Study: Spanking increases childhood defiance and mental health issues

[TITAN308]

I guess while we are on the subject, the ER doctors missed diagnosed my wife's lymphoma cancer. "Oh that lump on your neck, its just a swollen gland, suck on some candy and it will go away."

Her dentist the next day is who decided to have the lump on her neck biopsied and discovered it.

A fucking dentist...

[anothdae]

I like how the negative effects in this study were all childhood only. Almost as if kids that are troublesome get spanked.

What everyone is failing to mention is that the same study showed direct correlation between notspanking children and adult behavorial problems, drug abuse and anti-social attitudes.

From the actual study....

http://imgur.com/yyHXSJ2

[Malachi256]

I guess while we are on the subject, the ER doctors missed diagnosed my wife's lymphoma cancer. "Oh that lump on your neck, its just a swollen gland, suck on some candy and it will go away."

Her dentist the next day is who decided to have the lump on her neck biopsied and discovered it.

A fucking dentist...

My wife and I had to self-diagnose her smoldering appendicitis. Doctors just kept blowing her off. Finally convinced a surgeon to go in and remove it (after quite a bit of cajoling) and voila, her pain was gone the moment she woke up.

Modern medicine is amazing, but it's certainly not perfect.

[GrinningMan]

I like how the negative effects in this study were all childhood only. Almost as if kids that are troublesome get spanked.

What everyone is failing to mention is that the same study showed direct correlation between notspanking children and adult behavorial problems, drug abuse and anti-social attitudes.

From the actual study....

http://imgur.com/yyHXSJ2

Shhhh, pay no mind to the thing underneath the tarp. They'll get to that later, but twist it that they were 'just bad people'.

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My wife and I had to self-diagnose her smoldering appendicitis. Doctors just kept blowing her off. Finally convinced a surgeon to go in and remove it (after quite a bit of cajoling) and voila, her pain was gone the moment she woke up.

Modern medicine is amazing, but it's certainly not perfect.

I've always figured it was just doctors that didn't want to do the paperwork.

[TITAN308]

I like how the negative effects in this study were all childhood only. Almost as if kids that are troublesome get spanked.

What everyone is failing to mention is that the same study showed direct correlation between notspanking children and adult behavorial problems, drug abuse and anti-social attitudes.

From the actual study....

http://imgur.com/yyHXSJ2

Well then...

/sips tea and pulls up bucket of popcorn

[Templar 331]

In one of the largest, most comprehensive studies on the topic,

In other words....

meta-analysis

Pretty much just grabbing other people's studies and piecing together what they want.

But here's my favorite article on the matter. :P

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/25/us...pagewanted=all

The more children are spanked, the more likely they are to defy their parents

Lets take a second to rethink this. If spanking is your default reaction to anything your child does then obviously the child will be disobedient.

The science seems to be settled on this issue for the time being. Stop spanking your children.

Nothing is ever settled with soft science.

[Sky High]

for what it's worth I'd think it's a bit of a no brainier that hitting your child does more harm then good. there are other ways of disciplining them.

[TZucchini]

I like how the negative effects in this study were all childhood only. Almost as if kids that are troublesome get spanked.

What everyone is failing to mention is that the same study showed direct correlation between notspanking children and adult behavorial problems, drug abuse and anti-social attitudes.

From the actual study....

http://imgur.com/yyHXSJ2

You're not reading the columns correctly. "Spank" and "no spank" are sample sizes, not number of subjects.

[Barnfargen]

"Proper discipline" is called "Positive Discipline"

If you Google it, you'll find plenty of websites, books and studies for it. Wikipedia has several studies that show 'significant' results.




Here's a webpage that has a guide for each age bracket:

The most important things seems to be-

- No spanking
- No timeouts
- No yelling/raised voices
- No grounding
- No confiscation of privileges/toys

For example, if your 10 year old didn't get his homework done because he played video games instead, don't say "The next time you don't do your homework, I'm taking away your video games". That's harmful, and causes your child to lose respect for you. Instead, say: "You seemed stressed this morning when you didn't get your homework done. Let's figure out a way together on how to get your homework done next time"

According to the professionals, if you are "kind and firm" and don't punish your children you will never have to because they will respect you and learn self discipline by your examples.

