It’s a good idea to have a few ground rules when it comes to disciplining your child, particularly if each parent has a wildly different view of effective discipline. One of the most common questions that come up for many parents is “will we spank him?” Once a fairly taken-for-granted form of discipline, spanking has come under fire in recent decades. After a recent study encompassing 50 years of data, parents can look more definitively to science to tell them how to handle misbehaving youngsters.
Who Spanks?
There are still fairly large camps in high favor of corporal punishment, with about three-fourths of the population in favor of occasionally dishing out a good spanking. Nearly all parents of a three- to four-year-old have spanked them at some time according to a 1999 article by M.A. Straus and J.H. Stewart. More recently, a 2015 Pew Research Center survey found that about half of parents never spank their child, while 4% spank often. That number changes as families are broken down into race (black, white, Hispanic) and parental level of education. Regardless, that still leaves about one out of every six pairs of parents who opt for spanking at least occasionally.
Furthermore, several states still allow corporal punishment as a means of discipline in school. Parents may opt out -- but some parents choose not to, particularly if this fits with their own disciplinary theory. All the same, it begs the question: how hard is your child’s principal spanking your child compared to you?
Spanking and Mental Health
A plethora of studies have cropped up in the past 20-30 years revolving around spanking or other forms of discipline, including a real-time study by psychologist George Holden that intended to study yelling but caught (sometimes severe) slappings and spankings on audio. An early 2017 study by Shawna Lee and Andrew Grogan-Kaylor was featured in an issue of Child Abuse and Neglect. Now, for many parents, the occasional swat seems a long way from child abuse, but for many families, it is. What this study (and many recent studies like it) have found is that spanking is an “adverse childhood event” and may, in fact, lead to a host of mental health issues just like the physical and emotional abuse that three-fourths of Americans considered to be far and removed from an occasional spank.
Spanking Alternatives
To understand why spanking tends to be ineffective -- and it is ineffective -- you have to understand the psychology behind it. Spanking is effective in the short term. The child learns right then, at the moment, that behavior was bad. Does the lesson last into the future? No, because the child has absolutely no idea why the behavior was incorrect or what he should have done instead.
Behavioral psychology revolves largely around positive and negative reinforcement or punishment. Positive reinforcement is rewarding good behavior by adding something happy (like a trip to the park). Negative reinforcement is taking something bad away (parental disapproval) to promote good behavior. Positive punishment works by adding something not happy (spanking) to discourage future repetitions, and negative punishment is taking something good away (screen time) to stop bad behavior.
That’s a lot, but it’s important because, by and large, most studies show reinforcement is much more effective than punishment. Which means instead of spanking or punishing kids, a more effective means of discipline is to reward or remove negative stimuli when good behavior is in evidence.
Spanking, not spanking, it really is the parents choice. So the question you should ask yourself isn’t “Should I spank my child?” but “How effective do I want the lesson to be, and am I looking for short or long term realizations?”
