Child corporal punishment: Spanking

Results of studies: 1996 to 2004

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Previous studies (1985 to 1995)...

1996: Review of corporal punishment studies:

Robert E. Larzelere is the director of research at Boys Town, NE, and a skeptic of the anti-spanking position. He analyzed what he considered to be the eight strongest studies of corporal punishment (CP). ₃ He found that they showed that spanking and other forms of violence short of actual abuse had "beneficial outcomes." However, the study seems almost without value when closely examined:

2001: Corporal punishment and social/emotional development:

On AUG-24, Diana Baumrind and Elizabeth Owens, research psychologists at University of California - Berkley's Institute of Human Development, reported the results of their longitudinal study on corporal punishment. They had studied over 100 middle class, white families. Data was extracted from a data base that had studied the children from 1968, when the children were preschoolers, to 1980, when the children were early adolescents. They defined five levels of severity of corporal punishment:

No parents who went beyond hitting into actual abuse were included in the study. They found a major correlation between spanking and long-term harm to children among "Red zone" parents. Among the remaining parents, they found small but significant correlations between the level of physical punishment and later misbehavior among the children at age 8 to 9. Ms. Baumrind said that "the children of parents in the green zone who never spanked were not better adjusted than those, also in the green zone, who were spanked very seldomly." She emphasized that her study did not study how abusive physical punishment harms children. She said that she and other researchers have found ample evidence of that in other studies. ₄

2002: Result of meta-analysis of 88 studies:

The American Psychological Association issued a press release in 2002-JUN concerning the publishing of a large-scale, meta-analysis of 88 studies on spanking of children by psychologist Elizabeth Thompson Gershoff of the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University.

She searched for associations between parental use of corporal punishment and eleven factors, including:

She found "strong associations" in each case. One factor -- immediate compliance by the child -- was positive; the other ten factors were negative. She suggests that these observations give insight into why corporal punishment is such a controversial matter:

The APA comments:

"The meta-analysis also demonstrates that the frequency and severity of the corporal punishment matters. The more often or more harshly a child was hit, the more likely they are to be aggressive or to have mental health problems."

Commenting on the study, George W. Holden, PhD, of the University of Texas at Austin, wrote that Gershoff's findings:

"... reflect the growing body of evidence indicating that corporal punishment does no good and may even cause harm." _9.10

2002: Genetic linking of childhood abuse with violence in adulthood:

Terri Moffitt of King's College London in the UK, and the University of Wisconsin in the U.S. helped lead an international team of investigators in a longitudinal study of 1,037 children. Their subjects were all born in Dunedin, New Zealand during 1972. Included were 442 boys. The study followed the children from the age four in 1976 until adulthood. The team studied the genetic makeup of the children, concentrating on a gene that controls the production of an enzyme called monoamine oxidase A (MAOA). This chemical breaks down a key neurotransmitter in the brain which is linked to a person's mood, aggression and pleasure. The gene come in two alleles (varieties). One allele is found in about one third of the male subjects tested. It causes their brains to produce too little of the enzyme. For these males, 85% of the boys who were abused during childhood turned to criminal or antisocial behavior as adults. They were nine times more likely to become antisocial. Moffit explained that the allele's "relation to aggression only emerged when we considered whether the children had been maltreated." They defined maltreatment as: frequent changes in the primary caregiver, rejection by the mother, or physical or sexual abuse. She said: "This suggests that the best strategy for preventing violence is to prevent child abuse." Two out of every three boys have inherited the other allele which produces higher levels of MAOA. They were unlikely to develop behavior problems. The allele that they possess "may promote trauma resistance."

If physical abuse during childhood almost inevitably produces anti-social violent behavior among the one third of adult males who are genetically predisposed to produce low levels of MAOA, then one wonders what level of corporal punishment is safe. Perhaps conventional levels of spanking could trigger violence many years later when the child has grown up.

