not work any better than other methods in getting a child to observe time-out. Not only did a single spanking fail to fix the problem, the spanked children engaged in more disruptive behavior (such as yelling and whining) before achieving compliance. In short, with the same degree of consistency and persistence, spanking is as effective but not more effective, than other methods that are applied as consistently.
Chart 18.1 Effectiveness and Side Effects of Spanking Compared with Nonviolent Discipline
An essential element in accounting for success in correction and control of toddlers is repetition and consistency. Almost nothing works, including spanking, without it. As previously pointed out, a difference between spanking and nonviolent methods of correction is that spanking parents tend to spank over and ov;er until the child conforms. For example, a study by Bean and Roberts (1981) of parents who used spanking to secure compliance with the child remaining in time-out found that the average number of spankings was 8.3 and the median was 3.5. The median session lasted 22 minutes. Thus, the children in this group were spanked once every 3 minutes until the child did comply. They then attribute the improved behavior to the spanking, not to persistence and consistency in correction.
Just the opposite tends to happen when parents use so-called alternatives, which we prefer to call nonviolent discipline. When the misbehavior almost inevitably reoccurs, instead of repeating the correction, the repetition of the misbehavior is attributed to the lack of effectiveness of the nonviolent correction rather than to the lack of persistence and consistency in applying nonviolent correction. The experiments just described show that when parents are equally persistent, nonviolent methods are equally effective.
Spanking for disobedience and fighting. Another study that found that spanking is not more effective used data provided by mothers of 40 children age 2 to 3 (Larzelere, 1996). The researchers asked the mothers to keep a discipline record for a set number of days. The mothers wrote the nature of the misbehavior and the type of corrective measure that was used. The results were similar to the experiments on teaching children to observe time-out. They showed that, with toddlers, all methods of discipline, including spanking, had a high shortterm failure rate as measured by the number of hours until the child repeated the misbehavior. The recidivism rate for misbehavior by the toddlers was about 50% within two hours. For a few children, the misbehavior was repeated within two minutes. By the end of the day, 80% had repeated the misbehavior.
Chart 18.2 compares four discipline scenarios from this study in respect to the average number of hours until a repetition of the misbehavior occurred. An effective discipline method is one that not only stops the behavior but also teaches the child to not do it again. Therefore, the longer the time before the misbehavior reoccurs, the more effective the method. Using this measure of effectiveness, Chart 18.2 shows that the four discipline types had about the same degree of effectiveness. Corporal punishment, either alone or in combination with reasoning, worked no better than reasoning alone, non-corporal punishment alone, reasoning, and corporal punishment. The statistical tests showed that the differences between methods were not statistically dependable.
The long run. Parents have the long-run effect in mind when they say that spanking will teach the child a lesson he won't forget. Unfortunately, the evidence in Parts II and IV and Chapter 19 shows that the long-run net effect is more often to increase rather than decrease the probability of antisocial behavior and crime. What many children don't forget is the aspect of spanking that parents do not think about, and if they did would want the child to forget-that their parents hit them, that hitting is morally correct, and that love and violence go together.
In some cases, that link between love and violence results in sadomasochistic sexual preferences. This is not a new idea. Rousseau (1928) attributed his need to be spanked in order to become sexual aroused to being spanked as a child. Gibson (1978), Greven (1990), Krafft-Ebing (1895), Money (1986), and Money and Lamacz (1989) also argued that being spanked as a child can lead to an adult interest in sexual activities that incorporate pain and humiliation similar to those experienced at the hands of loving parents. A study of 455 university students found that the more spanking experienced as a child, the greater the percent who enjoyed being spanked or tied up as part of sex (Straus & Donnelly, 2001a).
Chart 18.2 Spanking Does Not Deter Repeating the Misbehavior Any Longer than Non-Spanking
2,853 instances of disobedience and 785 instances of fighting by 40 children age 2 to 3, from Larzelere et a!. (1996).
A simple test of the idea that spanking teaches a lesson children won't forget comes from interviewing the representative sample of 1,003 mothers in two Minnesota counties (see Chapters 7 and 8). The mothers were asked what was the last misbehavior for which they had spanked their child. They were then asked if they had previously spanked for that misbehavior. Seventy-three percent said they had previously spanked for that misbehavior. This is a 73% failure rate, which is probably typical. However, parents do not perceive having to spank again as indicating that spanking has failed. But when a nonviolent method of discipline needs to be repeated, they do perceive it as having failed. We suggest that the dual standard for judging spanking and judging nonviolent modes of discipline is the result of the deeply ingrained cultural myth that spanking is the most effective method of discipline, and that it works when other methods have not worked.
A study by Power and Chapieski (1986) observed 18 mothers interacting with their 14-month-old child. They recorded the children's response to requests by the mother. Given the age of the children, all of these had to be relatively simple requests, such as "come here" and "put that down." The children whose mothers rarely or never spanked, failed to comply with the mother's requests in 31% of the interactions, whereas the children whose mothers relied on spanking as a disciplinary technique failed to comply in 49% of the interactions observed. Thus, spanking was associated with a 58% greater rate of misbehavior. Even at this early age, spanking was, on average, less effective in teaching a lesson the child will not forget than non-corporal disciplinary strategies.
Although the Power and Chapieski study involved only 18 children and neither this study nor the Minnesota study were experimental or prospective studies, when combined with the Roberts et al. experimental studies, the longitudinal studies in this book and those reviewed in the next chapter, and with many other studies, the weight of the evidence indicates that the idea that spanking works when other methods fail is a myth. In the short run, spanking does stop the misbehavior, but no more effectively than nonviolent modes of correction and control. In the long run, the results of the longitudinal studies on antisocial behavior of children (Chapter 6), crime as an adult (Chapter 15), and the longitudinal studies summarized in the next chapter show that spanking increases the probability of antisocial behavior by children and crime as an adult more often than it decreases antisocial and criminal behavior. Just as important for evaluating the effectiveness of spanking, we do not know of any studies in a peer-reviewed journal that found that spanking results in better behaved, better adjusted, or smarter children.
Why Spanking is No More Effective than Other Methods in the Short Run and Less Effective in the Long Run
The presumption that spanking is the most effective disciplinary technique is such a deeply embedded part of the culture of most societies, that it is necessary to explain why this obvious truth is untrue.
The Short Run
As we have said previously, we do not doubt that spanking will, on average, stop misbehavior in the immediate situation. However, as the research just reviewed shows, it has just as high a failure in the short run, that is, over the next few hours or days. Why isn't spankingdifferent and more effective in teaching a lesson that lasts even a few hours or days?
Toddlers have limited ability to control their own behavior. The studies reviewed show that all methods of discipline, including spanking, have a high failure rate with toddlers. It takes a great deal of time and many repetitions for a young child to internalize standards of behavior (Tremblay, 2003, 2006). This biologically built-in limitation applies to spanking as well as other modes of discipline.
Spanking interferes with cognitive functioning. Being slapped or spanked is a frightening and threatening event that arouses strong negative emotions such as humiliation, sadness, and anger. Children also experience spanking as highly stressful (Saunders & Goddard, 2010; Turner & Finkelhor, 1996; Willow & Hyder, 1998) Fright, stress, and other strong negative emotions can result in cognitive deficits such as erroneous or limited coding of events and diminished elaboration (Bugental et al., 201 0; Heuer & Reisberg, 1992; Meerum Terwogt & Olthof, 1989). To the extent that spanking arouses such emotions, the child is less likely to learn from the spanking than correction by other methods. Moreover, it can evoke resentment and weaken the bond between the child and the parent as shown in Chapters 8 and 9. When the bond between child and parent is weak, parents are less likely to be role models for the child and less likely to be able to influence the child, which may be part of the explanation for the long-term boomerang effect of spanking.
Spanking does not provide an explanation of the problem. Another reason spanking may be less effective is because toddlers and infants may not understand the reason for being hit. Imagine a toddler who is pushing food off a highchair tray. The parent says "Stop that!" When the child does it again, the parent slaps the child's hand. A toddler does not think of pushing food off the tray as dirty or creating a mess and may not understand why he or she is being hit. The same principle applies, and perhaps more strongly, to being spanked for 'doing something that is potentially dangerous, such as touching a food mixer while helping a parent bake a cake. The child whose hand is slapped for doing that may come away with the idea that the danger is the parent because the child only experiences the hurt imposed by the parent and not the potential pain from the food mixer. If there is learning when the child's hand is slapped, it comes primarily from the parent also explaining why the child should not push food off the tray or should not touch the mixer. The learning that occurs is despite the spanking, not because of it, because on average, being hit is stressful and interferes with cognition and learning.
The Long Run
In addition to being no more effective in the short run, the research evidence in this book, and much other research, shows that in the long run, spanking is less effective than nonaggressive means of correction. Again, because American cultural: beliefs are that spanking is more effective and therefore can and should be used when other modes of correction have failed, and that it will "teach him a lesson he won't forget," it is necessary to explain why, on average, the opposite is true.
Less well-developed conscience. Some of the earliest evidence on why spanking is less effective in the long run was a study of379 five-year-old children by Sears, Maccoby, and Levin (1957). They found that spanking was associated with a less adequately developed conscience. Spanking teaches a child to avoid misbehavior if one of their parents is watching or will know about it, rather than avoiding misbehavior because the parents have explained why some things are right and others wrong. When parents explain, children will gradually come to understand and accept these standards, and they are likely to remain in effect in situations when no parent is present, and probably also for life. Proponents of spanking, of course, believe that this is what spanking accomplishes, but Sears, Maccoby, and Levin and others since then have found the opposite.
Weakens child-to-parent bond Although most children accept the legitimacy of parents spanking, most children also resent it and feel angry with their parents for hitting them. Many even say they hated their parents for doing it (Straus, 2001a, p. 154; Willow & Hyder, 1998). Because spanking or other legal corporal punishment often continues for 13 years (Chapters 2 and 17), bit-by-bit, this anger and resentment chips away at the bond between parent and child (Chapters 8 and 9). A strong child-to-parent bond is important because children are more likely to accept parental restrictions and follow parental standards if there is a bond of affection with the parent. A strong bond facilitates internalizing the rules for behavior and developing a conscience. Many empirical studies have found a link between a weak parent-child bond and juvenile delinquency (Hindelang, 1973; Hirschi, 1969; Rankin & Kern, 1994; Wiatrowski & Anderson, 1987). The weakening of the child-to-parent bond that tends to result from spanking is also part of the explanation for the research showing that children who are spanked tend to have a less welldeveloped conscience. Children who harbor fear or resentment against their parents as a result of spanking may be less likely to internalize the parent's standards of behavior, and thus less likely to apply them when the parent or another authority figure is not present.
Feasibility of external control diminishes with age. The long-term effectiveness of spanking is also low because, from school-age on, children are increasingly out of sight of the parents. Hence, reliance on external controls such as spanking puts a child at increased risk of misbehavior because, as a child grows older, the feasibility of external controls diminishes. In addition, after a child has reached a certain size, anecdotal evidence suggests that many parents would like to still use spanking but cannot because the child is too big. By this, they often mean that it is no longer physically possible, not that it is no longer appropriate. Whatever the reason, as shown in a previous chapter, the prevalence of corporal punishment decreases as the child grows older (Chapter 2). Therefore, to the extent that parents have depended on spanking as a last resort, they are increasingly left without one.
Decreased opportunity to acquire cognitive and social skills. When parents spank and also explain why they are spanking, it reduces the adverse effects of spanking, but it does not eliminate them (Larzelere, 1986). However, many parents spank first. For example, one mother we interviewed told that she has three little kids and does not have time for "all that explaining stuff." She said she needed something that "works quickly." One leading advocate of spanking advises:
"Spank as a first resort? That's right. Spontaneously. As soon as you see that the child is losing control or as soon as the child commits whatever comp!etely outrageous act (e.g., spitting on an adult). Whack" (Rosemond, 1994a, p. 210).
More generally, and also more importantly, as we suggested in Chapter 12 to explain the link between spanking as a child and conflict with marital partners later in life, to the extent that a parent spanks, either as a first resort or a last resort, it denies the child an opportunity to observe, participate in; and learn conflict resolution strategies that are important in many life situations. This is true even though the parent may have already explained because children require many repetitions to acquire these complex cognitive and social skills. Therefore, rather than spanking when the child repeats the misbehavior, the explanation and other modes of correction need to be repeated. We believe that when parents do not spank and enforce the rules by explaining and creating appropriate alternatives and compromises, their children are more likely to themselves acquire and use these vital skills. This is possible because, contrary to what many believe, even toddlers can understand directives from their parents and comply with the instructions that they receive (Hakman & Sullivan, 2009; Knudsen & Liszkowski, 2012; Owen, Smith Slep, & Heyman, 2009).
The research evidence from the studies in this book, and the studies we review, shows that children who are not spanked are, on average, better behaved. That does not mean that all unspanked children are better behaved, just as not all spanked children behave badly. As pointed out in the section of Chapter 1 on Risk Factors: The Real Meaning of Social Science Research Results, those results mean that nonviolent discipline increases the probability of good behavior, and spanking increases the probability of subsequent bad behavior, but fortunately does not guarantee it. As we pointed out in Chapter 1, the results reported in this book are analogous to the results on heavy smoking. Heavy smoking increases the probability of death from a smoking-related disease. One third of heavy smokers will die from a smoking-related disease, which also means that two thirds will not. Similarly, the research cited in this chapter showing that spanking increases the probability of a weak child-to-parent bond, less well-developed conscience, lower IQ, and crime later in life means that more spanked children will have these problems, but like most heavy smokers, most will not.
Why ls Spanking Perceived as More Effective than It Is?
The studies show that spanking is no more effective than nonviolent discipline techniques. If these are the scientific facts and the facts of daily experience, why do parents and professions believe that spanking when necessary is so effective? We have already suggested part of the explanation. This section examines that question more systematically. A number of different processes probably come together to produce the false belief.
Selective Perception of Effectiveness
One process is selective perception. Even though every parent can observe the short-run high failure rate of spanking, few perceive it. The selective perception results from the cultural belief and expectation that spanking is more effective. They perceive the need to repeat the spanking, but they do not perceive it as indicating that spanking has failed. But when a child misbehaves and the parent explains and the child does it again, the repetition is attributed to the ineffectiveness of explaining to a young child. As the time-out experiments mentioned previously show, repetition of spanking does result in compliance, but these same experiments also show that repetition of just putting the child back in the time-out chair is equally effective and is accompanied by less disruptive behavior such as ci:ying, yelling, and whining.
Emotional Gratification
Another part of the explanation for perceiving spanking as more effective than it is, may be because spanking can be emotionally gratifying, just as acting out of impulse can be gratifying (Toch & Adams, 2002). When a child misbehaves and repeats the misbehavior and the parent is angry and frustrated, hitting the child may be emotionally rewarding. It is not that parents enjoy spanking their children. Few do. But when parents are frustrated with their child, spanking the child allows the parent to perceive themselves as really taking the situation in hand, being in control, and therefore relieving some of the frustration.
Confusion with Retribution
Another part of the explanation for the belief in the superior effectiveness of spanking, despite the evidence that it is not the most effective, is the idea of just desserts (i.e., the belief children should pay for their misbehavior). This may even be the case among parents of infants, because many believe that their infants can and do act with intention or on purpose (Feldman & Reznick, 1996). Retribution is an end in itself that is quite different than effectiveness. However, retribution is also believed to act as a deterrent that will reduce the probability of further misbehavior. As a consequence, retribution is probably often confused with deterrence. Physically attacking another child is usually regarded as a moral offense, and this may be why it is the most commonly occurring misbehavior for which Sears, Maccoby, and Levin (1957), a Parents magazine survey (Lehman, 1989), and studies by Catron and Masters (1993) and Holden et al. (1995) all found that parents were more likely to use spanking to correct their child hitting another child than to correct most other kinds of misbehavior.