My questions is what are you being "firm" on if you give no punishment to the situation? So I don't get quoted out of context, I'm not specifically talking about spanking here. What you listed seems to be no punishment at all to misbehaving. I just can't seem to understand how a child (or adult) would change when being taught that you won't have negative consequences to your actions.

Just to toss in my 2 cents, I have a 6 year old son and I have given him a very rare swat on the butt for doing things wrong that he has been warned about more than a few times.

[BuckSparkles]

I'd agree, but only if someone else is actually doing better.

Man, wouldn't that be something if people actually went around buying other people's kids things for behaving like good children.

Maybe it's time to start something like that...

Ah but that sends its own bad message.

Not every good action results in a reward. If you raise them to expect rewards after everything, even if the thing is simply not screwing up (which is standard, as opposed to doing the right thing), then you will also have hellions.

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You're not reading the columns correctly. "Spank" and "no spank" are sample sizes, not number of subjects.

Spank and no spank? Why not -Strike- and -Not Strike-

Or better yet, -Assault- and -Not Assault-.

Seeing how a few smacks on the rear is the same as ASSAULT, according to some of you nancys.

[NineSpine]

Ah but that sends its own bad message.

Not every good action results in a reward. If you raise them to expect rewards after everything, even if the thing is simply not screwing up (which is standard, as opposed to doing the right thing), then you will also have hellions.

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Spank and no spank? Why not -Strike- and -Not Strike-

Or better yet, -Assault- and -Not Assault-.

Seeing how a few smacks on the rear is the same as ASSAULT, according to some of you nancys.

If I smack your wife on the rear a few times, what charge gets filed against me?

[gamingmuscle]

Did you even bother reading the article? Or are you too enveloped in your own preconceived notions.

The science is settled. "A few spanks" does more harm than good, and increases defiance. It's literally counterproductive.

I get there is a correlation, I'm not sold on causation. At least not by what these articles that pop up every now and then have said.

I don't know enough about how are genetics effect behavior and how our environment does.

Does the behavior cause the spankings or the spankings cause the behavior?

[Ayla]

I guess while we are on the subject, the ER doctors missed diagnosed my wife's lymphoma cancer. "Oh that lump on your neck, its just a swollen gland, suck on some candy and it will go away."

Her dentist the next day is who decided to have the lump on her neck biopsied and discovered it.

A fucking dentist...

My grandmother who was 80 got diagnosed with " late onset severe allergies" and was given nose spray to help

Whoops sorry, lol, its actually cancer. My bad, but it's okay im a doctor. >.>

Seriously, I was spanked maybe 3 times. Im pretty fucked in the head. I'd rather have been spanked than given 30-40 minute timeouts and room that was devoid of any toys, lockable from the outside, because my room was for sleeping and punishments, not playing.

I dont trust doctors (I think most are idiots who pidgeonhole diagnoses), nor do I really trust a majority of studies unless I personally agree with their methods. You can easily find correlations if you want to and skew studies to fit personal agendas.

[GrinningMan]

Ah but that sends its own bad message.

Not every good action results in a reward. If you raise them to expect rewards after everything, even if the thing is simply not screwing up (which is standard, as opposed to doing the right thing), then you will also have hellions.

Eh, we already have 'hellions'. Perhaps buying thing is the wrong way to put it, but give the child and their family a compliment.

All I'm saying is that as it stands, we have people expecting little beasts that can't tie their own shoes or remember to shut the lights off before leaving a room to know what 'respect' is.

[Pretty Little Psycho]

The proper discipline is to give them a smaller trophy than the one they would've gotten had they behaved properly.

Why should you reward someone for not behaving as they should be or rewarding them for behaving as they should?

[Malachi256]

for what it's worth I'd think it's a bit of a no brainier that hitting your child does more harm then good. there are other ways of disciplining them.

I was spanked a few times as a child. I remember the last time it happened (I was probably early teens) it was so silly for both parties that I laughed a bit.

These spankings were entirely to get my attention - I was defying my parents mostly by just ignoring them. My dad did them not out of emotional rage but as a calculated move. I do not feel the least bit traumatized by any of these events - I honestly barely remember any of them.


