Thinking Critically about Spanking

Folly is bound up in the heart of a child,
but the rod of discipline will drive it far from him.
(Proverbs 22:15)

I am not yet a parent, but I am earnestly preparing to be one and am constantly on constant look-out for parenting instructions that incorporate good science and critical thinking, two things that seem to be painfully absent in the world of The Mozart Effect and Baby Einstein. Thankfully, there is at least one person out there in the parenting world who seems to grasp the value of a good scientific study. His name is Alan E. Kazdin and he is a developmental psychologist at Yale. I have yet to read his books, but I’m familiar with the basics of his methods and approach from his contributions to Slate.com. Kazdin takes a scientific approach to the study of parenting and has earned my respect by relying on scientific studies, not just experience or instinct, to discern which methods of parting work and which do not.

His latest article in Slate, Spare the rod: Why you shouldn’t hit your kids, presents the case for not disciplining children through corporal punishment with the support of real, empirical data, not just a wealth of anecdotes or appeal to emotions. Here are the scientifically proven facts, Kazdin tells us: corporal punishment doesn’t work. So why engage in it?

I’ve gotten into a few debates over the years in regard to the issue of spanking, and it’s something I have flip-flopped on. I’ve heard the argument that spanking can make children more aggressive, or encourage them to hit in turn, but I always fell back on my own experience to help me make up my mind. I was spanked as a child, and I wasn’t the least bit aggressive or violent. I watched my parents spank my several younger siblings, and it seemed to be an effective tool. Once I even called up my mom to ask her about it, and she told me that in her experience, young children, prior to their development of complete language skills, do not have the ability to rationally understand certain situations and so the only way to get through to them is with a smack. (That doesn’t solve the issue of why I was still being dealt the belt when I was 9, long after my language skills had kicked in, but we’ll put that aside for a moment.)

I decided that I would spank my kids too. I turned out alright, and my parents spanked me. Plus there seemed to be some sense behind corporal punishment. It seemed to produce results. This is where Kazdin shows the misconceptions surrounding the practice:

…corporal punishment [is temporarily effective] in stopping a behavior. It does work—for a moment, anyway. The direct experience of that momentary pause in misbehavior has a powerful effect, conditioning the parent to hit again next time to achieve that jolt of fleeting success and blinding the parent to the long-term failure of hitting to improve behavior. The research consistently shows that the unwanted behavior will return at the same rate as before.

This is a classic example of confirmation bias and demonstrates the general lack of critical thinking in regard to this issue. Parents remember that hitting put a stop to the tantrum, but forget that the tantrum surfaced again a few hours later. It’s a temporary solution, it’s immediate gratification. Never mind what meticulously controlled, peer reviewed scientific studies have to say about the practice. If parents think it is working, they are going to keep doing it based on nothing but false confidence in their own observational skills and experience, despite the fact that psychological research has shown, as Kazdin puts it, “that we frequently misperceive our own experience,” and that “memory is an extremely unreliable guide in judging the efficacy of punishment”

Kazdin goes on to explain the way that culture and religion can contribute to the cognitive bias that fuels the false assertion that spanking is a good method of discipline:

Studies of parents have demonstrated that if they are predisposed not to see a problem in the way they rear their children, then they tend to dismiss any scientific finding suggesting that this presumed nonproblem is, in fact, a problem. In other words, if parents believe that hitting is an effective way to control children’s behavior, and especially if that conviction is backed up by a strong moral, religious, or other cultural rationale for corporal punishment, they will confidently throw out any scientific findings that don’t comport with their sense of their own experience.

I believed that spanking was an effective method of punishment because my parents spanked me. They decided to spank me because they were spanked also. And what about my grandparents, surely they were spanked too. Even Proverbs, that book of godly wisdom revered by all good Christians, tells us that beating a child with a rod is a good way to discipline him. This line of reasoning boils down to nothing more than the Appeal to Tradition logical fallacy. It doesn’t matter what tradition dictates, or how your parents raised you; none of that changes the fact that corporal punishment has proven to be ineffective and to have serious and negative side effects.

One of those side effects is the natural escalation of violence. My parents probably started out with light swats when I was a toddler, but by the time I was 6 had been spanked with the backside of a plastic hairbrush so hard that the thing split in two, and by the time I was 9 I had been hit with my dad’s belt. Kazdin explains the escalation of violence by outlining the fact that children are “endowed with wonderful flexibility and ability to learn,” and that they “typically adapt to punishment faster than parents can escalate it, which helps encourage a little hitting to lead to a lot of hitting.”

I can remember this adaptation to punishment. I can remember when the open-hand spankings didn’t hurt anymore, and my mom had to reach for an object instead. According to Kazdin, this escalation of violence, hitting with an object, actually constitutes child abuse as legally defined by most states. Through a lack of critical thinking and what basically amounts to a loss of temper and a desire for quick results rather than long term solutions, my kind and loving parents, who I absolutely adore, stooped to child abuse. My mom’s rationalization for hitting fell apart because by the age of 9, or even 6, I had the rational and linguistic abilities to understand what I had done wrong and to discuss the ways that I needed to modify my behavior. There was no excuse for hitting. It had revealed itself for what it really was: nothing but a conditioned, unthinking, reactionary behavior.

There are other serious negative side effects from spanking that have been well-proven. They include, contradictorily, the fact that spanking increases the exact behavior that studies show most often drive parents to spank in the first place: a defiant, noncompliant attitude, and aggression. Spanking has been also shown to cause poor parent-child relations and mental health problems such as depression and anxiety.

Kazdin sums up his argument against corporal punishment thus:

So what’s the case for not hitting? It can be argued from the science: Physical discipline doesn’t work over the long run, it has bad side effects, and mild punishment often becomes more severe over time.

It’s that simple. Scientific research has made this a black-and-white issue. Kazdin, through his appropriation of scientific findings and appeal to rationality, has thoroughly convinced me not to hit my children. He has helped me make up my mind once and for all regarding this issue.

Tags: parenting