Long-Term Effects Are Not Observable
Finally, spanking is perceived as more effective than it is because parents have no way of observing for themselves that spanking increases the probability of many social and psychological problems such as slower mental development, school problems, delinquency, and depression and crime as an adult. They can see that when they spanked, in most instances it stopped the bad behavior. Moreover, if later problems such as school failure or serious crime occur, parents are unlikely to think the delinquency occurred because of the spanking. We suggest that the reverse is more likely: If a child is delinquent, most Americans will think that the delinquency occurred despite, rather than because of spanking. Many will think that it shows that she should have spanked more. The only way parents can know about the harmful effects of spanking is by being informed of the results of the research showing the harmful side effects. Unfortunately, as shown in the introductory chapter and in Douglas and Straus (2007), social scientists are not giving them that information, not even in child development or child psychiatry textbooks.
Beneficial Versus Harmful Side Effects
Chart 18.1 summarized the evidence on the effectiveness of spanking as compared with other discipline strategies. The first two rows of the chart summarize what has just been discussed: That in the immediate situation, the effectiveness of both spanking and nonviolent correction are high, but in the subsequent short run, the effectiveness of both is low. The difference between spanking and nonviolent discipline are in the next two rows. The third row summarizes what is in much ofthis book: The long-term effect of spanking is to increase the probability of antisocial behavior and many serious and sometimes lifelong problems such as crime and depression. The last row of the chart is based on the results of numerous other studies on side effects (as summarized in Gershoff, 2002) requires no additional comment.
All methods of discipline are likely to have side effects; that is, they result in behaviors by the child that were not necessarily part of the behavior that the parent intended to influence. The side effects of spanking documented in Parts II, III, and IV and the meta-analysis by Gershoff (2002) are overwhelmingly behaviors that parents would not want if they had been able to choose. The side effects of nonviolent modes of discipline tend to be beneficial. An example is the previously mentioned research by Sears, Maccoby, mid Levin (1957), which found that spanking was associated with a less well-develop-ed conscience. Presumably, parents who did not spank used cognitive methods of correctioJ1, and one side effect is developing a stronger conscience. Another is greater cognitive ability, as suggested by the results in Chapter 10.
W4en parents use hitting as a method of discipline, the side effect is an increase in the probability of a child who does a lot of hitting. Similarly, when parents consistently use explanation and reasoning as a means of correcting and influencing the child, the side effect is likely to be a child who uses and may insist on explanation and reasoning. In the short run, this can be a problem because a child who uses and expects a reason and an explanation for everything can be exasperating, even infuriating. However, whereas that behavior may be exasperating from a child, it represents exactly the kind of behavior that most parents want to see in their child as an adult.
Summary and Conclusions
This chapter described three paradoxes about spanking: approval of spanking has decreased, but spanking toddlers has not; professionals opposed to spanking fail to advise parents to never spank; and focusing exclusively on teaching alternatives results in almost everyone spanking.
These paradoxes reflect the almost inevitable contradictions that arise when the social organization and the culture of a society are undergoing change. Because the research presented elsewhere in this book indicates that it is in the best interest of children and of national well-being to hasten the shift to nonviolent methods of child rearing, the conclusion we suggest about how to deal with paradoxes and contradictions is to focus on an unambiguous policy of: Never hit a child as a way to correct misbehavior.
Why Never Spank Must Be the Advice to Parents
Spock and Rothenberg (1992), and now defenders of spanking such as the Baumrind, Larzelere, and Cowan (2002), and Gunnoe (2009), advise parents to avoid spanking if they can. That seems like sensible advice. But, it is not. The problem is the clause "if they can." Remember the research shows that 80% of toddlers will repeat a misbehavior for which they were corrected within the same day. As a result, almost all parents who accept this advice will end up spanking because no matter what they do, the child is likely to repeat the misbehavior. Therefore, they will incorrectly conclude that they can't avoid spanking. They will think they found that the nonviolent discipline method did not work, but what they are really seeing is the low ability of toddlers to control their behavior. Parents do not know, because social scientists and professionals advising parents have not told them, that all methods of correcting the behavior of a toddler, including spanking, have the same low level of one-time success. Moreover, because of the myth that spanking is harmless when done by loving parents, they will not be strongly motivated to avoid adding a spank or two to their disciplinary practices. They fall back on the myth that spanking works when other methods have failed, not realizing as we said, that all methods of discipline have a high failure rate with toddlers. This set of circumstances is what led 94% 6f our national samples of parents to spank toddlers.
Given the circumstances just described, reliance on teaching alternative disciplinary techniques by itself is not sufficient as a means of ending spanking. It is also necessary to simultaneously and unambiguously advise parents to never spank. The necessity of advising parents to never spank was epitomized by Dr. Lewis First, quoted previously and by one mother we interviewed. Both said they were opposed to spanking. But Dr. First also said, "if a child repeatedly runs into traffic, for example, you may want to play the big card." This mother, who was also opposed to spanking when talking about other modes of discipline, said, "I use them all, but I can see with my own eyes that the alternatives often don't work. So, for her sake [the child's] and my sanity, I sometimes have to spank." Given that 80% of toddlers who have been corrected for misbehavior will repeat that same misbehavior in the same day, almost all parents will come to the same conclusion as this mother. The only way to avoid that conclusion is to remove spanking or any other hitting of children as an alternative. Unless child psychologists, parent educators, social workers, pediatricians, and others who advise parents communicate an unambiguous, never spank message, almost all toddlers will continue to be spanked.
Professionals Need to Be Informed
In order to effectively communicate a never-spank message, child psychologists, child psychiatrists, pediatricians, parent educators, social workers, and other professionals must themselves be informed about the research evidence and its implications. The textbooks in all these disciplines currently give very little attention to spanking. In Chapter 1 and in Douglas and Straus (2007), we reviewed 23 of the leading child development and child psychiatry textbooks. We found that the majority discussed spanking, but few wrote more than a paragraph on the topic. Moreover, none discussed the extensive research on this topic or the fact that the vast majority of this research indicates that using spanking leads to poor outcomes.
Information Professionals Need
The information that should be in child development and child psychiatry textbooks, but is not there, can be summarized as four key points on which professionals need to be informed. They are the empirical research evidence that:
* All methods of correction and control have a high failure rate with toddlers. Therefore, nonviolent discipline strategies will erroneously be identified as not working.
* Corporal punishment is not more effective than nonviolent modes of correction and control, even in the short run.
* Spanking has harmful side effects.
* Children who are not spanked tend to be the best behaved and smartest after controlling for parental education, parental warmth and support, and other variables.
Once professionals have learned about the empirical research on these four points, they will be in a better position to advise parents to never, ever, under any circumstance, hit a child as a means of correction and control. As pointed out earlier, most professionals now consider this a negative approach. The success of the never-spank approach in Sweden has shown that a never-spank approach is not only necessary in principle but that it has been very effective.
Since the passage of the no-spanking law and the steps to inform every parent, and every child, in Sweden that spanking is wrong and is contrary to national policy, the use of spanking has decreased from rates that were about the same as in the United States to a small minority of parents. So has the rate of crime, drug abuse, and suicide by youth (Durrant, 1999; Durrant & Janson, 2005). The Swedish experience shows that an absolute never-spank approach has worked to reduce use of spanking. It has also shown that the disaster foreseen by the critics of the Swedish law at the time it was passed have not occurred. Their prediction was that without the ability to spank when necessary, parents would lose control. Sweden would become a nation of kids running wild. It is not at all certain that the reduction in juvenile crime and psychological problems that occurred in Sweden since the no-spanking ban can be attributed to the reduction in spanking because so many other changes have also occurred. But it is certain that the fear that the prohibition of spanking in Sweden would result in a nation with kids running wild has not occurred.
Once child psychologists, pediatricians, social workers, and other professionals have been informed about the research and accept the implication that parents must be advised to never spank (as compared with advising parents to avoid it if you can), the implementation of a policy of informing parents about the four types of research results just listed is relatively inexpensive, although it will meet resistance and take time. Some examples include:
* Parent education programs can be revised to include the evidence that spanking does not work better than other disciplinary tactics, even in the short run, that it tends to make for more, rather than less, misbehavior in the long run and to specifically tell parents to never spank.
* The Public Health Service can follow the Swedish model and sponsor nospanking public service announcements on TV, radio, milk cartons, and the Internet.
* Never-Spank posters and pamphlets can be displayed in pediatrician's offices and hospital maternity departments.
* A notice can be put on birth certificates such as:
Warning: Spanking Has Been Determined to Be Dangerous to the Health and Well-Being of Your Child-Do Not Ever, Under Any Circumstances, Spank or Hit Your Child
The chapters in Parts II, III, and IV of this book show that the benefits of never spanking are many, but as pointed out previously, they are virtually impossible for parents to perceive because parents cannot find out what their children will be like months or years after the spanking by observing whether the child ceased the misbehavior when they were spanked. The situation with spanking is parallel to that of smoking. Smokers could perceive the satisfaction from a cigarette but had no way to see the adverse health consequences down the road until they were informed about the research. Similarly, parents can perceive the benefit of a slap when the child stops the misbehavior. However, they have no way of seeing the adverse consequences down the road of spanking. Like smokers, they have no way of looking a year or more into the future to see if there is a harmful side effect of having hit their child to correct misbehavior. The only way parents can know this is through a major public health effort to inform all parents about the scientific evidence on the four key points listed above and by assuring parents that there is no need to put a child at risk of the harmful side effects of spanking because nonviolent methods of discipline are just as effective in the short run and more effective in the long run.
The Ethics of Advising Parents to Never Spank
Some defenders of spanking argue that it is unethical to advise parents to never spank until there is absolutely conclusive evidence on the key issues just listed (e.g., Larzelere et al., 1998). Unfortunately, this view is also prevalent, even among social scientists who are opposed to spanking. For example, one of the reviewers of a draft of this book commented, "Even though I agree with the authors [about never spanking], the primary problem as I see it is that there is not enough data to suggest that spanking-after controlling for physical abuse and other forms of harsh punishment besides spanking-is associated with criminal behavior. As Taylor et al. (2010) points out, most studies of spanking do not control for physical abuse, including those used in Gershoff's meta-analysis. Therefore the link between harsh and punitive punishment and child delinquency may be spurious."
It is true that most studies of spanking do not control for physical abuse, but the reviewer seems to have missed the paragraph headed Confounding with Abuse a few pages earlier, which cited five studies that did control for physical abuse and still found that spanking was related to child behavior problems We have since added a sixth study that controlled for physical abuse and still found spanking to be a risk factor for behavior problems.
A policy statement by the National Association of Social Workers states that it "opposes the use of physical punishment in homes, schools, and all other institutions where children are cared for and educated. Effective discipline does not involve physical punishment of children" (National Association of Social Workers, 2012). But, a clear never-spank position is not held by most professionals who advise parents. As pointed out in Chapter 1, even the antispanking policy statement of the American Academy of Pediatrics includes wording that permits spanking toddlers. The surveys of psychologists and pediatricians cited in Chapter 1, and our conversations with psychologists and pediatricians, suggest thftt at least three quarters of American pediatricians and psychologists believe there is not sufficient evidence to advise parents to never spank. But is the evidence really not sufficient?
* First, a meta-analysis of 88 studies 'found 94% agreement between studies in finding harmful side effects (Gershoff, 2002).
* Second, there are now at least 18 longitudinal studies that provide evidence showing that although behavior problems cause spanking, when spanking is used to correct those problems, the long-run result is more, rather than less, misbehavior.
* Third, most of the studies controlled for other risk factors that might be the real cause of the harmful side effect.
* Fourth, there are six studies that controlled for the overlap between spanking and physical abuse. All found that spanking was nonetheless related to behavior problems.
* Fifth, thinking of spanking as a treatment for misbehavior, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and standard clinical practice require that if there are alternative treatments without harmful side effects, the alternative should be prescribed. Absolutely conclusive evidence of harmful side effects is not needed to cease prescribing the treatment with harmful side effects.
The last point in this list requires some additional explanation. We discuss two aspects of this ethical requirement: transferability to other situations and availability of alternative treatment.
Transferability to other situations. If a procedure is shown to have a negative or toxic effect under some circumstances, it becomes the obligation of those who favor the procedure under other circumstances to show that it is safe and effective under those circumstances. Defenders of spanking now recommend it only for younger children and explicitly warn against hitting older children (American Academy of Pediatrics, 1998; American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, 1995). Thus, having accepted the evidence that corporal punishment is harmful under one circumstance (older children), they have the obligation to provide empirical evidence that it is safe for younger children. Such evidence does not exist, and the research in Chapter 10 about corporal punishment and mental ability found the opposite (i.e., that the effects are more harmful for toddlers). The belief incorporated by many pediatricians and clinical psychologists that younger children who are hit by their parents do not experience it as traumatic is based on tradition, not empirical evidence. What evidence does exist indicates that spanking is as harmful as or more harmful to young children than to older children. This parallels research by Fink:elhor and colleagues (Fink:elhor, 2008; Fink:elhor, Turner, & Ormrod, 2006) who investigated the similar traditional presumption that young children (age 2 to 9) who are attacked by other children, including siblings, do not run the same risk of traumatic symptoms as do older children (age 10 to 17). They found that the adverse psychological effects are as serious for the younger children in their study, just as we have found that the adverse psychological effects of spanking are as serious, or more serious, for children in the permissible-to-hit ages of2 to 6.
Availability of alternative treatment. In medical practice, when a new drug becomes available, pediatricians are obligated to advise parents to avoid the drug currently in use if there is evidence that the old drug has harmful side effects, even if the evidence is not conclusive, provided an equally effective drug is available that does not have those side effects. Spanking is like the old drug with harmful side effects. Nonviolent modes of correction and control are like the new drug that is just as effective but does not have the long-term risk harmful side effects. This combination creates an ethical requirement to advise parents to switch to the new drug, which means use of nonviolent modes of correction and never spanking.
19 Implications for Crime and Violence in Society
Research has shown that physically abused children (those whose parents perpetrated severe assaults such as punching, choking, or burning the child) are more likely to engage in crime than other children (Currie, 2009; Farrington, 1978; Rebellon & Van Gundy, 2005; Widom, 1992). But does that apply to legal and' morally correct spanking? This chapter addresses the following questions:
* What have studies of differences between societies in use of corporal punishment found about the relation of corporal punishment to the level of physical violence in a society?
* Do children whose parents spanked them have an increased probability of antisocial behavior as a child and criminal behavior as an adult?
* What are the processes linking spanking and crime?
* What are the implications of trends in spanking for trends in engaging in crime?
Most of the world's societies are violent in the sense that they have high rates of physical assault, homicide, and war. The United States may be one of the most violent of the advanced industrial societies. One indication of where the United States stands is the prevalence of homicides. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the 2008 U.S. homicide rate of 5.2 per 100,000 was more than 3 times the Canadian rate of 1.7 per 100,000, and about 5 times the rate of Western European countries. Nevertheless, using this measure, many societies are more violent. Even before the outbreak of the drug wars in Mexico in the late 1990s, the Mexican homicide rate of 11.6 was more than double that of the United States. The rate for Colombia (38.8 per 100,000) is more than 7 times higher.
Spanking and Violence
Most of the world's societies also bring up children violently by spanking them to correct misbehavior. Perhaps the correspondence between the preponderance of physical violence and that of spanking is just a coincidence. Obviously, spanking and assaults and murders differ in severity and also in the cultural definition that makes one legitimate and the other criminal. However, there is also a correspondence between the behavior involved in spanking and the behavior involved in criminal assaults and homicides that is seldom perceived.
