Punishment Research Gets A Big Swat

Several months ago, America’s front pages were ablaze with the news that Murray Straus, director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, has proved that children who are spanked behave worse, not better, over time.

In fact, Straus has not proved anything of the sort.

For years, Straus has been trying to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between spanking and anti-social behavior. Each attempt has been seriously flawed, thus failing to establish a connection.

That, however, is irrelevant. Straus knows spanking is bad, and many of his very unscientific public statements would suggest that to him, his opinion outweighs the results of any research, including his own.

He has made such top-lofty claims as spankings teach “the morality of hitting” and “those who love you, hit you.” Groundless emotional rhetoric of this sort props Straus’s fervent conviction that spanking ought to be made illegal, thereby - so he has said - making America “healthier, less violent and wealthier.”

The fact that he sees no problem with recommending state control of parental discipline based on assertions neither he nor anyone else has proved qualifies Straus as more ideologue than scientist.

There is no question but that his most recent study is Straus’ best to date. It can at least be said he took more time and care in collecting, preparing and presenting his data than he has done in the past. But the question becomes: What reasonable conclusions can reasonable people glean from Straus’ findings?

In his initial sample, mothers, 23 to 30 years old, were asked how many times in the previous week they had spanked their children - ages 6 to 9. They were also asked questions to determine the extent to which their children displayed anti-social behavior (stealing, lying, bullying and so on). Two years later, these same mothers were again asked about their children’s behavior.

Straus found that the more spankings children initially received, the worse their behavior was likely to be at the time of the second sample.

What Straus didn’t tell the media was that his association was only statistically significant at the level of three or more spankings a week. Conceivably, the children in question were receiving 156 spankings per year!

This simply means Straus found what no reasonable person would debate: Something is bad wrong (as we say in North Carolina) when parents spank their children more than occasionally, and that children in “bad wrong” home situations are likely to develop anti-social behavior. It’s also interesting to note that Straus was unable to determine that one or two spankings per week (52 to 104 spankings per year) were associated with an increase in anti-social behavior.

The same issue of the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine in which Straus’ study appeared (Vol. 151, August 1997), included a second study that received much less media attention. The principle author, Marjorie Linder Gunnoe, found “for most children, claims that spanking teaches aggression seems unfounded.”

Gunnoe’s study suggests spankings can be either beneficial or detrimental, depending on a child’s age, family structure, cultural context and - most interestingly - how the child experiences them.

If the child believes a parent is acting aggressively (spanking too hard or too often, or striking out in anger), he is more likely to adopt aggressive ways of dealing with conflict.

By contrast, when perceived as fair, legitimate expressions of parental authority, spankings prompt many children to inhibit aggression.

Sounds reasonable to me. Back to the drawing boards, Murray Straus.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Rosemond The Charlotte Observer