crying boy
© unknown
Children who are spanked are more likely to be aggressive toward other children and adults. Over the long term they tend to be more difficult and noncompliant, have various behavior problems, can develop anxiety disorders or depression, and later develop antisocial behavior. They are more at risk to be involved in intimate partner violence, and they are at risk to become child abusers. A new study based on real-time audio recordings of parents practicing corporal punishment discovered that spanking was far more common than parents admit, that children were hit for trivial misdeeds and that children then misbehaved within 10 minutes of being punished.

Experts in the mental health of children have always emphasized that displays of physical aggression typically leads to behavioral problems. Children universally seek to understand their world through the love and nurturing comfort of care-givers, not physical pain by consequence of misbehaving.

Advocates of corporal punishment have outlined best practices for responsible spanking. But real-time audio from this study revealed that parents fail to follow the guidelines, said psychologist George Holden, who is lead author on the study and a parenting and child development expert at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

From 70 percent to 90 percent of parents spank their children, and it's practiced in the vast majority of countries worldwide, Holden said. Studies have shown that its single positive effect is immediate compliance. Increasingly, however, the evidence is clear that spanking is associated with many unintended negative consequences, he said.

The real-time audio interactions revealed that parents were not always calm, as the guidelines recommend, but instead were often angry when they spanked or hit their child; they didn't spank as a last resort; and they gave spankings for minor infractions, not just serious misbehavior. And while many spanking advocates recommend hitting children no more than twice, parents in the audio recordings were slapping and hitting their children more often.

"From the audio, we heard parents hitting their children for the most extraordinarily mundane offenses, typically violations of social conventions," Holden said. "Also, corporal punishment wasn't being used as a last resort. On average, parents hit or spanked just half a minute after the conflict began."

Parents who used corporal punishment in the audio commonly violated three of the six "use" guidelines the researchers examined: Spank infrequently, use it only for serious misbehavior, and only as a last resort.

Ultimately, spanking is not the best form of discipline, because it does not teach children right from wrong. Although it makes children afraid to disobey when parents are present, they feel free to misbehave if they believe they can get away with it, according to the researcher.

Some studies have even shown that depressed dads are more likely to shortchange their children and use physical punishment, even on tots who are still crawling.

"The recordings show that most parents responded either impulsively or emotionally, rather than being intentional with their discipline," said Holden, who favors humane alternatives to corporal punishment.

The findings are reported in "Eavesdropping on the Family: A Pilot Investigation of Corporal Punishment in the Home," which was published online by the American Psychological Association before it appears in a final print and online issue of Journal of Family Psychology.

Parents agreed to wear tape recorders to capture home interactions

The unique recordings captured parent and child interactions in 33 families over the course of four to six evenings. Parents volunteered to wear the recorders; most were mothers who were home with their children after a day's work. The recordings captured 41 instances of corporal punishment, mainly during everyday activities such as fixing supper and bathing children.

More than 80 percent of the moms were married and had completed more education than the general population. About 60 percent were white and worked outside the home, and their children averaged just shy of 4 years old.

In 90 percent of the incidents, noncompliance was the immediate cause, such as sucking fingers, eating improperly, getting out of a chair, and going outside without permission. In 49 percent of the incidents, the parent sounded angry prior to spanking or hitting. On average, less than 30 seconds elapsed from the time when parents initiated nonviolent discipline to when they used corporal punishment. In 30 of the 41 incidents, the children misbehaved again within 10 minutes of being hit or spanked. The youngest child hit was 7 months old. One mother hit her child 11 times in a row.

Most remarkably, the researchers noted an unusual finding: The rate of corporal punishment exceeded estimates in other studies, which relied on parents self-reporting. Those studies found that American parents of a 2-year-old typically report they spank or slap about 18 times a year.

"The average rate we observed using the real-time audio equates to an alarming 18 times a week," said Holden, a professor in the SMU Department of Psychology who has carried out extensive research on spanking.

"Although spanking advocates may acknowledge these incidents as inappropriate use of corporal punishment, evidence indicates that mothers who report their child gets spanked are also more likely to report physical abuse of that child," the authors noted.

Source:
apa.org