Spanking and Homicide
Everyone understands that spanking is carried out for the morally valid purpose of correcting or controlling misbehavior. What is not understood is that almost all assaults by adults are also carried out to correct what the offender perceives as misbehavior of the victim. Marvin Wplfgang's (1958) pioneer study of all homicides in Philadelphia from 1948 to 1952 found that 37% of the murders were in response to an insult, curse, or some other affront; 13% part of a domestic quarrel; 11% a reaction to sexual infidelity; and 1 0% disagreements over money. Thus a total of71% of the homicides were to correct what the offender perceived as misbehavior by the victim. The FBI Uniform Crime Reports' figures on homicides show the same thing. In 2002 and for many previous years, about three quarters of U.S. homicides were classified as parts of arguments, fights, juvenile gang killings, etc.-not part of some other crime such as robbery or rape. Typical examples include a confrontation between two men over a loan of $50 that was to be paid back in a week. Now it is three months later. They get into a fight, and one ends up dead. Physical fights between adults almost always occur over what the aggressor thinks are moral transgressions, such as not making good on a promise to pay back a loan, an insult, a member of one gang walking through the territory of another gang, or flirting with the offender's spouse or girlfriend. Thus, both spanking and most criminal violence occur in response to what the parent who spanks, or the person who assaults, believes is an outrageous or persistent misbehavior. See Wikstrom and Treiber (2009) for an analysis of crime as moral actions.
Moreover, like most assaults and homicides, spanking is usually impulsive, done in anger, and often regretted (see Chapter 7). Among the sample of mothers interviewed for the study on impulsive spanking in Chapter 7, 54% said that spanking was the wrong thing to have done. Durant's (1994) study of a Canadian sample revealed similar parental misgivings about spanking.
Spanking may share key elements with criminal assaults, yet that is hardly evidence that spanking is one of the factors making U.S. society so homicidal. This chapter examines that issue by reviewing empirical research on the link between spanking and societal violence, spanking and physical assaults, and other crime by individuals within a society.
Theoretical Approach
The theoretical approach of this chapter has two main elements. The first is that spanking teaches the morality of hitting to correct misbehavior. This approach is consistent with social learning theory (Akers & Sellers, 2008) and with a key element of the situational action theory of crime, namely that "acts of violence are essentially moral actions and therefore can, and should be analyzed and explained as such" (Wikstrom & Treiber, 2009, p. 76). It is important to keep Wikstrom's specification in mind: "Morality is often discussed in temfs of whether particular actions are good or bad (virtuous or reprehensible), or whether or not they are justified in relation to some superior moral principle. It is important to stress that we do not use and discuss morality in these terms but rather focus on understanding how people's actions are guided by rules about what actions are right or wrong under particular circumstances; we classify these rules as moral rules" (p. 76, note 1).
The second main aspect of our theoretical approach is the idea of cultural spillover (Baron & Straus, 1987, 1989; Baronet al., 1988). Cultural spillover is an aspect of the principle that human societies are social systems in the sense that each part of society tends to influence and be influenced by the other parts, and that includes violence (i.e., that violence in one sphere of life increases the probability of violence in other spheres). The cultural spillover theory of violence)s explained further later in this chapter.
Societal-Level Evidence
Anthropological Studies
Societal case studies. Seventy years ago, the anthropologist Ashley Montague argued that, "Spanking the baby may be the psychological seed of war" (Montague, 1941). He later invited eight anthropologists who had studied one of the relatively few nonviolent societies to contribute chapters to a book called Learning Non-Aggression: The Experience of Non-Literate Societies (Montague, 1978). Although those eight societies differed tremendously, one thing they had in common was nonviolent child rearing (i.e., spanking or smacking children was not part of their culturally prescribed method of child rearing).
Montague did not argue that non-spanking alone will produce a nonviolent society. On the contrary, the eight societies described in his book show that a great deal more is required, especially a high level of attention to a child's needs and safety, and positive rather than punitive modes of dealing with misbehavior. If spanking is a risk factor for societal violence, it is only one of many risk and protective factors. As a consequence, rather than a one-to-one relationship between spanking and societal violence, the cross-cultural evidence only indicates that spanking is associated with an increased probability of societal violence. This sort of probabilistic relationship is similar to the relationship between characteristics or events that cause disease and the actual occurrence of the disease. As explained in the section at the end of Chapter 1 in "Risk Factors: The Real Meaning of Social Science Results," there is almost never a one-to-one relation between a risk factor and the disease. Heavy smoking, for example, does not guarantee lung cancer. Rather, it increases the risk of death from smoking-related diseases to about one out of three (Matteson et al., 1987). This is a large risk, but it also means that two thirds of heavy smokers do not die of smoking-related diseases. Just as most heavy smokers will not die of a smoking-related disease, most people who have been spanked a lot will not be violent adults.
Human relations area files data. In-depth analyses of child rearing in nonviolent societies are highly informative and important, but statistical evidence is also needed. One approach to statistically test the idea that corporal punishment is associated with societal violence is through analyses of the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF). The HRAF is an archive of anthropological data on over 300 societies. Levinson (1989) found that corporal punishment is used in about three quarters of the world's societies, and that the frequency of use varies greatly. Levinson also analyzed data on violence between adults and found the societies that used corporal punishment were more likely to also be societies in which wife beating was prevalent. Although the relationship that Levinson found was relatively strong (a correlation of .32) and persisted when anumber of other variables had been statistically controlled, it is the only aspect of societal violence that Levinson found to be strongly associated with corporal punishment. Thus, analyses of the HRAF data provide only limited evidence for a link between corporal punishment and societal violence.
The International Dating Violence Study
The study in Chapter 13 on violence in the dating relationships of university students in 32 nations found that the higher the percent in each nation who were spanked or hit a lot:
* The higher the percent who approved of hitting a partner under some circumstances
* The higher the percent who actually did assault a dating partner
* The higher the percent who assaulted severely enough to injure their partner
We took this analysis one step further using a statistical method called multilevel modeling to see if a national context in which spanking was prevalent tended to also be national contexts in which adult violence is more common. We found that students in nations with a high rate of spanking have a higher probability of physically assaulting a dating partner than students in low spanking nations, regardless of whether they themselves were hit as children (Vanderminden & Straus, 2010).
Analysis of the same 32-nation sample found that the higher the percentage of university students who were spanked or hit a lot before age 12, the higher the percentage of students who agreed that a "A man should not walk away from a physical fight with another man." When the analysis used corporal punishment as a teenager, rather than before age 12, the link between corporal punishment and approving physical fights was much stronger. Similarly, the more corporal punishment was used in a national context, the greater the proportion of students who agreed that, "If a wife refuses to have sex, there are times when it may be okay to make her do it." This was also found for both~ corporal punishment as a child and as a teenager, but the link was stronger for the rate of corporal punishment as a teenager.
Why is the link between corporal punishment and adult violence stronger for corporal punishment experienced as a teen, as shown in Chapters 3 and 13? The explanation that both the public and professionals concerned with children tend to favor is that hitting young children to correct misbehavior is harmless if done in moderation or as U.S. law puts it, with reasonable force. This was the belief underlying the consensus statement issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics conference on corporal punishment. It recommends that parents avoid spanking, but it forbids it only for children under age 2 and over 6 (Friedman & Schonberg, 1996b ). As pointed out in Chapter 10 on the relation of spanking to mental ability, which found more harmful effects for young children, the belief that young children are not adversely affected or affected less than adults by being ~ victim of crime is based on folk beliefs for which there is no scientific evidence. We suggest that the seeming more adverse effect on teenagers reflects their having been assaulted in the name of discipline for l3 or 14 years rather than 3 or 4 years.
Homicide
Perhaps the most dramatic example of the link between spanking and societal rates of violence comes from an analysis of the relation of spanking to homicide rates. Charts 19.1 and 19.2 give the results of testing the hypothesis that the more spanking is used in a society or sector of society, the more murders in that sector. Chart 19.1 uses as the cases the 32 nations where we obtained data on the percent of students who were spanked or hit a lot by their parents. It shows that the higher the percent spanked or hit a lot, the higher the national homicide rate. Chart 19.2 tested the same hypothesis but by using data on the 50 states of the United States as the societal units and using approval of spanking as the "independent variable" (i.e., the hypothesized risk factor). The cllart shows that the higher the percent of the population of a state who approved of spanking children, the higher the homicide rate of the state.
Cause and effect. In the previous paragraph, we put the term independent variable in quotation marks to highlight that both charts give the results of cross-sectional correlations. As a consequence, it is not possible to determine with this data whether it is the experience of spanking that leads to homicide or whether a society where there are norms approving violence leads parents to use violence in bringing up children. Probably both processes are at work. But whatever the causal direction, these results show that societies in which spanking is prevalent tend to be societies where there is more approval of violence and more violence. Our interpretation is that both spanking and homicide are two reflections of a violent society. Some would label these results as spurious correlations. We argue that they are evidence supporting the principle that in a violent society, cultural norms approving of pro-social violence tend to increase the probability of violence in all spheres oflife and increase the probability of violent crime (Baron & Straus, 1988; Galiani, Rossi, & Schargrodsky, 2011; Hogben, Byrne, Hamburger, & Osland, 2001). This phenomenon is discussed below as the cultural spillover theory of violence.
Chart 19.1 The More Spanking of Students in a Nation, the Higher the National Homicide Rate
Chart 19.2 The Larger the Percent of the Population Who Approve of Spanking, the Higher the Homicide Rate (Data for the 50 U.S. States)
*Controlled for Percent: Below poverty, Black, College-educated, Metro resident
Attitudes Favoring Spanking and Infant Homicide Rates
Bums and Straus (in Straus, 2001b, p. 115) used data from Edfeldt (1979) on the degree to which teachers in 10 European nations approved of corporal punishment to examine the relationship between corporal punishment and societal-level violence. They found that the greater the degree of approval of corporal punishment in a nation, the higher the overall homicide rate and also the homicide rate for infants. When variables such as the gross national product and educational and military expenditures were controlled, the relationship between approval of corporal punishment by teachers and the infant homicide rate remained, but not the overall homicide rate. This seemingly strange result does not mean that teachers who favor hitting children when necessary favor murdering infants. A probable explanation is that the more a society favors spanking and other forms of morally legitimate violence, the more frequent spanking will be used, and the earlier in life it is likely to be used. In the United States, for example, Chapter 2 shows that about one third of parents hit infants. The combination of starting early, hitting a lot, and the vulnerability of infants, means that more infants are at risk of being killed in a society that favors spanking, even though no one favors killing infants. These results are also consistent with research in the United States and Canada that found that two thirds to three quarters of cases of physical abuse began as spanking and escalated into more severe and sometimes lethal assaults (Straus, 2000; 2008a).
David Gil's (1970) pioneering study of 1,380 children found that 63% of the abuse incidents were an "immediate or delayed response to specific (misbehavior) ofthe child." Gil concluded:
"Because culturally determined permissive attitudes toward the use ofphys~ ical force in child rearing seem to constitute the common core of all physical abuse of children in American society, systematic educational efforts aimed at gradually changing this particular aspect of the prevailing child-rearing philosophy, and developing clear-cut cultural prohibitions and legal sanctions against the use of physical force as a means for rearing children, are likely to produce over time the strongest possible reduction of the incidence and prevalence of physical abuse of children." (p.141 ).
An in-depth study of 66 cases of physical abuse by Kadushin and Martin ( 1981) also found that two thirds were instances of spanking that had escalated out of control. A study of substantiated physical abuse cases in Ontario found that 85% started as attempts to correct misbehavior by the child (Trocme, McPhee, Tam, & Hay, 1994). The meta-analysis by Gershoff (2002) included 1 0 studies that investigated the relationship between spanking and physical abuse. All 10 studies found a relationship.
Other studies investigated the relation of having experienced spanking as a child and physically abusing a child later in life. For example, Straus and Yodanis (200 1) studied a nationally representative sample of American parents and found that the more spanking these parents had experienced as children, the greater the probability that, in bringing up their own children, they went beyond legally permissible spanking and engaged in severe physical attacks on their children. As mentioned previously, Gershoff's meta-analysis covered 10 studies of the link between spanking and crime.
Studies like those just cited, plus clinical observation, led Zigler and Hall (1989) to conclude that "ultimate control.ofthe abuse problem lies in changing our societal attitudes towards and acceptance of aggression as an appropriate mechanism for problem solving." A number of other leading scholars and clinicians have also concluded that reducing spanking is essential to reducing physical abuse (Feshbach, 1980; Gelles & Straus, 1988; Haeuser, 1991; Maurer, 1976; Williams, 1983), and some, such as Chaffin et al. (2004) have shown that reducing spanking actually does reduce risk for physical abuse of children.
State-to-State Difference in Corporal Punishment in U.S. Schools
Hyman and Wise (1979) published a tabulation of the extent to which corporal punishment was permitted in schools in the 1970s. At that time, only four states prohibited corporal punishment by school personnel. Some states permitted only the principal to hit children; others permitted both the principal and teachers. Thus there were considerable differences between the U.S. states in the extent to which corporal punishment was permitted in schools. We used this information to create a corporal punishment Permission Index score for each state (Straus, 2001a). At the extreme were states that permitted any school employee to hit a child. Florida even prevented individual school districts from forbidding corporal punishment. This study found that the more corporal punishment was authorized in a state, the higher the rate of violence by students and the higher the homicide rate in the state. A plausible explanation for this is that corporal punishment in schools and murders reflect state-to-state differences in an underlying tendency to use violence to correct problems. Corporal punishment in schools is an example of violence to correct a problem, and as noted earlier in this chapter, so are almost three quarters of murders in the United States. Both corporal punishment in schools and murders reflect an underlying culture of violence. There is a bidirectional relationship: As suggested in Chapters 3, 5, and 20, these cultural beliefs and norms increase the probability of corporal punishment, and corporal punishment increases the proportion of the population who subscribe to those beliefs and norms.
A generation later, another study of the relationship between school corporal punishment and homicides was published (Arcus, 2002). Arcus found that, in states that allowed corporal punishment, the probability of a homicide occurring in a school was twice that of schools in states that do not allow corporal punishment. Further, the more corporal punishment was actually used, the higher the rate of homicides in the schools of the state. These relationships remained after controlling for the poverty rate and the percent of conservative Christians in each state.
The Cultural Spillover Theory of Violence
The studies on the relationship between spanking and other forms of violence, and those described earlier in this chapter, are consistent with the idea that all types of violence tend to be related to each other. The studies we described show linkages between legitimate violence (such as spanking and executing criminals) and criminal violence such as homicide and rape. They illustrate what has been called the cultural spillover theory (Baron & Straus, 1987, 1989; Baronet al., 1988; Galiani et al., 2011; Hogben et al., 2001).
According to the cultural spillover theory, a society that uses violence for socially approved purposes such as spanking children, executing criminals, or going to war, will tend to be a society in which more citizens use violence for what the rest of the society defines as a criminal purpose. Thus, executing criminals results in a higher rather than a lower rate of homicide because, when society legitimizes killing people who do horrible things, it is associated with an increased percent of the population who take it in their own hands to kill someone who has done to them something they think is horrible (Baron & Straus, 1988; Stack, 1993; Thomson, 1999). When a society legitimizes killing by going to war, more people will perceive enemies in their daily life who warrant killing (Archer & Gartner, 1984). Even violence in the form of heavyweight boxing prize-fights has been found to be related to .an increase in the rate of criminal violence (Phillips, 1983). Baron and Straus (1988) used these and other indicators of legitimate violence to create a scale to measure the extent to which the 50 states of the United States differed from each other in legitimate violence. They found that the higher the score of a state on the Legitimate Violence Index, the higher the state's homicide rate, even after controlling for other state characteristics associated with homicide such as the poverty rate and the percent of the state population in the age group with the highest homicide (age 18 to 24).