2004: Linking childhood punishment with political beliefs in adulthood:

The 2004-MAY-13 issue of Newsweek carried an article by Michael Milburn, interviewed by Brian Braiker. Milburn is a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts and a co-author of the book: "The Politics of Denial." ₅ He "has extensively explored what determines political attitudes, the role of emotion in public opinion and the effects of the mass media on political attitudes and social behavior." Discussing the prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq involving the physical and sexual mistreatment of inmates by American soldiers, he commented:

"We found that, particularly for males who had never had any psychotherapy, when they reported a high level of childhood punishment, they were significantly more likely to endorse a range of punitive public policies like support for the death penalty, opposition to abortion, support for the use of military force....Well, the extent to which emotion connected to childhood punishment was driving their political attitudes, when they had an opportunity to sort of reflect on that and [have a] short-term catharsis experience, that sort of energy disappears....What we have found, really broadly, is the higher level of punitiveness among political conservatives is really strongly associated with experiences, generally, of harsh punishment from childhood. It’s not just going to be that they were spanked; there’s a whole family climate, and punishment is just going to be one of those indicators of that....In our research we also found that when we gave people the statement 'the amount of physical and sexual abuse in this country is greatly exaggerated by the mass media,' conservatives were significantly more likely to agree with that."

2004: University of Michigan study of spanking and anti-social behavior of children:

Andrew Grogan-Kaylor of the University of Michigan's School of Social Work conducted a study to determine whether spanking children led to their anti-social behavior later in life. He accessed data from the years 1994, 1996 and 1998 of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The results of the study have been published in the 2004-SEP issue of Social Work Research. ₆ Information for more than 1,800 children were analyzed. Mothers were asked about incidences of cheating, lying, bullying, breaking things deliberately or getting into trouble at school. They were also asked how often, if ever, they had spanked their child in the previous week. Grogan-Kaylor said that: "Even minimal amounts of spanking can lead to an increased likelihood in antisocial behavior by children....This study provides further methodologically rigorous support for the idea that corporal punishment is not an effective or appropriate disciplinary strategy." ₇

The Social Work Research journal's abstract reads:

"This study was conducted to examine the effect of corporal punishment on antisocial behavior of children using stronger statistical controls than earlier literature in this area; to examine whether the effect of corporal punishment on antisocial behavior is nonlinear; and to investigate whether the effects of corporal punishment on antisocial behavior differ across racial and ethnic groups. The author used a nonexperimental design and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The analysis was conducted using fixed-effects methods to control for observed independent variables and unobserved time-invariant variables. Corporal punishment had a nontrivial effect on children's antisocial behavior in later years despite the strong controls introduced by the fixed-effects models. The analysis provides no evidence for differences in the effect of corporal punishment across racial and ethnic groups."

You can view the entire article in your browser for $35.00 US. ₈

References used:

The following information sources were used to prepare and update the above essay. The hyperlinks are not necessarily still active today.

1. bbbAdah Maurer, Ph.D. & James S. Wallerstein, "The Influence of Corporal Punishment on Crime," (1987), The Natural Child Project, at: http://www.naturalchild.org/
2. bbbCathy Woodgold, untitled note, Cathy's Parenting Pages, at: http://web.ncf.ca/
3. E. Larzelere, "A review of the outcomes of parental use of nonabusive or customary physical punishment," Pediatrics 98:824-831
4. Patricia McBroom, "UC Berkeley study finds no lasting harm among adolescents from moderate spanking earlier in childhood," at: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/
5. Michael A. Milburn & Sheree D. Conrad, "The Politics of Denial," MIT Press, (1996). Read reviews or order this book safely from Amazon.com online book store
6. Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, "The effect of corporal punishment on antisocial behavior in children,"
   Social Work Research, Vol. 28, # 3, 2004-SEP, Pages 153-162.
7. "U-M study: Spanking can lead to more bad behavior by children," University of Michigan News Service, 2004-SEP-08, at: http://www.umich.edu/
8. The abstract is online at: http://miranda.naswpressonline.org/ You can also purchase the article from the same URL.
9. "Is corporal punishment an effective means of discipline?," Press release, American Psychological Association, 2002-JUN-26, at: http://www.apa.org/
10. Elizabeth Gershoff, "Corporal Punishment by Parents and Associated Child Behaviors and Experiences: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review," Psychological Bulletin, Vol 128, #4, Pages 539-579, (2002-JUL), at: http://www.apa.org/

Copyright © 1995 to 2007 by Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
Latest update: 2007-JUN-17
Author: B.A. Robinson