The truth about spanking: promoting a ban is counterproductive

National Review, April 21, 2008 by Lawrence Diller

In 2007, a California state legislator, Sally Lieber, inadvertently initiated an informal poll on the public's attitudes about spanking. She proposed criminalizing parents' spanking their children who were three years old and younger--and the result was surprising. The unorganized reaction to her proposal was immediate and great: Letters poured in to newspapers statewide protesting both the idea that the government may interfere with private family matters and the notion that spanking is always bad. Lieber's own office admitted that 90 percent of the e-mails she received were against her proposal. After an attempt at watering it down, she withdrew it, vowing to try again at another time.

And in February of this year, in a small but highly influential professional journal addressed to pediatric behaviorists, a psychologist from Canada, Joan Durrant, reignited the smoldering controversy with an article titled "Physical Punishment, Culture and Rights: Current Issues for the Professionals." In this piece, Durrant, long known for her anti-spanking position, invoked the usual studies of clinical families and of spanking as practiced in the U.S., and also pointed to a United Nations report which stated that "no violence against children is justifiable, and all violence against children is preventable." The lack of any accompanying comment or critical editorial suggested strongly that the editors of the journal shared Durrant's point of view.

RED HERRINGS AND RED BEHINDS

Everyone, of course, would prefer that no violence be perpetrated on anyone, least of all children. But what does the evidence teach us about what happens when countries do proscribe corporal punishment of children? The proponents of a spanking ban in America often point to the Scandinavian countries, where corporal punishment has been outlawed for decades, as evidence that a ban can be effective. Yet a critical look at the evidence there reveals very mixed results. While parents report less spanking, children who grew up since the Swedish ban show a sixfold increase in criminal assaults compared with the previous generation, along with major increases in juvenile delinquency and substance abuse.

There are multiple confounding variables with such statistics, but certainly prohibiting spanking has not led to the hoped-for social improvements in Sweden.

In fact, the controversy over spanking is a red herring--one that distracts from the main causes of children's poor mental-health outcomes, which is to say poverty, poor schools, and violence and substance abuse in the community. And for the middle class, the fight over spanking has another sad result: It further confuses American parents' ideas about discipline, which is already the main problem for middle-class kids.

Parents feel mixed-up and uncomfortable about disciplining their children. The growing cultural emphasis on feelings, and particularly on children's self-esteem, has parents feeling damned if they do and damned if they don't. (A parent's setting of limits very frequently makes the child "feel bad.") While there are a few children who can be raised with nothing but rewards and positive talk, there are many, especially boys, who will push for a conflict in order to have effective rules set. Many children escalate in their search for the boundaries that make them feel secure.