Lansford and Dodge (2008) analyzed the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample of anthropological records. This data set includes 186 cultural groups to represent the world's 200 cultural provinces. They found that frequent use of corporal punishment was related to more aggression in children, warfare, and adult interpersonal violence. These relations remained after controlling for demographic, socioeconomic, and other aspects of parenting. Lansford and Dodge concluded that frequent spanking is related to more cultural approval of violence and more actual acts of violence, and that reducing spanking by parents can lead to reductions in societal violence manifested in other ways.
The cultural spillover theory applies to cultural norms approving violence, at least in part because the use of violence for socially approved purposes is likely to be a result of and also to reinforce norms approving of violence. Thus, norms approving violence in one sphere of life will be associated with norms approving violence in other spheres oflife. This is consistent with findings in Chapter 5 on approval of violence and spanking, with results in Chapters 12 and 13 on the link between being spanking and violence approval, and with the study by Lansford and Dodge described in the previous paragraph. In other words, the more children in a society who have been spanked, the greater the tendency for the society to have cultural norms that approve of, or accept other forms of, violence and the more approval of, violence in other spheres of life, the more approval of spanking. Regardless of the direction of the effect, more spanking is associated with an increased probability of violence in other spheres of life.
Individual-Level Evidence
There have been many studies of the relation of spanking to antisocial behavior and crime. Based on a review by Haapasalo and Pokela (1999) and on their own research, Farrington and Welsh (2006) concluded that "It is clear that harsh or punitive discipline (involving physical punishment) predicts a child's delinquency." This conclusion is even more clear from the results of the metaanalysis by Gershoff (2002). She analyzed 49 studies that tested the relation of corporal punishment to antisocial and criminal behavior. This included:
* Twenty-seven studies of the relationship of corporal punishment to aggression by children. All 27 found that corporal punishment was associated with an increased probability of aggression.
* Thirteen studies of the relation of corporal punishment to delinquent and antisocial behavior. Twelve of the 13 found that corporal punishment predicted an increased probability of delinquency and antisocial behavior.
* Four studies of the relation of corporal punishment to aggression as an adult. All four found that corporal punishment predicted an increased probability of aggression, as did the nine studies on this issue in Parts II and IV of this book.
* Five studies of the relation of corporal punishment to criminal and antisocial behavior as an adult. Four of the five found that corporal punishment was associated with an increased probability of crime and antisocial behavior.
Although the results of Gershoff's meta-analysis are impressive because they reveal a "degree of consistency between studies that is rarely found, the evidence is weaker than it seems because most of the studies are cross-sectional, almost all are U.S. studies, and some lacked needed controls. Therefore, the following sections of this chapter provide examples of studies that used longitudinal designs or were conducted in different national contexts, or which controlled for important confounding variables such as whether there was also physical abuse.
Prevalence of Spanking
The processes that can link spanking and crime begin in infancy because, in many societies, parents start spanking children before their first birthdays. As shown in Chapter 2 and by Duggan et al. (2004), at least one third of parents in the United States hit infants. Similar.results have been found for the United Kingdom (Newson & Newson, 1963). A typical example is slapping the hand of a child who pushes food from a highchair tray to the floor after being told not to do it again. This can be considered a child's first experience with violence by an adult. It is one of the reasons for entitling this book The Primordial Violence. It is important that the first experience of violence by adults is in the form of behavior that is morally correct, socially approved, and legal in all but a few nations because, in addition to teaching what the child is being punished for, spanking also implicitly teaches that hitting to correct misbehavior is morally correct. Our theory is that learning this behavioral script has a lifelong effect, and this script is part of the reason most violence, from simple assaults to homicides, is carried out to correct the perceived misbehavior of the person attacked. Moreover, as we pointed out earlier, the anthropologist Ashley Montague (1941) argued that spanking is one of the underlying causes of war.
As was shown in Chapter 2 on the prevalence of corporal punishment in the United States, over 90% of parents use spanking, at least occasionally, with children ages 2 to 4. Moreover, toddlers are spanked an average of2 to 3 times a week (Giles-Sims et al., 1995; Holden et al., 1995; Stattin et al., 1995). The percentage of parents who spank decreases after children turn 5 (see Chapter 2, Chart2.1). Even with children age 13,40% still used corporal punishment, and at age 17, 13% still used corporal punishment. The most recent U.S. national survey of children in 2006 found that 44% of children age 8 to 10 and 15% of children age 16 to 18 had experienced corporal punishment in the previous 12 months (Martin, 2006). Moreover, among parents who continue corporal punishment into the teenage years, it is not a rare outburst. Within the subgroup of parents who use corporal punishment with teenage children, it tends to occur 4 to 5 times a year (Straus & Donnelly, 2001b).
Rates of spanking that can be compared cross-nationally were presented in Chapters 3 and 13. They are the reports of the 17,404 students in the 32 nations surveyed for International Dating Violence Study. In each of the nations, the students were asked whether they had been "spanked or hit a lot before age 12." In most of the 32 nations, over one half of the students recalled being spanked or a hit a lot. This is a lower-bound estimate because it refers to being hit a lot and because many people do not remember much of what happened when they were 2 to 5 years old, which are the peak ages for spanking. The rates ranged from less than one fifth of the students in the low spanking nations such as Sweden and the Netherlands to almost three quarters of the students in the nations where spanking was most prevalent (Taiwan and Tanzania).
Spanking and Juvenile Antisocial Behavior
The studies cited above indicate that spanking is frequent and continues for at least four or five years and, in a third or more cases, into the teenage years. We believe that being hit by parents, often for four or more years, sets in motion a number of criminogenic proc'esses. One process is weakening the bond between parent and child, as shown in Chapters 8 and 9 and by Afifi et al. (2006). A weak bond between child and parents is a key element in the social control theory of crime (Hirschi, 1969). Social learning identifies another linking mechanism because spanking provides a behavioral model of violence. Many studies have found that the more spanking experienced as a child, the greater the support for and actual spanking of their own children (Bailey, Hill, Oesterle, & Hawkins, 2009; Muller, Hunter, & Stollak, 1995). This is illustrated by a study of 102 children age 3 to 7. The mothers were interviewed to find out about spanking. The more spanking these children experienced, the more likely they were to approve of parents spanking.·However, this study made an additional unique contribution. It examined the children's strategies for dealing with a conflict with a sibling and with a peer. Two vignettes portraying typical child disagreements with a peer (who grabs the child's toy) and a sibling (who changes the TV station) were used. The children were asked to pretend that they were the child in each situation and to indicate which-of four responses they would choose if they were in this conflict: (a) do nothing, (b) try to find a grown-up to help, (c) suggest sharing or compromising, or (d) hit the other child. These responses were presented to the children pictorially, and they pointed to the one they would choose for each situation~ The results in Chart 19.3 show that the more spanking, the more likely the child was to say they would hit the other child. Moreover, spanking was the strongest predictor of children's acceptance of aggressive problem solving, above and beyond parental acceptance, parental experience of corporal punishment, and familial demographics. A limitation of this study is that it does not rule out the possibility that the parents who spanked a lot did so to correct a child who hit other children a lot. However, the longitudinal studies described below did control for the child's misbehavior.
Study of 1 02 children age 2 to 7 who responded to vignettes depicting conflict with another child. The children were asked what they would do.
Chart 19.3 The More Children Were Spanked, the More Likely They Were to Hit Another Child with Whom They Were Having a Conflict
Longitudinal Studies
Although misbehavior does provoke spanking, 11 of 12 longitudinal studies that ,controlled for the level of misbehavior at the start of the study found that when parents spank, it is associated with a subsequent increase rather than decrease in the probability of antisocial and aggressive behavior. These studies also controlled for many possible confounding factors, such as socioeconomic status and parental warmth.and support.
* Berlin et al. (2009) studied a sample of 2,573 low-income 2-year-olds in Early Head Start programs and found that spanking at age 1 was associated with an increase in child aggression a year later. However, spanking at age 2 was not associated with more aggressive behavior at age 3.
* Ellison, Musick, and Holden (2011) studied a U.S. national sample of 456 children and found that early spanking alone was not associated with subsequent antisocial behavior, but spanking that persisted into or began in middle childhood was. Children of mothers who belonged to conservative Protestant groups did not have higher antisocial behavior subsequent to spanking.
* Grogan-Kaylor (2004) studied a sample of 4- to 14-year-old children and found that more spanking was associated with an increase in antisocial behavior two years later for Blacks, Whites, and Hispanics.
* Lau, Litrownik, Newton, Black, and Everson (2006) studied a sample of 4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds with previous behavior problems and found that spanking was associated with a subsequent increase in externalizing problems.
* MacKenzie et al. (2011) measured the relation of spanking at age 3 of a nationally representative sample of 779 three-year-old children to externalizing behavior at age 5. The study controlled externalizing behavior at age 3 and 30 other variables. Despite that, they found that frequent spanking at age 3 was associated with more externalizing behavior at age 5.
* Pardini, Fite, and Burke (2008) studied a sample of 1st-, 4th-, and 7th-grade children and found that spanking was associated with a subsequent increase in both teacher- and parent-reported conduct problems. The increase was larger as age increased and if the child was Black.
* Gunnoe and Mariner (1997) studied a sample of children 4 to 11 years old and found that, for White but not for Black children, spanking was associated with more fights at school4 or 6 years later. Over the same time span, corporal punishment was also associated with an increase in antisocial behavior for all ages for Blacks as well as Whites.
* McLoyd and Smith (2002) studied a sample of 4-year-old White, Black, and Hispanic children and found that more spanking was associated with more behavior problems six years later for all three racial or ethnic groups. However, spanking was not associated with behavior problems for children with high levels of emotional support.
* Millar (2009) studied a representative sample of9,789 Canadian children age 4 to 11 and found that spanking was associated with a subsequent increase in hyperactivity, emotional disorders, aggression, indirect aggression, and property offenses.
* Mulvaney and Mebert (2007) studied a sample of White and Black children and found that spanking at age 3 was associated with an increase in externalizing problems in 1st grade. The increase was found for both Black and White children and was greater for children with difficult temperaments.
* Straus, Sugarman, and Giles-Sims (Chapter 6) studied a nationally representative sample of children aged 6 to 9 and found that spanking was associated with an increase in antisocial behavior two years later.
* Taylor, Manganello et al. (2010) studied a sample of 3-year-old children and found that spanking was associated with an increase in child aggression two years later.
Among these many excellent studies, the one by Millar (2009) is particularly important because it allowed comparison of the effects of spanking with the effects of other adverse childhood experiences. The study followed up a very large nationally representative sample of Canadian children who participated in the Canadian National Longitudinal Study of children. Millar's sample was large enough to include in one statistical analysis five other well-established risk factors for child behavior problems: whether a parent is depressed, inadequate supervision, lack of love and support, low income, and broken family. Each of these is associated with more spanking and therefore could be the real underlying cause of the link between spanking and child antisocial behavior. Millar found that the effect of spanking was in addition to and had a stronger unique effect on aggression and delinquency than these other five adverse childhood experiences.
Spanking and Adolescent and Adult Crime
Longitudinal Studies of Adolescent Crime
Four longitudinal studies found that corporal punishment was associated with crime as an adolescent or adult, controlling for the level of misbehavior that presumably elicited the corporal punishment.
* Brezina (1999) studied a nationally representative sample of lOth-grade boys and found that corporal punishment was associated with an increase in child-to-parent assault a year later.
* Foshee et al. (2005) studied a sample of 8th- and 9th-grade students and found that spanking was not associated with assaulting a dating partner for the total sample (which included many single-parent families). In the two-parent sample, maternal spanking was associated with more assaults on dating partners.
* Simons et al. (1998) studied a sample of 7th-grade boys and found that moj:e spanking was associated with more dating violence and antisocial behavior two years later.
* Straus, Colby, and Medeiros (Chapter 15) studied a sample of children age 8 to 13 and controlled for the level of antisocial behavior that presumably led to the spanking, as well as 10 other risk factors for later crime such as low parental monitoring and support. Years later, when they were young adults, the boys who experienced spanking had higher scores on scales to measure violent crime, property crime, and overall crime.
Spanking and Physical and Sexual Assault of Partners
There are several cross-sectional studies that, even though they cannot establish which is cause and which is effect, have the merits of controlling for important variables that could be the real underlying cause of the relationship between spanking and crime, such as low socioeconomic status or a low level of parental warmth and support, and some are studies in nations other than the United States.
Research on the relationship of spanking to physically assaulting a marital or dating partner has consistently found that spanking is associated with an increased probability of assault on a marital or dating partner.
* Chapters 12 and 13 show that spanking is associated with physically assaulting a dating partner in the United States and many other nations.
* Chapter 16 shows that spanking is associated with sexual coercion and physically forced sex.
* Cast, Schweingruber, and Berns (2006) studied a sample of young married couples and found that more spanking was associated with more physical assaults against a partner.
* Foshee (Foshee, Bauman, & Linder, 1999; Foshee, Ennett, Bauman, & Suchindran, 2005) studied a sample of 8th and 9th graders and found that more spanking by mothers was associated with more assaults by females against dating partners, but not by males.
Spanking and Other Adult Antisocial Behavior and Crime
Afifi et al. (2006) studied a nationally representative sample of 5,877 U.S. adults and found that the percent with conduct disorder/antisocial behavior as adults was 32% higher for participants who had experienced corporal punishment.
A study by McCord (1997) is particularly important because the boys in the study were followed up over a 35-year period and because, like the children in Chapter 15, they were a high-risk group who many believe need strong discipline (one of the euphemisms for spanking) to keep them from a life of crime. However, Chart 19.4 shows the boys who experienced spanking were 111ore likely to have been convicted for a serious crime, regardless of whether the father had a criminal record. Moreover, McCord ( 1997) found that although parental warmth and support reduced the percent of boys who were later convicted of a violent crime, the relation of spanking to crime remained.
Similar results were found using the data on 17,404 university students in the International Dating Violence Study (described in Chapter 3). Chart 19.5 clearly shows that positive parenting is associated with less crime as measured by a scale that asked about eight criminal acts (described in Dawson and Straus, 2011). Moreover, Chart 19.6 shows that regardless of the level of positive parenting, the more spanking, the higher the score on the criminal behavior scale. (Positive parenting was measured by a six-item scale that asked about the extent to which the student's parents supervised, helped, and comforted the child).
Chart 19.4 Rates of Conviction for Serious Crimes Are Higher among Sons Who Experienced Spanking and Highest among Sons of Convicted Fathers Who Experienced Spanking
*Data from McCord (1997), Table 1
Chaff 19.5 The More Positive Parenting, the Lower the Probability of Criminal Behavior 17,404 university students. International Dating Violence Study. ANCOVA controlling for age, socioeconomic status, and limited disclosure scale score.
Studies in two other nations compared the extent of criminal behavior as an adult by those whose parents depended on spanking with those whose parents did not. In Finland, Pulkkinen (1983) and in Great Britain, Farrington (1978) found that children whose parents used spanking had a greater probability for subsequently committing serious crimes.
Trends in Spanking and Implications for Crime
The longitudinal studies in Chapters 6, 10, and 15, and those summarized in this chapter provide strong evidence that spanking causes cognitive and behavioral problems. However, there are still reasons why the causal connection can be questioned, such as whether there is a genetic predisposition to violence that manifests itself in both spanking by the parents and aggression and other antisocial behavior by the child. These questions are addressed in the section, Does Spanking Really Cause Antisocial Behavior, in Chapter 20. Assume for the moment, however, that the link between spanking and an increased probability of antisocial behavior and crime is causal, what are the implications for crime rates?
Chart 19.6 Positive Parenting Reduces the Crime Rate but Does Not Reduce the Relation of Spanking to Crime
17,404 university students. International Dating Violence Study. ANCOVA controlling for age, socioeconomic status, and limited disclosure scale score.
