To spank or not to spank?

The latest study finds that even minimal amounts of spanking lead to more antisocial behaviour in children

Frank Hudson says he does not spank his 3-year-old son. But sometimes he wonders whether he is doing the right thing. When he was growing up, parents did not hesitate to swat the bottoms of children who did wrong. Neither did the neighbours.

"What I'm trying to say is, we weren't as cruel and mean and talking-back as these children are today, and they don't get whipped at all,'' Hudson, a 40-year-old contractor, says during a Positive Parenting class at the nonprofit Family Tree in Baltimore.

Across the table, Family Tree staffer Krystal Nunn replies she, too, was a product of spanking. But it did not improve her behaviour.

"Spanking me didn't lead me not to run my mouth,'' she says. "All it taught me was to prepare for the next spanking.''

To spank or not to spank? Child development experts have been recommending against it for decades. But though the numbers have been going down, polls show that many parents still believe physical punishment of children is appropriate.

Fewer than half the respondents to an American Demographics survey earlier this year said spanking was acceptable punishment.

In the past, various studies have found up to 90 per cent of parents spanked their children at least occasionally.

But 70 per cent of respondents said that children's behaviour today is worse than it was a decade ago, and that permissive parents are partly to blame.

On one side of the debate are well known child specialists such as Dr T. Berry Brazelton who say spanking is never the right way to discipline. The American Academy of Paediatrics advises its members to reduce bad behaviour by giving children timeouts or taking away privileges.

"Corporal punishment is of limited effectiveness and has potentially deleterious side effects,'' reads its policy, set in 1998.

The latest study on the effects of spanking, released in September by the University of Michigan School of Social Work, found that even minimal amounts of spanking led to more antisocial behaviour in children.

At the other extreme is James Dobson, a former assistant professor of paediatrics who now runs the conservative Christian organisation Focus on the Family.

In The New Strong-Willed Child, a 2004 update of a parenting book first published a quarter-century ago, Dobson writes that slapping of the fingers and later spanking can be necessary, particularly to deter dangerous behaviour.

"In those situations when the child fully understands what he is being asked to do or not to do but refuses to yield to adult leadership, an appropriate spanking is the shortest and most effective route to an attitude adjustment,'' he writes.

Dr Larry Wissow, a child psychiatrist and professor at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, likens the corporal punishment debate to the political divide over ideologies. It is further complicated, he said, by the inconsistency of data over the years.

In the middle are parents - many in two-income families, many raising kids on their own, many trying to teach children to navigate a perilous world - whose everyday conduct falls somewhere between the extremes.

Louise Gifford of Hanover, Maryland, United States, has struggled with the issue for years. As a single parent in her 20s, she spanked her oldest daughter frequently.

Timeouts didn't work - but neither, in the end, did spanking. Now that she is 39 and remarried, Gifford says she employs different strategies with her younger children, ages 2, 5 and 6, although she occasionally spanks the older ones.

"We're really still searching for better methods,'' she said.

Hudson says that because of his own childhood memories of spanking, he doesn't spank his son. Instead, the boy sits in a discipline chair after he has misbehaved.

David Hendricks, who shares custody of his 4-year-old son and attended the Family Tree class, said he had spanked the boy once, after he spat at another child.

If the boy appears about to seriously misbehave, Hendricks said, "I just look at him or change my voice tone. He knows the consequences.''

Since going to the parenting class, Tori Leak said she had stopped spanking her son, now 13, even though he is a handful. It's a reversal from what she used to believe, and from her upbringing in North Carolina.

Now, Leak says, she focuses on listening to her son. As a paediatrician, Dr Alice Tsai recommends against spanking. But she suspects that many parents who visit the St Agnes Hospital clinic where she practises do it anyway.

As the parent of two young children, she can understand the impulse, although she does not believe in ever giving in to it.

"There certainly are times when you really feel frustrated with your kids,'' Tsai said.

Jerry Wyckoff, a family psychologist and author of Getting Your Child From No to Yes: Without Nagging, Bribing or Threatening, said the hectic pace of life keeps spanking alive.

© Los Angeles Times-Washington Post
News Service