On the other hand, I heard my neighbors get the crap smacked out of them. Apparently their dad used a belt. These sounded like torture sessions. I don't know the extent, but I'd bet that dad was enraged.

My own dad laid into me once in an enraged state. He didn't physically touch me, but he yelled at me loud/hard enough that I was hiding behind my mom, afraid of being harmed. That most definitely did "traumatize" me, whatever that means exactly. It was an extremely isolated and unusual event, but I can imagine if it was more the norm I would've been significantly damaged. I've brought it up with my parents once or twice in recent years and I'm pretty sure my dad doesn't even remember.


And of course I'm a perfectly benign, productive member of society now. Anti-spanking studies/advocates crack me up. Equating all spanking behavior by parents with abuse is just ridiculous.

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Why should you reward someone for not behaving as they should be or rewarding them for behaving as they should?

Sorry, I was being sarcastic. I forget that sometimes what I think is clearly ludicrous is actually a serious thought for some people around here.

[BuckSparkles]

If I smack your wife on the rear a few times, what charge gets filed against me?

Kids =/= Adults.

[Techno-Druid]

I'm not someone who supports spanking personally. If you can't hit your employees, your mate or your siblings, then why would you hit your child?

Now that doesn't mean children should not have discipline. Discipline is to teach, punishment is the hurt.

[NineSpine]

Kids =/= Adults.

Is it a lesser issue if someone sexually assaults a child then? How about this: If I walk up and spank your child, because I want to, should the punishment be LESS than if I did so to an adult? Your standard doesn't appear coherent at all.

[Mazeari]

Five pages of comments here, but none on the research article/website itself. Hm.

Ok so I skimmed over it, first to say it looks pretty solid. However it's a meta analysis, and thus can't stand for the validation of all the used studies. I picked out some interesting things, most are literal quotes. Which can be contradictory a bit due to being quotes from different studies. Some dots seem to have dissapeared, which may cause for some annoying reading.

Around the world, most children (80%) are spanked or otherwise physically punished by their parents (UNICEF, 2014) (Does that mean 20% of them turn out to be super heroes, if it brought severly negative connoctations)?


Studies’ measures of physical punishment were categorized into four types: conditional spanking (“physical punishment that was used primarily to back-up milder disciplinary tactics”), customary physical punishment (“typical parental usage”), overly severe physical punishment (“measures that gave extra points for severity of physical punishment”), and predominant use of physical punishment (“predominant disciplinary tactics . . . or proportional
usage”) (Larzelere & Kuhn, 2005, p. 17). When the main effects were examined, predominant and overly severe categories of physical punishment were found to be associated with more detrimental outcomes.

Customary physical punishment was found to predict more detrimental outcomes when children’s initial levels of child misbehavior were statistically
controlled, d .19, but was generally not significantly different from other disciplinary tactics, including reasoning, taking away privileges, and time out, in the strength or direction of its associations with child outcomes.

The authors concluded that, in general, physical punishment was no worse than other disciplinary techniques.

The circumstances of experimentally manipulated spanking thus are likely to be unusual, leading to concern that experiments with parental spanking may suffer from a lack of external validity.

because there is selection bias in who gets spanked— children with more behavior problems elicit more discipline generally and spanking in particular.

And indeed the conclusion from the article: Our first research question was whether spanking would be associated with detrimental child outcomes when studies relying on harsh and potentially abusive methods were removed. The answer to this question is: Yes, it is. As noted above, all of the mean effect sizes indicated that even when a restricted definition of spanking is used, spanking is associated with detrimental child outcomes. The mean effect size across all studies, d .33, was smaller than the overall mean effect size reported by Gershoff
(2002), d .40, but still statistically significant.

Maybe this can help further the discussion.

On my personal note, on their conclusion, they do not define what is the treshold for hard and potentially abusive methods. And thus hard to conculde where to drawn the line. And eventhough multipe studies implicated the importance too define harsness in multipe groups. This meta analysis study divided it into non spanking and spanking group (after removing the vaguely harsh conditions). Which makes sense because of the limited studies done in such manner, but can also greatly influence the results.