There is evidence that spanking is decreasing worldwide, even in the United States, where the trend is less clear. Twenty-nine nations have prohibited spanking by parents, starting with Sweden in 1979, followed by other Scandinavian nations a few years later, Germany in 2000, and other nations since then (listed in the next chapter). Large reductions in spanking can be accomplished by such changes in national policy, as illustrated by the experience of Sweden and Germany discussed in Chapter 21. In the 1950s, 97% of Swedish parents spanked and one third did it at least daily. By 2006 it had decreased to I 0% (Modig, 2009). In Germany, surveys of nationally representative samples of children age 12 to 18 found large decreases from 1992 to 2002, especially in the most severe forms of corporal punishment (Bussmann, 2004; Bussmann et al., 2011). The shift away from corporal punishment is likely to continue and probably accelerate. If spanking is one of the causes of crime, worldwide reductions in spanking should contribute to a worldwide reduction in crime, especially violent crime.
Processes Linking Spanking and Crime
In Chapter 18, we discussed the widespread belief that, as the saying goes, spanking "will teach him a lesson he won't forget." That is often true. However, this chapter shows that the lessons learned may also be conducive to violence and other crime. The most frequently mentioned of these criminogenic processes is that it is appropriate to hit people-including people we love-who misbehave, and that "might makes right." Learning the morality of hitting is an important part of the explanation of the link between spanking and crime. Many other processes are likely to also be part of the explanation. Some of them were shown by the studies in this book. They include:
* Lower self-control (Chapter 7)
* Undermining the bond between children and parents (Chapter 8)
* Lower IQ (Chapter 10)
* Lower probability of higher education (Chapter 11)
* Less conflict management skills such as explaining and negotiating (Cliapter 12)
Needed Research on Mechanisms Linking Spanking and Crime
Research on the relation of spanking to child antisocial behavior and adult crime needs to examine many other processes. The examples include: anger, rage, resentment, and hostility over being repeatedly hit by parents; feeling powerless and a resulting need to demonstrate power; belief that the world is unfair; rebellion resulting from overly strict discipline enforced by spanking; low self-esteem; less well-developed conscience; alienation; hostile attribution of the intent of other people's behavior; neurological and endocrine damage (Bugental et al., 2003; Bugental et al., 2010; Tomoda et al., 2009); depression (Straus, 1994; Straus, 2001d); post-traumatic stress symptoms (Straus, 2009c); and dulled affect and empathy.
Although spanking usually secures compliance in the immediate situation, the long-term effects of spanking are more often the opposite of what, for most Americans and British people is a self-evident truth-that spanking is sometimes necessary to bring up a well-behaved child. Contrary to this belief, the studies in this book found that spanking is \!SSociated with an increased probability of 15 harmful side effects, ranging from antisocial behavior of children to reduced mental ability, depression, and crime as an adult. In the concluding chapter, we restated these in the form of a list of 15 benefits of never spanking.
Summary and Conclusions
The introduction to this chapter asked whether spanking has the same relation to crime as physical abuse. The evidence summarized suggests that it does, but with the important qualification that the "effect size" is less. For example, Strassberg et al. (1994) found that spanking was associated with twice the number of acts of physical aggression observed among a group of kindergarten children compared with the children who were not spanked six months earlier. But physical abuse was associated with 4 times as many physically aggressive acts. Other studies that have also found that spanking has the same effect as physical abuse, but with a lower probability of the adverse outcomes for children include Afifi et al. (2006), Fergusson et al. (2008), Straus (2001a, Chapter 7), and Ulman and Straus (2003). Moreover, all the adverse effects of spanking shown in this book, and in our previous book on spanking (Straus, 2001a) and in Gershoff's meta-analysis, are also the effects of physical abuse found by numerous studies.
20 Obstacles to Accepting the Evidence
Both the amount of research and the over 90% consistency between studies of the adverse effects of spanking is remarkable. Yet all but a few parents, social scientists, and professionals who advise parents continue to believe that spanking is sometimes necessary. As pointed out in Chapter 1, this research is practically ignored in textbooks on children. If there were as much consistency in the results of research on any other aspect of parenting, it would be a major section of child psychology textbooks, rather than the current situation, which is typically a one-half page description with no recommendation to never spank. The purpose ofthis chapter is to suggest explanations for this discrepancy between the evidence and what the experts recommend and what parents do. Seven overlapping explanations are presented:
* The evidence, while voluminous, does not really prove that spanking causes child behavior problems and crime.
* Ending spanking will mean a nation with kids out of control.
* The harmful effects don't apply when spanking is the cultural norm.
* Even if the evidence on the adverse effects of spanking is strong, it is not truly conclusive, and it is therefore not ethical to advise parents to never spank.
* Parents who spank, and children who have been spanked, have no way of perceiving for themselves that spanking has harmful side effects.
* Cultural norms block accepting the evidence.
In addition to these six obstacles, the next chapter discusses the belief that, compared with other harms to which children are exposed, the adverse effects of spanking are so small that it is not worth spending limited resources on attempts to end spanking.
Does the Research Really Prove that Spanking Causes Antisocial Behavior?
Causal Sequence
Most studies that investigated the relationship of spanking to antisocial behavior or crime are cross-sectional, and therefore the results could indicate either that:
* Child antisocial behavior causes spanking
* Spanking causes antisocial behavior
* There are bidirectional effects
We believe the relationship is bidirectional. That is, the child's antisocial behavior is one of the many things that lead parents to spank, but ironically, when they spank to correct antisocial behavior, it increases rather than decreases the probability of future antisocial behavior.
Two types of research have provided evidence that spanking increases the probability of crime. First, are the longitudinal studies in Chapters 6, 10, and 15, and the many others cited in Chapter 19 that controlled for the Time 1 level of antisocial behavior that presumably led to the use of spanking and found that spanking was associated with a subsequent increase in antisocial and criminal behavior. Second are the results of parent-training interventions for children with problem behaviors (Crozier & Katz, 1979; Patterson, 1982; Webster-Stratton, 1990; Webster-Stratton, Kolpacoff, & Hollinsworth, 1988). These three studies evaluated programs that included steps to get parents to stop or reduce spanking. In all three, the behavior of the children improved after spanking ended. A study by Beauchaine et al. (2005) of over 500 families randomly assigned parents to either a group that had parenting interventions to reduce spanking or to a control group. The study found that one year later the children in the no-spanking intervention group had significantly less externalizing behavior problems than the control group. Similar results were found by Knox, Burkhart, and Hunter (2011 ).
Is the Real Cause Genetic Inheritance?
Parents who use corporal punishment may be more aggressive as a matter of genetic heritage. The association between spanking and subsequent antisocial behavior may reflect a genetic propensity to violence that is shared by parents and their children. Our view is consistent with research showing epigenetic effects for the interaction of genetic characteristics with many parent practices. That is, the way parents bring up children influences how the genes express themselves as the child develops. What does the research show? The studies examining the interaction of genetic heritage and parenting practices have found evidence for both genetic effects and parenting effects, and an epigenetic effect (i.e., the interaction of genetics and parenting; Burt, McGue, Krueger, & Iacono, 2005, 2007; Starns, Juffer, & Van Ijzendoorn, 2002). However, none of these three studies empirically tested the interaction of spanking with genetic characteristics.
Fortunately, a study by Boutwell et al. (2011) did test the interaction of spanking with genetic propensity to antisocial behavior. They studied a sample of 1,600 twins that enable them to compare fraternal and identical twins. They found a clear genetic effect: The higher the score on their scale of genetic risk that measures genetic propensity for antisocial behavior, the more antisocial behavior by the child. The crucial point for understanding the effects of spanking is that they also found that spanking affected the relationship of genetic propensity to actual antisocial behavior. The bottom line in Chart 20.1 shows that the relation of genetic propensity for antisocial behavior to actual antisocial behavior was smallest for the children who were not spanked. The middle line shows a slightly larger relationship for the children in the low spanking group, and the top line shows that the relationship between genetic propensity and antisocial behavior was strongest for children who were spanked the most. However, as in our study of the relation of spanking to crime as an adult (Chapter 15), these relationships were found only for boys.
Chart 20.1 The Combination of Genetic Propensity and Spanking Results in the Most Antisocial Behavior
*After Boutwell, B. B., Franklin, C. A., Barnes, J. C., & Beaver, K. M. (2011)
The Boutwell et al. study found that spanking made the biggest difference among children who were genetically more likely to be antisocial. In other words, children who are genetically more likely be antisocial are not only more likely to be spanked, they are also much more likely to be adversely affected by spanking. The chances that they will develop antisocial behaviors increased by being spanked. These results are consistent with the irony intended by the title of our previous book on spanking Beating the Devil Out of Them (Straus, 2001a). This is because the research shows that spanking, rather than beating the devil out of them, brings out the devil in them. As a consequence, one practical implication of the Boutwell et al. study is that, when there is a genetic propensity to antisocial behavior, it is even more important to avoid spanking.
Confounding with Physical Abuse
The relation of spanking to antisocial behavior and crime could occur because, among the parents who spank are some who also physically abuse the child. Although most studies of spanking do not take this into account, at least eight high quality studies have done so. All eight found that spanking is related to antisocial behavior and crime even after removing physically abused children from the sample or after controlling statistically for physical abuse (Afifi et al., 2006; Gamez-Guadix, Straus, Carrobles, Mufioz Rivas, & Almendros Rodriguez, 2010; MacMillan et al., 1999; Strassberg et al., 1994; Straus, 1990e, Chapter 23; 2001a, Chapter 8; Taylor, Manganello et al., 2010).
Cultural Context
Societies differ in respect to the cultural or statistical normativeness of spanking. It has been argued that when spanking is the norm, children will understand that it is for their own good and will not suffer adverse side effects (DeaterDeckard & Dodge, 1997). Chapter 14 presents the results of 17 studies that provided 60 comparisons of the effects of spanking in different cultural contexts. A tabulation of those studies showed that for 77% of the studies, there was a harmful side effect of spanking regardless of the normativeness of spanking in the cultural contexts. Another review of cultural context effects found similar results and concluded, "Although corporal punishment is generally related to more behavior problems regardless of cultural group, this association is weaker in countries in which corporal punishment is the norm. Yet cultures in which corporal punishment is the norm also have higher levels of societal violence" (Lansford, 2010, p. 105).
Will Ending Spanking Mean Kids Out of Control?
Many people are worried that if parents cannot spank, it will result in kids running wild. If no spanking meant no discipline (i.e., no efforts to teach and no correction of misbehavior), that would be a likely outcome. However, no spanking does not mean no discipline, or as some put it, permissiveness (Larzelere & Baumrind, 2010). In fact, practically all parents, including those who spank, use many other methods of teaching and correcting, starting with saying no, repositioning the child, explaining, providing an alternative activity, and time-out. Of course, as shown in Chapter 18 on why everyone resorts to spanking, these methods often do not work. In fact, for 2-year-old children, if repetition of the misbehavior in the same day is the criterion of not working, the failure rate for all methods, including spanking, is about 80% in the same day (Larzelere & Merenda, 1994). When a child has beeq told to stop it and an hour later repeats the misbehavior, does that mean it is time to spank? No, because as the first chart in Chapter 18 shows, a 2-year-old is just as likely to do it again two hours after being spanked. It is possible to conclude from these statistics that, with a 2-year-old, nothing works. That is correct if never repeating the misbehavior is the criterion. But that criterion is inconsistent with what is known about the limited ability of toddlers to control their own behavior. It is more consistent with the evidence on child behavior to view replacing undesirable behavior by more appropriate behavior as a gradual process. It requires repeating the correction many times, often hundreds of times, regardless of whether it is by saying no or by spanking. With consistency and perseverance, both spanking and nonviolent correction can achieve that end. But, there are two big differences.
First, parents who spank are not deterred by the fact that the child repeats the misbehavior. They spank as often as necessary until the child does learn. On the other hand, when parents start with nonviolent methods of discipline and the almost inevitable repetition of the misbehavior occurs, the cultural myth that spanking works when other methods do not, leads them to turn to spanking. That is one of the main reasons why, as documented in Chapter 2, over 90% of parents spank toddlers.
Second, at the time parents use non-violent modes of correcting misbehavior, thire is no way they can observe the benefits such as closer child to parent bond and higher IQ. Those benefits, when they occur, take months or years to show up. But the repetition of misbehavior later in the same day, which occurs in about the same percentage of cases as when the child is spanked, is visible that day.
As we said, every method of teaching and controlling children, including spanking, needs to be repeated, often many, many times. If parents replace spanking with an equal level of consistency and perseverance in using the nonviolent modes of discipline they already use, the result would not be a world of kids out of control. The more likely result would be a world of better-behaved children. Consider the following:
The results of research in this book and the studies summarized by Gersh off (2002) tell us that spanking is associated with behavior problems of children. Flipping that around, those same results tell us that children of parents who do not spank have the least probability of behavior problems. They are, on average, the best behaved children. In fact, the failure to cover spanking in child development textbooks shown in Chapter 1 and in Douglas and Straus (2007) reveals that the better behavior from children who are not spanked may be the best kept secret of U.S. child psychology.
Sweden banned spanking by parents in 1979. Swedes who opposed the ban feared it would lead to a wave of delinquency. Instead, juvenile crime rates have dropped, along with juvenile drug use and suicide (Janson, Langberg, & Svensson, 2011 ). The specific changes are given in the next chapter. Those who favor the ban are likely to claim that it shows the benefits of avoiding spanking. That is not necessarily correct because a great many other things have changed in Sweden since 1979, and crime rates elsewhere in Europe have also decreased. Therefore, there is no way of knowing if the decrease in spanking had anything to do with the decrease in juvenile behavior problems and crime. However, it can at least be said with certainty that fears widely expressed in 1979 of Sweden becoming a nation with kids of control has not happened.
Although no state in the United States prohibits spanking by parents, with the exception of toddlers, spanking has been decreasing. The decrease has been especially rapid in the last two decades. If spanking is necessary for effective discipline, we should be seeing an increase in juvenile behavior problems and crime. Most people in the United States think that this is what has happened. In fact, 91% of the public believes that the percentage of teenagers who commit violent crime has increased or stayed the same over the past 10 years (Guzman, Lippman, Anderson Moore, & O'HareHow, 2003). Contrary to this belief, the rate of juveniles charged with a criminal offense has decreased since the early 1990s, as has the rate of violent victimizations perpetrated by juveniles as reported in the National Crime Victimization Survey (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). For crime in schools, tragedies such as what happened in Columbine, Colorado have captured public attention and aroused fear about the safety of children and concern for what life will be like if this continues. Again, the reality is the opposite. Both violent crime and property crime in U.S. schools have declined since the data were ftrst gathered in 1992 (Dinkes, Kemp, Baum, & Snyder, 2009). In other nations, bullying in schools has declined since the ending of corporal punishment in schools (Molcho et al., 2009). Bullying has decreased (Finkelhor, Turner, Ormrod, & Hamby, 2010). Other youth problems have also decreased, and youth are becoming more rather than less responsible. For example, sex without a condom has decreased (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 201 Ob ), and along with it births to teenage mothers (The Alan Guttmacher Institute, 2004).
Cross-Cultural Applicability of the Harmful Effects of Spanking
Most ofthe research on spanking is based on parents and children in Western societies. But there is enough evidence from non-Western societies to indicate that the harmful effects of spanking may be cross-culturally universal (see Chapters 3, 5, 13, 14, 16; Gardner, Powell, & Grantham-McGregor, 2007; Gershoff et al., 2010; Lansford & Deater-Deckard, 2010). Our research in Chapter 14 on spanking in cultural contexts where corporal punishment is the norm, found that the cultural context does not eliminate the harmful side effects of spanking. The review by Lansford (2010) also found that corporal punishment is related to more behavior problems regardless of cultural group. Moreover, as pointed out earlier, Lansford's review of this issue concluded that "cultures in which corporal punishment is the norm ... have higher levels of societal violence" (Lansford, 2010, p. 105).
