The truth about spanking: promoting a ban is counterproductive

National Review, April 21, 2008 by Lawrence Diller

'PROGRESS" in human civilization has been marked by prohibitions against certain instinctual, innate practices, many now considered primitive. These achievements include ending human sacrifice, cannibalism, incest, slavery, and wife-beating. Virtually every society now deems these practices immoral. Abortion is at the forefront of ethical controversy in the United States and, if some have their way, it could be returned to the list of morally proscribed practices.

Other noble social experiments to change human behavior have not gone as well. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, did not end alcohol use, but rather drove it underground. Organized crime was the chief beneficiary. America acknowledged its mistake in 1933 when the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition. On an international scale, Karl Marx's utopian vision of socialist Communism has never been realized in any country or society without a heavy dose of state terror to counteract the human tendency to avoid work unless it is individually rewarded.

THE NEW ABOLITIONISM

Corporal punishment of children--spanking--is another practice targeted for abolition. Children's rights have been a growing part of the civil-rights movement that started in the 1950s. The work of C. Henry Kempe, a pediatric radiologist who spoke out about previously "hidden" causes of broken bones in children, initiated a series of reforms protecting children against physical abuse. Laws exist nationwide, and a network of Child Protective Services has been set up, to protect children from physical and sexual abuse and neglect.

By the 1970s, a number of states had abolished the use of corporal punishment in school. In the 1980s, anti-spanking advocates began pushing localities and states to make the corporal punishment of children by their parents illegal, as Sweden had done in 1979. Many feminist activists saw protecting children's physical rights as a natural extension of the laws protecting women from spousal abuse. But conservatives and the Religious Right fought back.

John Rosemond, an outspoken syndicated columnist and child psychologist, not only defended spanking but said it was a vital part of raising healthy children. James Dobson, a psychologist and the founder of Focus on the Family--and arguably one of the most powerful political leaders in the country--made his initial entry onto the national scene in the 1970s with his book Dare to Discipline (which has been reissued many times). Dobson did not shy away from physical punishment; he recommended that parents squeeze their child's shoulder to provoke physical pain, when necessary, to get the child to mind. In a more recent book, The New Strong-Willed Child (2004), Dobson continued to make the case that corporal punishment is an integral part of raising children.

Meanwhile, Americans continue to spank their children. The latest national survey found that over 90 percent of three- and four-year-olds had been spanked at one time or another. Yet apparently many of these same parents feel that spanking is wrong. Enter the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

The spanking controversy had been heating up for nearly two decades before the AAP finally decided, in 1996, to take a critical look at corporal punishment. It held a two-day scientific-consensus conference at its headquarters in Elk Grove, outside of Chicago. The findings of the meeting were ultimately published in a special supplement of the AAP's journal, Pediatrics, under the title "The Short and Long Term Consequences of Corporal Punishment."

The meeting at Elk Grove looked to be the ultimate showdown between anti-spanking and spanking-is-not-always-bad pundits--a sociological Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Twenty-three experts in the field of child rearing were assembled, and both sides gave it their best shot. Yet the confrontation seemed to end in a draw. Most of the studies cited on corporal punishment came from a clinical population--in other words, they dealt with families that had been referred to mental-health agencies for having physically abused their children. These findings could not be applied to the general population. On the other hand, studies looking at the general population tended to be poorly controlled or retrospective (prospective studies are generally better at avoiding bias).

The best studies of normal families came from Diana Baumrind, a highly respected psychologist from the University of California, Berkeley, who followed healthy middle-class white families prospectively for 15 years. Families where parents occasionally employed spanking (defined as one or two open swats on the bottom of a child between the ages of two and six) as one form of discipline within an otherwise loving context did marginally better over the long term than the very few families that abjured spanking entirely.

The anti-spanking forces offered prospective studies that followed larger, more varied groups of families that employed spanking as more typically used by American families--haphazardly and with anger. In these groups, there were higher rates of mental illness and violence in the children whose parents used spanking more frequently.