Illustration by
Shelley Frayer/James Ireland Design Inc.
Bum rap
Antispanking activists should take a time-out
Discussion
WHENEVER I READ SOMETHING ON THE SPANKING CONTROVERSY,
I remember an incident a few years ago in a downtown day care. It happened at
about 6:05 p.m., five minutes past the deadline for parents to depart with
their offspring. The staff was itching to leave, and an occasional dirty look
aimed at a tardy parent darted through the mask of cordiality stretched across
their faces. I was hurriedly helping my son put on his socks, shoes, and coat,
when I heard a commotion behind me. I turned; it was another late parent
walking toward us carrying a boy of about four, her arms locked firmly around
his middle. He was kicking and yelling at the top of his lungs, "No! No!
Put me down!" She was talking to him in the very best contemporary
parenting book manner: very calmly, very firmly, not raising her voice.
"It's time to go now," she said. "I've given you 20 minutes to
play with the day-care toys. That's enough. Daddy's got dinner ready, and he's
waiting for us at home."
She put him down by the kiddie coat rack, and knelt beside him. He seized
this brief moment of freedom to unleash a barrage of blows to her head and
chest. "Let me go!" he yelled as he connected with her chin. She
looked around in embarrassment. I averted my eyes. "That hurt," she
said evenly, taking down his coat, "That really hurt. I don't
like that." She grappled with him in a fruitless effort to force him into
his coat; he wriggled out easily, shoving her face as far away from him as
possible. The struggle continued for minutes, then reached a stalemate. The
day-care staff, looking on with increasing disgust and fatigue, offered such
helpful comments as, "Come on Tyler. It's time to go home now."
As I left with my son, I reflected upon the spirit of the age that has
blessed us with such incidents. Perhaps some non-aversive method of discipline
would have made that terrible child comply with his mother's request quickly,
but I cannot think of it. I am convinced that the most effective solution in
that particular instance would have been a sharp, compliance-inducing swat on
the bottom.
But what parent does that today when people are watching? The antispanking
movement of the last 15 years has done a brilliant job propagating the view
that spanking is just another form of child abuse. Today, normal parents are
not just frightened of appearing abusive; they also fear that an occasional
swat to the behind can turn their little darling into a dangerously aggressive
adolescent and an incorrigibly criminal adult, as the "scientific
evidence" says. In fact, the antispanking movement, and its agents in the
mainstream media, has used this weak, and in some cases simply non-existent,
evidence to beat parents into submission. Antispanking advocates have given us
nothing more than a smattering of half-truths along with heavy smacks of
propaganda.
Before I continue, let me state categorically that I reject spanking as a
primary method of discipline. Let no one see this article as encouragement to
parents to spank their children for every little thing. It goes without saying
that I support all efforts to end the physical abuse of children, but I do not
think that spanking, used rarely and judiciously, is abuse. Rather, it can be
useful in some situations, with many kids.
But what is spanking? Antispankers define it as broadly as possible, not
just to show that spanking causes harm, but to more easily place it on a
continuum with child abuse. One antispanking article, for example, defined
spanking as "any disciplinary hitting of kids that's not injurious or
currently considered abusive." Note the emotive and misleading word hitting
which can include punching, cuffing, boxing the ears, and slapping the face.
But the meaning of the word spanking, which has remained relatively
stable over the centuries, is quite different from these abusive behaviors.
The English language's most authoritative source, the Oxford English
Dictionary, defines the verb to spank as "To slap or smack (a
person, esp. a child) with the open hand." Its earliest etymological
entry, dated 1727, reads, "To spank, to slap with the open Hand."
Another citation from 1889 shows how it was done then (and continues to be
done now): "My mother . . . lifted me cleverly [and] planted two spanks
behind." In 1996, the Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS) gave a similar
definition of "disciplinary spanking": "[It] is physically
non-injurious, administered with an opened hand to the buttocks, and intended
to modify behavior." This is the definition agreed upon by the American
Academy of Pediatrics and the one I use. I reject any broader definition as an
insidious effort to demonize this age-old and harmless practice.
IN CANADA, THE ANTISPANKING MOVEMENT HAS EMBARKED ON
what it hopes is a final offensive against spanking. Last year, an advocacy
group called the Canadian Foundation for Children, Youth and the Law received
$45,000 from the Federal Court Challenges Program to help it mount a Charter
of Rights and Freedoms challenge to Section 43 of the Criminal Code, which
allows parents to use "reasonable force" in correcting their
children. The foundation spearheads the Canadian branch of a North
America-wide movement of liberal child-care professionals, assorted experts,
and sundry kind-hearted folk that seeks to abolish every form of
physical punishment aimed at children. These people are not just concerned
with clear child abuse; Canadian law, they say, should not permit parents even
the open-handed, non-injurious smack to a defiant child's bottom. They
therefore want to repeal Section 43, not amend it. If the
foundation wins, police could lay assault charges against parents who swat
their four-year-old. Because the legal challenge is underway in the lower
courts, the foundation's lawyers are not talking to journalists. No one knows
when the process will be completed.
Many people fear that a repeal of Section 43 could criminalize a vast
number of otherwise law-abiding citizens. In a 1995 letter to the Canadian
Medical Association Journal, Dr. Bruce Williams highlights the irony:
"Those who oppose the use of punishment in raising children favor the use
of punishment, in the form of criminal sanctions, to deal with those who use
corporal punishment on their children."