The fact that anthropological and cross-national studies show that parents in almost all societies spank has been used to argue that spanking may not be "something to confront with policies or laws" (Nock, 2000) and imply that such an effort is not needed or not possible. On the contrary, laws and policies to deal with behaviors that are likely to cause problems are even more important when the behavior is linked to cross-cultural or biological universals such as sex, parenthood, aging, and violence. We do not use the fact that aging, male dominance, and murder occur in every, or nearly every, society to say that nothing should be done about them. Chapter 3 on the use of corporal punishment worldwide shows that spanking was indeed found in all32 nations studied. However, there were also very large differences between the nations in the percent of students who were spanked, and most important, Chapter 13 shows that nations with the lower rates of spanking also had lower rates of assaulting and injuring dating partners. Thus, although spanking may be just about universal, it is far from a constant. It varies from society to society and that variation is related to the level of violence in a society. The same principle applies to group differences in spanking within a society such as Blacks compared with Whites.
The difference between the treatment of spanking and aging or homicide is not that spanking is universal, whereas aging and homicide are not. Rather, spanking is treated differently because the presumed benefit of spanking "when necessary" is a deeply embedded aspect of U.S. culture, as well as many other cultures. As a consequence, almost all Americans doubt the wisdom or even the possibility of never spanking a child.
The Ethics of Advising Parents to Never Spank
The Ethical Obligation to Inform Parents about the Research
The research evidence on whether spanking causes violence and other crime and psychological problems is very strong but not conclusive because there have been no randomized control studies. However, as pointed out in Chapter 18 on why almost all parents spank, there are nonviolent methods of correcting and controlling behavior that are just as effective in the short run but do not have the harmful side effects of spanking. Therefore, even evidence that is not fully conclusive creates an ethical requirement to advise parents to avoid the medicine that has the potential of harmful side effects and to advise them to use treatments for misbehavior that are just as effective but do not have these side effects. As a consequence, professionals working with parents and those who write books and articles for parents have an obligation to (1) inform parents that there are nonviolent modes of discipline that are just as effective, but without the risk of the side effects of spanking and (2) advise parents to never spank and use only nonviolent modes of discipline.
Do Parents Need to Learn Alternatives for It to Be Ethical to Advise to Never Spank?
If no spanking meant no correction, it would be a disaster because children need correction and guidance to help them become responsible persons. However, as we pointed out earlier, _even parents who spank the most, use many other methods of correcting misbehavior and use them much more often than they spank. For example, they tell the child to stop something or do something and explain why; they move the children; and they use nonviolent punishment such as disapproval or depriving the child of a privilege. As a consequence, the advice to never spank does not mean no correction. It mostly means leaving out the spanking part of what they do and using only the nonviol~nt methods of correction that almost all parents already use. If parents did this (i.e., continued correcting misbehavior but leave out the spanking part), it would increase the probability of their being effective parents, of having a closer bond with their child, and of having better behaved and more successful children. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that almost all parents and children will benefit when parents also acquire new behavior management skills or improve their method of using the techniques they already use. Therefore, although it is not a prerequisite for never spanking, we believe that as many parents as possible should participate in parent education classes such as Effective Black Parenting (Alvy & Marigna, 1987); Nurturing Parenting (Bavolek, 1992-2006), Parent Effectiveness Training (Gordon, 2000), and Tripple-P (Graaf, Speetjens, Smit, Wolff, & Tavecchio, 2008).
The Moral Principle of Nonviolence
A second ethical consideration is the moral value of nonviolence. Violence has been used throughout human history to achieve socially desirable goals, but it has gradually been replaced by nonviolent alternatives (Elias, 1978; Pinker, 2011). Corporal punishment of soldiers, sailors, apprentices, and wives has been abolished. The ancient principle of an eye-for-eye has been replaced by giving kings and now governments' responsibility for dealing with criminals. In tum, governments have increasingly replaced flogging and execution of criminals or heretics with incarceration. Incarceration in tum is being replaced by various forms of therapeutic treatments, such as restorative justice (Johnstone & Van Ness, 2007; Menkel-Meadow, 2007).
Ironically, the family is one of the last places where violence by individual members of society to achieve socially desirable ends has persisted. Corporal punishment in schools and corporal punishment and capital punishment of criminals has been abolished in all nations of the European Union and in many other nations. Foster parents and day care teachers are not allowed to hit children in most states of the United States. However, the situation is quite different for biological parents. In all but 32 of the more than 190 nations in the world, parents are allowed to hit children for purposes of correction and control. To say that there are 32 nations where spanking is illegal overstates the extent of the movement away from spanking because in most of those nations little has been done to inform parents and children that the legal standard is never spank. Nevertheless, even a generation ago, the idea oflegally prohibiting spanking would have been seen as utopian by some citizens and laughable or outrageous by most. Moreover, as shown in Chapter 17 on the decline of spanking, parents themselves are moving away from spanking regardless of the legal change. The evolving cultural change to end all spanking because it is inhumane and a violation ofhuman rights (Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment, 2007; Newell, 2011; Pinheiro, 2006) is likely to proceed to the point where legal prohibition will be used by all nations to clarify and extend the new pattern, thus crystallizing a new stage in the social evolution of a more humane and less violent world.
Why We Don't Perceive the Connection
The evidence presented in this book, together with the many other studies cited, shows that spanking is associated with behavior problems of both children and adults. This evidence has been not presented to university students or in clinical training as indicated by its absence from child development and child psychiatry textbooks. The content analysis of textbooks on child development presented in Chapters 1 and 18 shows that almost one half of these books include nothing at all on spanking, and those that do include very little, despite the fact that it is a part of the early experience of over 90% of American toddlers an:'d despite a degree of consistency in research results that may be greater than any other aspect of parent behavior.
As we pointed out in Chapter 1, Ross Park's argument that "attempts to treat punishment as a separate variable are bound to fail. Instead, the inherent packaged nature of parental discipline renders the attempt to answer the question about the effects of corporal punishment on children a misguided one" is like saying that it is futile to try to separate out the effects of Vitamin C because the effects depend on the whole nutritional context or futile to study the effect of reading to children because of the inherent package nature of parenting. Of course the whole nutritional package or the whole parenting package must be studied, but so must each of its parts. Parke's comments are another example of dismissing the overwhelming evidence of the harmful effects of spanking.
In some cases, the evidence is not merely ignored but denied, as we documented in Chapter 19. Still another example of ignoring the evidence about the impact of spanking is the violence of prevention programs that are implemented in a large proportion of U.S. schools. None that we know of address the most frequent type of violence encountered by teenagers-being hit by a parent. Remember that at least one third of 13- and 14-year-olds are hit by their parents each year, and that among teenagers who are hit by parents, it happens an average of about 8 times per year. It may be beyond the power of a school-based program to get parents to stop hitting their children, but if the cultural norms permitted it, they could explain that it is also wrong for parents to correct misbehavior by hitting. Until parents stop hitting children to correct their misbehavior, it is unrealistic to expect teenagers to accept the idea that hitting is not an appropriate way to deal with the misbehavior of a peer who, for example, insults him or her, jumps ahead in a line, or makes a pass at his or her girlfriend or boyfriend.
Social and Psychological Obstacles to Accepting the Evidence
In our opinion, the fundamental reason for disregarding the evidence on the links between spanking and violence is not inadequacies of the scientific evidence on the adverse effects of spanking. The more fundamental explanation lies in the contradictions between what the research says and what personal experience and cultural norms say.
Personal Experience
A major obstacle to accepting the evidence that spanking is linked to behavior problems and violence occurs because personal experience seems to contradict the research results. One aspect is rejecting the research results because the harmful outcome has not happened to them. It is difficult for most people to understand that when research shows that smoking kills, it really means it kills only a minority of heavy smokers As was pointed out in detail in Chapter 1, spanking is a risk factor, not a one-to-one causal relation. It increases the probability of crime and other social and psychological problems, but most people who were spanked, like two thirds of heavy smokers, will not suffer a harmful side effect. They can say, and almost everyone does say, "I was spanked and I don't beat my wife or rob banks." Additionally, it is impossible to see for yourselfhow things would have been different with the same amount of discipline, love, attention, etc. but without the spanking. Only longitudinal research on the effects of spanking, such as the studies in Chapters 6, 10, and 15, and the other longitudinal studies reviewed in Chapter 19, can show this.
Another personal experience reason for not accepting the findings from research on the harmful effects of spanking is that it requires admitting that one's parents did something seriously wrong. Similarly, there is the even greater difficulty in acknowledging that having spanked one's own children unnecessarily exposed them to risk of serious harm.
Perhaps the most important reason the, evidence linking spanking to crime and violence has been ignored is that, like their children, parents cannot see for themselves the evidence ofharm. As we noted earlier, the harmful side effects do not occur right away, often not for years. When they do occur, almost no one even considers the possibility that the child's violent or antisocial behavior or an adult's depression might be the result of spanking by loving parents, especially since the spanking is culturally defined as something that is sometimes necessary for the child's well-being. The harmful effects of smoking were not perceived for centuries for the same reasons. Smokers could experience the pleasure of the behavior, but they had no way of looking 10 years down the road to see the harm it might cause. Only research can show that, and even then, only if professionals and parents are informed about the results of the research. However, as we pointed out in Chapter 1 professionals and parents are not informed about the results of research on the side effects of spanking.
Cultural Norms and Myths
Much of the opposition to steps to end spanking is based on one or the other of the 10 cultural myths about spanking described in Chapter 10 of Beating the Devil Out of Them: Corporal Punishment in American Families (Straus, 2001a). An example is the myth that spanking works better than other methods of correction and control. As explained in Chapter 18, that myth is why, despite the fact that most people in the United States probably believe it is best to avoid spanking, almost all parents continue to spank. It is exemplified by one father who said to us "I avoid it at all costs, ~ut there are occasions when a good swat on the behind is needed." This view is shared by many pediatricians and child psychologists. For example, Dr. Lewis First of Children's Hospital in Boston told a reporter that he was against spanking, but later in the same interview said "if a child repeatedly runs into traffic, for example, you may want to play the big card" (Lehman, 1989). The same article reports that Dr. Robert M. Reece, Director of Child Protection at Children's Hospital and also at Boston City Hospital, told the reporter that he "opposes all corporal p1,mishment as ineffective, potentially dangerous, 'and unfair" (emphasis added). Later in the same interview he said, "Spanks anywhere but a few light blows on the buttocks or using anything other than an open hand are out of bounds and signal abuse." In short, "a few light blows on the buttocks" are not out of bounds to a pediatrician who "opposes all corporal punishment." Those same contradictory views are probably manifest in surveys of professionals by Burgess et al. (2010) and Schenck et al. (2000).
Even more deeply embedded cultural obstacles to never spanking are described in Chapter 10 of Beating the Devil Out of Them (Straus, 2001a) on 10 myths that perpetuate corporal punishment. Among them are the cultural norms supporting use of violence for socially desirable ends, as was illustrated in Chapter 5 on the links between approval of violence and spanking, extreme individualism, fear of government intervention in the family, and religious fundamentalists ·who believe that God expects parents to spank. These deep-seated aspects of American beliefs and culture are major obstacles that are slowing the eventual end of spanking as a culturally approved and prevalent method of violent child rearing. However, slowing does not mean stopping the change to a world without spanking.
Summary and Conclusions
This chapter documented numerous obstacles that have blocked a shift away from spanking that is part of the long-term social evolution toward a more humane society (Pinker, 2011; Straus, 2001 d). Eventually this cultural transition will probably lead to recognition of the evidence. There are signs that illustrate both the underlying movement away from spanking and the obstacles. In 1995, the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics jointly published a pamphlet Raising Children to Resist Violence: What You Can Do (American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, 1995). It says that "Hitting, slapping, or spanking children as punishment shows them that it's okay to hit others to solve problems and can train them to punish others in the same way they were punished." Despite this, the American Psychological Association has turned down resolutions advising parents not to spank, even though many years ago it passed a resolution against corporal punishment by teachers. Why has the American Psychological Association not done the same for corporal punishment by parents? It is not because there is scientific evidence showing that corporal punishment by teachers is harmful and a lack of such evidence for corporal punishment by parents. The evidence available at the time of harm from teachers using corporal punishment was minimal. There were no experiments, no longitudinal studies, and only a few-and mostly inadequate-cross-sectional studies. On the other hand, the evidence on harm from parental spanking is plentiful. It includes experiments, longitudinal studies, and many well-designed cross-sectional studies with numerous controls and parent-education intervention studies, and it is highly consistent. The most plausible explanation for condemning corporal punishment by teachers and not by parents is a cultural change in one but not the other. In the United States, except for states in the Deep South, there is now a moral consensus against teachers hitting, whereas as shown in Chapter 17, no such moral passage (Gusfield, 1981) has taken place concerning parents hitting children. Scientific evidence had little to do with the fact that as long ago as 197 5, the governing Council of the American Psychological Association passed a resolution against corporal punishment by teachers, but a resolution against parents spanking has not even been put before the council.
In Chapter 1, we quoted the ,guidelines published in 1998 (and reaffirmed in 2004) by the American Academy of Pediatrics after years of sometimes heated debate (American Academy of Pediatrics, 1998). Although it is a strong statement against spanking, it does not include spanking in the behaviors that should never be used.
In 2008, a member of the California legislature introduced a bill to ban spanking of children under age 3. It received national attention, and there were editorials in many newspapers. Almost all the editorials and reader comments opposed the legislation. Like the similar legislation proposed in Massachusetts in 2005, it did get beyond the committee hearing stage. Nevertheless, the fact that this legislation was even proposed in two states is a sign that the process of change is underway. As indicated in the next chapter, that process is much further along in Europe.
21 A World Without Spanking
The idea of a world where parents never spank evokes a variety of images, some of them diametrically opposite.
We suggest that the majority image in the United States, and probably all but a few other nations, is that it would be a world with out-of-control children and socjal chaos. This is the implication of surveys such as those in Chapters 5 and 1 i that found that almost three quarters of Americans think that spanking is so,metimes necessary. That belief is also prevalent among professionals in the United States concerned with children (Burgess et al., 2010; Schenck et al., 2000). The opposite view of a world without spanking is that it would be a world with less violence and other crime, in part because, as shown in this book, children who grow up free of violence by their parents are more likely to be, as the saying goes, healthier, happier, and wiser than children who were spanked. It would be a world with fewer psychological problems. This is what we believe the research evidence indicates. But as indicated in Chapter 1, this evidence has not yet made its way into child development textbooks and the training of professionals who work with parents. That is probably one of the reasons the kids out of control image predominates.
Perhaps the most positive view of a world without spanking is held by a third group-those for whom ending spanking represents a major and essential gain in human rights (Durrant & Smith, 2011; Newell, 2011; Pinheiro, 2006). From a human rights perspective, ending spanking is a key step to creating a world not only in which children are better off, but which is more humane and peaceful, and, therefore, everyone is better off.
A fourth view, which we examine in this chapter, is that ending spanking by parents would not make much difference. This group focuses on the research results that show that, although spanking may have an adverse effect on children under some circumstances, the effect is small and contingent on what else the parents do. This view helps explain the seeming contradiction between the increasing proportion of the general population and professionals who are against spanking but do not see spanking as a major influence on the well-being of children unless it is done too much or is done by parents who use harsh discipline as opposed to just spanking. As a consequence, one section of this chapter examines whether ending spanking is worth the effort. After that, we examine:
* Changes in society that are indicative of a change toward a more humane and civilized society and which underlie the decrease in approval of spanking and actual spanking. * Legislation throughout the world to end the use of spanking and all other forms of corporal punishment. * The prospects for such legislation in the United States. * Identification of 15 ways in which the results of our research suggest that children and society would benefit from a world without spanking.
Societal Change and Change in Spanking
Consistent with the section on economic development and the decline in spanking in Chapter 17, Cultural Norms on The Necessity of Spanking and in this Chapter the decrease in spanking and the decrease in juvenile violence and violent crime are probably part of a civilizing process that has been going on for centuries (Elias, 1978; Pinker, 2011 ). One indication is that homicide rates have been declining since the late Middle Ages (Eisner, 2003, 2008). There are many reasons for the decrease (Elias, 1978; Pinker, 2011 ). One is that governments have assumed the responsibility for maintaining law and order. Vendettas and duels and other forms of self-help justice (Black, 1983) are no longer necessary. We now have police to deter offenders. Citizens can bring their grievances to courts for settlement. Although the existence of institutionalized means of maintaining order and adjudicating conflicts has been critical for the decrease in violence, many other factors have and are contributing to the decrease in interpersonal violence. We suggest that one of them is the way children are brought up. Treating children in ways that would now be considered ch,ild abuse was once common (DeMause, 1984). Over the centuries, children have been treated more and more humanely, including less use of spanking. Such children, in turn, are more likely to grow up to treat others more humanely and less violently.
The civilizing process is continuing because, as nations become more economically developed, they also tend to become more civilized in the sense used by Elias (1978), including less violence of many types including less violent child rearing (Pinker, 2011). We analyzed the International Dating Violence Study data on 32 nations (used for Chapters 3, 12, and 16). The nations ranged from low in economic development (such as Tanzania and South Africa) to high in economic development such as Sweden and the United States. They also differed in scores on a scale to measure the national average level of violent socialization. This scale consists of eight indicators of violent socialization, such as the percent in each nation who were told to hit back if someone hit or insulted them, the percent of students who were hit a lot by their mother or father when they were teenagers, and the percent who grew up in a family in which there was violence between the parents. The results shown in Chart 21.1 strongly support the idea that the more economically developed a nation, the less violently children are brought up. For example, Switzerland (CHE), the Netherlands (NDL), Sweden (SWE), and Belgium (BEL) in the lower right comer of the chart are all high in economic development and low in violent socialization. On the other hand, Great Britain (GBR), the United States (USA), and Hong Kong (HKG) are also high in economic development but are above average in violent socialization. Those cases illustrate why the correlation between economic development and violent socialization, although very high (.54) explains only 29% of the difference between nations in violent socialization. This is because economic development is only one of many things that influences violent socialization. Cases like the United Kingdom, United States, and Hong Kong that do not fit right on the trend line reflect the fact that many other national characteristics, not just the level of economic development, affect the degree to which children are brought up violently.
Chart 21.1 The More Economically Developed a Nation, the Less Violently Children Are Socialized
The results on the relation of economic development to less violent socialization are consistent with the civilizing process discussed previously (Eisner, 2003; Elias, 1978; Pinker, 2011). Human societies are gradually evolving to be more humane, including less violence. Violence is more and more being regarded as a problem rather than a virtue. Another example of this trend is a comparison ofU.S. survey data that asked nationally representative samples of adult Americans if they agreed or disagreed that "When a boy is growing up, it's important for him to have a few fist fights." In 1968, 75% agreed (Owens & Straus, 1975). By 1995, the Gallup survey ofU.S. parents described in Chapters 2 and 17 found that only 21% agreed. Because the 1968 survey included everyone age 18 or older and the 1995 survey was restricted to parents, the real decrease is probably not as great, but it is almost certain to be very large.
Seventy years ago, Montague (1941), and 40 years ago, Steinmetz and Straus (1973) argued that the family is the cradle of violence because it is where children first experience violence in the form of being hit by their parents and first observe violence between others in the form of parents and siblings hitting each other. That is also why we chose The Primordial Violence as the title for this book. It is a cruel irony that the institution that provides a child's first experience with love and support is also the institution that provides the child's first experience with violence. And, irony within irony, as we suggested previously, the fact that good parents do this for the morally correct purpose of producing a well-behaved child means that a child's first experience with violence is also an experience with the principle that violence is morally acceptable and is sometimes necessary in interpersonal relationships. We believe that learning the morality of violence through spanking by loving parents is an important part of the explanation for the high rates of violence in families and other spheres of life.
Of course, consistent with our repeated emphasis on multiple causation of almost all important individual and national characteristics, spanking is only one of many causes of violence and other crime. As a consequence, even if all parents stopped hitting their children, it would not mean the end of violence and other crime. Moreover, ifthere is a decrease, it is probably only one part of this century's long civilizing process described by Elias (1978, 1997) and Pinker (2011) that has reduced homicide rates in Europe to a 20th of what they were in the late Middle Ages (Eisner, 2003, 2008). Although less violent child rearing is only one aspect of the civilizing process, we suggest it is a crucial aspect.
The Prospects for Ending Spanking Worldwide
Despite the important reductions in violence resulting from the civilizing process, that process is far from complete. One seemingly small, but we think extremely important, part of the process that remains to be completed is ending violent socialization in the form of spanking. Spanking continues to be used by almost all parents in all but a fraction of the world's nations. Nevertheless, the movement away from spanking is accelerating. As was shown in Chapter 17, spanking is declining. Even in the United States, spanking has declined dramatically in the past 30 years for children of all ages except toddlers. The largest change has probably been in Sweden, which in 1979 was the first nation to legally ban spanking. A study of a Stockholm birth cohort born in the 1950s found that 94% of the parents spanked when these children were 3 years old. A third of them did it at least once a day. Moreover, there was not a single child in the cohort who was never spanked (Stattin et al., 1995). That is probably the situation in most of the world today. But Chart 21.2 shows the dramatic decrease in Sweden since spanking was banned in 1979 to only about 10%. Of course, the fact that 30 years after passage of the no-spanking law, at least 10% of Swedish parents were still hitting their children can be taken as support for the argument that spanking is inevitable (Nock, 2000). However, the same can be said for the fact that a certain percent of people do not always stop at stop signs. To imply, as Nock does, that there is therefore no point to prohibiting spanking is analogous to arguing that there is no point in laws requiring stopping at stop signs because, despite those laws, some people do not always stop.
Chart 21.2 In Sweden Spanking Decreased from 90% to 10%
Modig, C. (2009). Never Violence-Thirty Years on from Sweden's Abolition of Spanking
There is unlikely to ever be a society without crime, and it is also unlikely that there will ever be a society without at least some parents hitting children, even when spanking is illegal and contrary to the beliefs and cultural norms of the population. Only time will tell if the rate of spanking in Sweden will decrease even more. However, even if spanking does not decline further, the decrease from 94% to 10% is an amazingly rapid social change in the course of only 30 years.
An important question is how much of the decrease in spanking in Sweden was the result of the no-spanking legislation. It is likely that this legislation, rather than being the prime cause of the decrease, crystallized and amplified a trend that reflected more general changes in Swedish society that have transformed the country from its extremely violent past in early modern Europe. Previous evidence of this long-term process was the 1928 law that prohibited corporal punishment in schools. That was a step in the evolutionary path toward the 1979 law prohibiting corporal punishment by parents (Bussmann et al., 2011; Durrant & Olsen, 1997; Giles-Sims & Lockhart 2005a, 2005b).
Legislation banning corporal punishment by teachers and by parents is both a reflection and a cause of the historical change toward less violent child rearing. Before such laws can be enacted, at least an influential portion of a society must believe that spanking is not appropriate in any circumstance. It seems that ending corporal punishment in schools is typically an early part of the evolutionary path leading to ending corporal punishment by parents. If so, the fact that many nations and just over one half of the states in the United States have prohibited corporal punishment in schools is a sign that the social evolution toward a less violent society is proceeding.
An almost opposite evolutionary perspective is exemplified by Nock (2000). Nock views spanking as part of human biological evolution, and therefore as something that cannot be changed. The past 100 years, and especially the past 30 years in Sweden, shows that even ifthere is a biological basis for spanking, social evolution can override an inherited predisposition to spank. The social evolution of Sweden in respect to humane treatment of children is an example of what is now occurring worldwide. Even Great Britain, like the United States, a bastion of support for spanking, has now prohibited corporal punishment in schools. Many other nations have ended corporal punishment in schools. This includes all 27 nations in the European Union. Moreover, among the almost one half of U.S. states that still permit corporal punishment in schools, many local school districts have banned it. These are usually urban school districts. Therefore, because the population is now primarily urban, a U.S. state can permit teachers to hit children, only a small percent of the children in the state attend schools in a community where this is permitted.
As for spanking by parents, by 2011, 32 other nations had followed the Swedish example and prohibited parents hitting children to correct misbehavior (Center for Effective Discipline, 2010): Austria, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Kenya, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Tunisia, Ukraine, Uruguay, and Venezuela. This list, however, overstates the extent of change because there are large differences between nations in what is being done to implement the ban. Some have only recently changed the law, and some that changed it previously have done little to inform the public. The study by Bussmann et al. (2011) of four nations in Europe shows that st eps to inform the public about the law makes a large difference in the extent to which corporal punishment actually decreases. Sweden was not only the first nation to ban spanking, it was and is the nation with the most extensive public information effort, including television and radio announcements, and information directed at children in schools and in notices on all milk cartons informing children that parents are not allowed to hit them (Janson et al., 2011). The extensive effort to inform children and parents and to help parents who spank is probably an important part of the explanation for the decline in spanking from almost all parents to 10%.
The European Union and the United Nations committee responsible for administering the Convention of the Rights of the Child has interpreted that Convention as precluding use of spanking (Newell, 2011). Bit by bit, the committee is encouraging the member nations to end all use of spanking, and bit by bit, this is happening, usually starting with ending corporal punishment in schools.
The Prospects for Ending Spanking in the United States
The United States is among the most resistant of advanced industrialized nations to the idea of taking active steps to eliminate spanking by parents. This is indicated by a high percent of the public and professionals who continue to think that spanking is sometimes necessary (see Chapters 1 and 17). Nevertheless, change is underway as is also shown in Chapter 17. Corporal punishment is now prohibited in most American schools, and as mentioned previously, we think that prohibiting corporal punishment in schools is part of the process that is likely to eventually lead to prohibiting spanking by parents.
A few scholars are turning their attention to the legal aspects of ending spanking by parents (e.g., Bitensky, 1998; Pollard, 2003). However, consistent with the national consensus that spanking is sometimes necessary, the focus is on clarifying the conditions under which spanking is a "reasonable use of force" (Cope, 2010; Lambelet Coleman, Dodge, & Campbell, 2010). This seems to us to be a means of strengthening the legal basis for spanking.
Although there has been no decrease in the percent of U.S. parents who spank and slap toddlers, as shown in Chapter 17, far fewer older children are I hit now than a generation ago. A U.S. branch of the organization End Physical Punishment of Children was established in 1989, under the nll;me of the Center for Effective Discipline. It has sponsored activities such as Spank-Out Day in a number of communities. It maintains a website that informs the public about spanking and progress in ending spanking (www.stophitting.com). Three other initiatives and their websites are:
* Children Are Unbeatable (www.childrenareunbeatable.org.uk) * End All Corporal Punishment of Children (www.endcorporalpunishment.org) * Positive Parenting (www.positiveparenting.com)
Even among Blacks, which is a segment of the population that is highly committed to the necessity of spanking (Chung et al., 2009; Taylor, Hamvas, Rice et al., 2011), the situation is changing. The Baby College program of the Harlem Children's Zone, for example, emphasizes the importance of using verbal discipline instead of corporal punishment (www.hcz.org/programs/ early-childhood).
As shown in Chapter 1, child development textbooks present little or none of the research on spanking and its harmful effects. An example of one that does discuss the adverse effects of spanking is Infants and Children (Berk, 2004). It provides two pages on spanking, which is more than most child development textbooks. Moreover, it is the only child development textbook we have found that cites Gershoff's meta-analysis showing that spanking is associated with many problem behaviors. But it does not discuss the pros and cons of spanking, much less recommend or even discuss the idea that children should never be spanked, nor do any of the other books we examined. Nevertheless, current child development textbooks and most books of advice to parents no longer recommend spanking as they did in the early 20th century. Most of parental advice books now follow the lead of Spock and advise parents to use other modes of correction, and in respect to spanking, to "avoid it if you can." Unfortunately, as explained in Chapter 18 on why so many parents continue to spank, because of the low ability of 2-year-olds to control their own behavior, "avoid it if you can" turns out to be the equivalent of advising parents to spank, resulting in the 94% rate shown in Chapter 2. The message needs to be never spank. A small, but growing number of those who advise parents now say that.
In 2005, the annual town mevting ofBrookline, Massachusetts (a politically liberal suburb of Boston) passed the following resolution by a narrow margin after a heated debate that lasted until after midnight. The article states:
* WHEREAS the nation's pediatric professionals and children's advocates advise against the use of corporal punishment of children;
* WHEREAS research shows that corporal punishment teaches children that hitting is an acceptable way of dealing with problems and that violence works;
* WHEREAS there are effective alternatives to corporal punishment of children;
* WHEREAS national surveys show that corporal punishment is common, and 25% of infants are hit before they are 6 months old;
* WHEREAS adopting national policies against corporal punishment has been an effective public education measure in various nations;
* WHEREAS accumulated research supports the conclusion that corporal punishment is an ineffective discipline strategy with children of all ages and, furthermore, that it is sometimes dangerous;
* WHEREAS studies show that corporal punishment often produces in its victims anger, resentment, low self-esteem, anxiety, helplessness, and humiliation;
* WHEREAS research demonstrates that the more children hit, the greater the likelihood that they will engage in aggression and antisocial behavior as children imitate what they see adults doing;
* WHEREAS in a study of8,000 families, children who experience frequent corporal punishment are more likely to physically attack siblings, develop less adequately developed consciences, experience adult depression, and physically attack a spouse as an adult;
* WHEREAS, according to human rights documents, children, like adults, have the right not to be physically assaulted;
* WHEREAS the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child has consistently stated that persisting legal and social acceptance of corporal punishment is incompatible with the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child;
* WHEREAS this resolution is supported by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Massachusetts Citizens for Children, and the Massachusetts Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers;
* BE IT HEREBY RESOLVED that Town Meeting encourages parents and caregivers of children to refrain from the use of corporal punishment and to use alternative nonviolent methods of child discipline and management with an ultimate goal of mutual respect between parent and child.
Although the Brookline vote was a landmark, it remains the only jurisdiction in the United States that states that parents should not spank. Another landmark change occurred in 2004. That year, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church passed a resolution declaring that "the United Methodist Church encourages its members to adopt discipline methods that do not include corporal punishment of their children" (Swan, 2004). The significance of this resolution is threefold: First, United Methodist is the second largest Protestant church in the United States. Second, they are the first denomination in the United States to formally oppose spanking. Third, Methodism is the church of John Wesley, whose mother proudly wrote that in bringing up her children "When they turned a year old ... , they were taught to fear the rod and to cry softly" (cited in Miller & Swanson, 1958, p. 10). That was typical of the/violent era into which John Wesley was born. Today's Methodists, as well as other Americans, are living in a much less violent era. Their rejection of spanking reflects the less violent and more humane society that enabled the resolution to be passed. It is part of the civilizing process we mentioned that is likely to extend that trend and help to eventually bring about a more nonviolent society.
Blacks are another group with a strong cultural commitment to the necessity of spanking. But as was shown in Chapter 17 by Chart 17.3, the percent who believe spanking is necessary is declining, even though not as much as among Whites. Both the Black cultural commitment to spanking and the social evolution ofhumane standards for interpersonal relations are illustrated by the experience of one Black father who decided not to spank (Toure, 2011 ). He said, "A few years ago, when I knew I was heading toward becoming a parent, I began to think about what sort of parent I wanted to be. And I began to weigh whether or not I should spank. I grew up in the 1970s and was spanked-quite a bit. I think the vast majority of Black children of my generation were spanked, and nearly all the Black kids in my parents' generation were. Spanking seemed like a Black cultural imperative: Black people tell one another, 'Spare the rod, spoil the child.'" His commentary concluded that he now has two children and does not spank them. He said, "I think the home should not be a place of violence. The argument [of one of his friends] won me over."
Although U.S. culture still strongly supports spanking, and most parents of toddlers still spank, the data in Chapter 17 on the decline in the use of spanking and the discussion in the previous section indicate that important change is taking place. Child development texts are beginning to discuss the negative consequences of spanking. The United Methodist Church resolution advising parents not to spank; garnered enough votes to pass. A small but growing number of parenting advice books have joined the previously lone voice of Leach ( 1977) in advising parents not to spank at all. We believe that the United States will eventually follow the pattern in other nations, which began with the end of corporal punishment in schools and a decline in public approval of spanking, followed by laws to discourage and later laws to ban parents spanking. These laws in turn are likely to further reduce both approval and use of corporal punishment.
Will Never Spanking Result In A Nation With Kids Out Of Control?
As we pointed out, Sweden is an important example of this process because in the span of just a generation, there have been changes not just in the law, but also major changes in public opinion and parent practices regarding spanking. These changes demonstrate that contrary to those like Nock (2000) who believe that spanking has an unchangeable inherited basis, spanking can be greatly reduced, even if not completely eliminated, when a nation makes the effort to informing everyone (including children) that spanking is unacceptable and provides information and help in using nonviolent methods of correction and control.
Sweden is also an important case study, because the fear of so many defenders of spanking is that without spanking, parents will be unable to raise wellbehaved children. Four Swedish studies (summarized in Durrant & Janson, 2005; Janson et al., 2011) found that no hitting did not mean no discipline. What it has meant is that parents correct misbehavior by nonviolent methods. As a consequence, instead of what many in Sweden feared in 1979, that Swedish children would be running wild, the opposite has happened. As we noted in the introduction to this chapter, behavior problems and crime by Swedish youth have decreased. Durrant (2000) compared rates from 1975-1979 with rates from 1992-1996 and found the following changes:
* Convicted of theft -21%
* Convicted of narcotics trafficking -51%
* Convicted of assault/aggravated assault +54%
* Convicted of rape -48%
* Consumer of alcohol -13%
* Tried drugs -28%
* Continue to use drugs -59%
* Suicide rate -20%
The only exception to lower rates since the ban on spanking is for assaults. However, the apparent increase reflects the effects of programs against bullying in schools that were introduced during this period. Durrant points out that "What was once considered common, even expected, behavior among young males is now defined as assault. School principals must now routinely report to the police any instances brought to their attention, including threats and minor assaults. The police, in tum, have no discretionary power in registering such reports; all are entered into the criminal statistics" (Durrant, 2000 p. 450).
When Sweden banned spanking in 1979, there was widespread concern that it would results in a nation with children running wild. The opposite has happened. This cannot be attributed to less spanking because it might be the result of changes in one or more of the many other causes of crime. But we can be certain that the reduction of spanking in Sweden did not lead to an increase in crime.
Is Ending Spanking Worth the Effort?
The value of trying to reduce or end spanking has been disputed by arguing that the effect size (as indicated by the correlation between spanking and harmful side effects) is so low that ending spanking would not make an important contribution to child well-being (Larzelere & Baumrind, 2010). Although the effect size is low, the history of public health efforts provides many examples of major gains based on eliminating or reducing risk factors with a low effect size.
A Low Effect Size Is Typical of Risk Factors for Child Well-Being
A low effect size (as indicated, for example, by a low correlation) is typical of the telation between any single aspect of what parents do and the child's development. It could almost not be otherwise because, as pointed out in Chapter 1, there are multiple influences on how a child develops. Therefore, no single aspect of what parents do can account for much of the difference between children in variables such as delinquency, depression, and IQ. For example, cognitive stimulation of a child by parents, such as reading to the child, has been shown by many rigorous studies to be related to the child's later cognitive ability. However, the table of regression coefficients in Straus and Paschall (2009) predicting the child's later cognitive ability shows that the effect size for the relation of cognitive stimulation to cognitive ability, like the correlation for the relation of spanking to cognitive ability, is low. Despite this, educators and developmental psychologists strongly urge reading to children, as they should. Similar low correlations have been found by a large body of research on the risk and protective factors that have been the focus of national prevention and treatment programs for many physical health and mental health problems. Chart 21.3 presents some of these correlations. It shows that the effect size for spanking is low, but higher than the effect size for 8 of the 1 0 risk factors in the chart, each of which are the basis for national prevention efforts.
Why is the low effect size for the harmful effects of corporal punishment used to argue that ending corporal punishment is not worth the effort, but the even lower effect size for the relation of childhood exposure to lead paint to lower IQ is not seen as making the effort to eliminate lead paint not worth the effort? It is not because the effect size is low; it is because belief in the necessity of spanking is so deeply ingrained in American culture. A presumed necessity of using lead paint is not part of American cultural beliefs and norms, so the public believes those research results.
Chart 21.3 Comparison of the Effect of Spanking with Effects of Other Risk Factors
*Partial correlations from Chapter 10 and 15. Other Correlations are from Bushman & Anderson, 2001.
Cumulative Effect of a Small Risk Factor Can Be Large
A critical fact that is ignored by those who argue that ending spanking would not make an important contribution to child well-being is the wide prevalence of spanking. Because over 90% of American children are spanked as toddlers, the effect of ending corporal punishment in reducing the percent of the population who experience psychological problems or commit crimes can be much larger than the reduction that could occur from ending physical abuse, even though the effect size for abuse is 7 times greater than for spanking. This is because at least 100 times more children have experienced corporal punishment than have been physically abused. Thus, the cumulative benefit for children of ending corporal punishment is likely to be very large.
The importance of the cumulative effect is a well-established principle in public health research and intervention. A risk factor that increases the probability of a health problem by only a small amount (such as spanking) can have more impact on public health if it applies to a much larger part of the population than a risk factor that, if present, increases the probability of a harmful effect by a large amount (such as physical abuse) but which applies to only a small percent of people (Rose, 1985; Rosenthal, 1984). The following hypothetical example shows that ending spanking could do more than reducing physical abuse to reduce the probability of being arrested for a serious crime as an adult.
* Epidemiological studies such as the study in Chapter 2, suggest that over 90% ofthe 70 million U.S. children experienced spanking, although there is great variation in frequency and severity. This compares with perhaps 1 million who experience physical abuse (i.e., about 1% ).
* The study by Afifi et al. (2006) described in Chapter 19 on spanking and crime of a U.S. nationally representative sample. They found that spanking was associated with 2.2% more cases of externalizing problems such as antisocial personality, whereas physical abuse was associated with 15.3% more cases. Thus, the adverse effect of physical abuse is 7 times greater than the adverse effect of spanking.
* Based on these data, ending all spanking could reduce antisocial behavior problems by: 0.022 x 70 million= 1,540,000 fewer cases.
* Ending all physical abuse could reduce antisocial behavior by: 0.153 x 1 million= 153,000 fewer cases
* Thus ending spanking could be associated with a 1 0 times greater decrease in antisocial behavior than ending physical abuse.
Because child antisocial behavior is a risk factor for crime, the example above suggests that reducing spanking could substantially reduce crime. However, that assumes that parents continue to monitor and correct misbehavior, except not by hitting the child. That is what happened in Sweden. Four Swedish studies found that no hitting did not mean no discipline (Durrant & Janson, 2005). It has meant correcting misbehavior by nonviolent methods, with many benefits for children, families, and society, as will be summarized in the next section.
Ending Spanking Is Needed to Reduce Physical Abuse
Ending spanking could not only have a positive impact on the majority of children who experience spanking, but as we pointed out earlier, it is also a crucial step in ending child physical abuse. Although the percent of spankings that escalate into physical abuse is minute, ending spanking is crucial for reducing child physical abuse because about two thirds of cases of physical abuse known to child protective services are the result of spanking that has escalated out of control (Gil, 1970; Kadushin & Martin, 1981; Trocme, Tourigny, et al. 2003). As pointed out previously, the meta-analysis by Gershoff(2002) included 10 studies that investigated the relationship between spanking and physical abuse. All 10 studies found a relationship, as did Straus & Yodanis (200 1 ). Thus, ending spanking and preventing physical abuse are part ofthe same effort. When parents no longer spank to correct misbehavior, the number of instances in which spanking escalates beyond this currently acceptable level of violence against children will decrease.
Summary and Conclusions
The potential benefits of a world without spanking are suggested by the 15 harmful side effects of spanking found by the research conducted for this book. These are summarized below. Given the millions of children who experience spanking in almost all nations, the results of this research suggest that reducing the violent child rearing that goes under the euphemism of spanking could result in a world with:
* Less antisocial behavior and delinquency as a child and as a young adult (Chapters 6, 7, 16, and 19).
* Less approval of other forms of violence such as the belief that torture is sometimes justified to obtain information critical for national defense, or that there are occasions when it is justified to slap a wife or husband (Chapters 5, 9, 12, and 13).
* Less impulsiveness and more self-control (Chapters 7 and 9).
* Better parent-child relationships (Chapters 8 and 9).
* Less risky sexual behavior as a teenager (Chapter 9).
* Less juvenile delinquency (Chapter 8).
* Less crime perpetrated as an adult (Chapters 12 through 16 and 19).
* Higher national average mental ability (Chapter 10).
* Greater probability of graduating from college (Chapter 11).
* Lower probability of depression (Chapter 12).
* Less violence against marital, cohabiting, and dating partners (Chapters 12, 13, 14).
* Less violence against nonfamily persons (Chapter 14).
* Less physical abuse of children (Chapter 14).
* Less drug abuse (Chapter 14).
* Less sexual coercion and physically forced sex (Chapter 16).
Ending spanking can reduce but not end, these personal and social problems because, as explained in the section on risk and protective factors in Chapter 1, spanking is only one of the many causes of these problems. Nevertheless, the studies in this book and the many other studies cited, makes it reasonable to think that a major reduction in spanking is likely to result in a substantial reduction in psychological problems and violence and other crime. If, for example, reducing spanking resulted in as little as a 10% reduction in these problems, that would be a profound benefit for the 10% who are spared these problems. There would also be collateral benefits. A much greater percentage would be spared the pain of being victimized by, interacting with, or caring for those with criminal behavior or psychological problems such as depression. An even larger number would be spared the trauma of having a family member victimized. The society as a whole is likely to be spared some of the economic costs of mental health treatment, crime, and prisons. Although it is impossible to know the percentages the research suggests that, in addition to many other benefits, such as a closer bond between parents and children, a society in which parents never spank is likely to be a society: with fewer psychological problems and less violence and other crime.
A world without spanking is likely to have its own problems, but we believe the results from the last 50 years of research on spanking provide a basis for believing that the net effect will be a more humane world, with fewer psychological problems, better human relationships, and less violence and other crime.
Legal prohibition of spanking is an important step in reducing spanking. However, it is important to recognize that in Sweden, the nation that has made the largest change, this was accomplished by legislation setting a national standard and by informing and helping parents, not by criminal penalties. If legal changes in other nations seek to reduce spanking by punishing parents who spank rather than by informing and helping parents to correct children's misbehavior nonviolently, it would be inconsistent with the changes in society and the humanitarian goals that underlie the movement away from violent child rearing.
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In the final months of his life Professor Straus handed out free copies of this book and took other actions to indicate that he wanted to make it available, presumably because he recognized that his work could help teach how to reduce violence if made available freely. Therefore I'm posting the rest of the book in four parts.
The Primordial Violence 2014-1
The Primordial Violence 2014-2
The Primordial Violence 2014-3
The Primordial Violence 2014-4
Penelope Leach. Your Baby and Child
The Baby College (http://www.hcz.org/programs/early-childhood)
Early Start Program (Fergusson, Grant, Horwood, & Ridder, 2005)
Effective Black Parenting (Alvy & Marigna, 1987)
Family Nurturing Program (Palusci, Crum, Bliss, & Bavolek, 2008)
Nurturing Parenting Programs (Bavolek, 1992-2006)
Parent-Child Interactive Therapy (Chaffin et al., 2004)
Parent Management Training (Patterson, 1995)
Parent Training (Beauchaine, Webster-Stratton, & Reid, 2005; WebsterStratton, 1984)
Play Nicely Video (Scholer, Hamilton, Johnson, & Scott, 2010)
Social Development Program (Hawkins & Haggerty, 2008)
Tipple P (Markie-Dadds & Sanders, 2006; Prinz, Sanders, Shapiro, Whitaker, & Lutzker, 2009)
VIPP-SD Program (Van Zeijl et al., 2006) p.273
Since the passage of the no-spanking law and the steps to inform every parent, and every child, in Sweden that spanking is wrong and is contrary to national policy, the use of spanking has decreased from rates that were about the same as in the United States to a small minority of parents. So has the rate of crime, drug abuse, and suicide by youth (Durrant, 1999; Durrant & Janson, 2005). p.288
The Public Health Service can follow the Swedish model and sponsor nospanking public service announcements on TV, radio, milk cartons, and the Internet. Never-Spank posters and pamphlets can be displayed in pediatrician's offices and hospital maternity departments. A notice can be put on birth certificates such as: Warning: Spanking Has Been Determined to Be Dangerous to the Health and Well-Being of Your Child-Do Not Ever, Under Any Circumstances, Spank or Hit Your Child p.289
Societal case studies. Seventy years ago, the anthropologist Ashley Montague argued that, "Spanking the baby may be the psychological seed of war" (Montague, 1941). .... Although those eight societies differed tremendously, one thing they had in common was nonviolent child rearing (i.e., spanking or smacking children was not part of their culturally prescribed method of child rearing). p.294
... In fact, 91% of the public believes that the percentage of teenagers who commit violent crime has increased or stayed the same over the past 10 years (Guzman, Lippman, Anderson Moore, & O'HareHow, 2003). Contrary to this belief, the rate of juveniles charged with a criminal offense has decreased since the early 1990s, as has the rate of violent victimizations perpetrated by juveniles as reported in the National Crime Victimization Survey (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). For crime in schools, tragedies such as what happened in Columbine, Colorado have captured public attention and aroused fear about the safety of children and concern for what life will be like if this continues. Again, the reality is the opposite. Both violent crime and property crime in U.S. schools have declined since the data were ftrst gathered in 1992 (Dinkes, Kemp, Baum, & Snyder, 2009). ... p.317
A major obstacle to accepting the evidence that spanking is linked to behavior problems and violence occurs because personal experience seems to contradict the research results p.321
...Among them are the cultural norms supporting use of violence for socially desirable ends, as was illustrated in Chapter 5 on the links between approval of violence and spanking, extreme individualism, fear of government intervention in the family, and religious fundamentalists ·who believe that God expects parents to spank. ... p.322
Scientific evidence had little to do with the fact that as long ago as 197 5, the governing Council of the American Psychological Association passed a resolution against corporal punishment by teachers, but a resolution against parents spanking has not even been put before the council. p.323
Ashley Montague "Learning Non-Aggression: The Experience of Non-Literate Societies" 1978
Ashley Montague "Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race" 1942
Positive Parenting.com
Children Are Unbeatable.org.
Zero Abuse Project
Effective Black Parenting; The Proven Program to Help in Raising Proud, Confident and Healthy African American Children (Parent's Handbook) by Alvy & Marigna, 1987
States prohibiting all corporal punishment of children, including in the home:
Wikipedia: List of countries by intentional homicide rate
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