Of course, propagandists for the cause deny that parents who only spank
will face any criminal charges after the repeal. "Minor breaches of the
law are not prosecuted," stated antispanking lawyer Corinne Robertshaw in
1997. Toronto Star columnist Michele Landsberg assumes, "No cop or
children's aid worker is ever going to report the parent who merely spanks a
toddler's bottom for darting into the road." Really? Perhaps Robertshaw
and Landsberg can explain why U.S. tourist David Peterson was charged with
assault in 1994 and locked up in a London, Ontario, jail when some local
do-gooder saw him spank his five-year-old daughter and reported him to the
cops. Peterson was no abusive, ignorant, and drunken bully, viciously whacking
his daughter indiscriminately: Described as "mild mannered" in
newspaper and magazine accounts, Peterson has an MBA and is a specialist in
production management. His wife, Paula, has an MA in early childhood education
and was working on her doctorate at the time. Peterson had followed an
established family procedure, spanking his child only after she had been given
sufficient warning and had persisted in her behavior. The judge threw out the
case, but if someone can be prosecuted while spanking is still legal, what
will happen when it is actually illegal?
Writing in the Canadian Paediatric Society News Bulletin, Dr. Mervyn
Fox, former chair of the CPS's Psychosocial Paediatrics Committee, gives
another reason to question Robertshaw and Landsberg's assumptions: "I
consult on behavioral paediatrics at a children's mental health centre in a
county whose Children's Aid Society has a strong bias against any physical
punishment. The society is widely regarded as punitive rather than
rehabilitative, absolutist rather than allowing for individual variations. In
consequence, parents are afraid to use any discipline for fear of
prosecution."
ANTISPANKERS ATTRIBUTE MUCH OF THE VIOLENCE IN NORTH AMERICAN
SOCIETY the urban violence among youth, the vandalism, the brutal
rapes directly to the physical punishment of children. According to the
doyen of antispanking advocates, University of New Hampshire sociologist
Professor Murray Straus, "Although physical punishment may produce
conformity in the immediate situation, in the longer run, it tends to increase
the probability of deviance, including delinquency in adolescence and violent
crime inside and outside the family as an adult [sic]."
The North American media seems to agree with Straus's conclusions and
uncritically publishes every questionable claim. In August 1997, the journal Archives
of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine published yet another study led by
Straus; the study "showed" that spanking children is "a
significant predictor of ASB [antisocial behavior] two years later."
Every major newspaper reported it, with some running opinion pieces by
self-appointed experts that said, basically, "children whose parents
still swat them on the bottom will grow up to be violent monsters."
Even without a PhD in sociology, the average person, using his common
sense, should be suspicious of studies that claim spanking increases societal
violence. The first question the skeptic asks: Was there more violence and
crime in the '50s and '60s than there is now? The answer, of course, is no.
"To be sure, there is at least three times as much violent crime today as
there was 30 years ago," writes Harvard's James Q. Wilson, author of Crime
and Human Nature and The Moral Sense. But if the theory that more
spanking equals more societal violence is correct, the '50s and '60s should
have been a hellish period of violent crime. Parents spanked more then.
According to Straus himself, 99 per cent of American parents spanked or used
some form of corporal punishment in 1950; today, everyone, including Straus,
agrees that the use of corporal punishment and spanking has declined. Survey
figures say that 70 to 90 per cent of parents now spank.
A careful look at U.S. crime statistics also refutes the idea that spanking
equals more societal violence. Between 1985 and 1993, violent crime actually
decreased by 20 per cent among males 25 or older, while it increased 65 per
cent for males 18 to 24 and by 165 per cent for 14- to 17-year-old males. So
those who grew up in a period of more spanking were, and are, less violent
than younger people who have grown up in a period of declining approval and
practice of spanking. This does not prove that a decrease in spanking makes
societies more violent, but these statistics throw cold water on any notion
that blames spanking for societal violence.
Some may say, "Well, that's the U.S., they're crazier down there;
there may be other reasons availability of guns for instance that have
skewed the statistics." These doubters should consider Sweden, a
historically nonviolent country and a favorite of antispanking advocates. The
Swedish government outlawed spanking in 1979 and operated an extensive
education program to wean parents away from corporal punishment. Since the
ban, police reports of teen violence have soared sixfold, according to
Statistics Sweden. "What is happening in Sweden is gang violence, mobbing
as they call it over there," says non-abusive spanking researcher Dr.
Robert Larzelere, a director of research at the Youth Care Building in Boys
Town, Nebraska, and a vocal critic of the blanket antispanking position.
"Violence has dramatically increased over the last decade or more."
Despite this evidence, antispanking advocates continue to link spanking and
violence. At a 1996 corporal punishment conference, Straus cited
anthropologist Ashley Montague who argued that "spanking the baby may be
the psychological seed of war." In 1978, Montague gathered eight
anthropologists who had studied nonviolent primitive societies such as the
Fore of New Guinea and the Aborigines of Australia. These anthropologists
published their accounts of primitive child-rearing practices in the book Learning
Non-Aggression, which showed that none of these nonviolent societies
spanked their children.
But Laurie J. Bauman of the department of pediatrics, Albert Einstein
College of Medicine, criticized Straus's logic by pointing out that these
"societal level studies cannot be used to show causality." Other
factors (rather than spanking) could have made these societies nonviolent,
factors like overall social attitudes and values.
But let us ignore this academic position for a moment and see things again
as a layperson. Modern Singapore provides an extreme example of a spanking
society. In the home, Singaporean parents cane their children and strongly
approve of physical discipline; in school, headmasters physically discipline
unruly delinquents; and, of course, Singapore still whips adults in its
criminal justice system. According to the logic of antispankers, Singapore
should be the most violent society on earth, a Hobbesian world where life is
"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Yet Singapore is one of
the most nonviolent of industrialized societies and, in fact, surpasses Sweden
in many measures of nonviolence. In Singapore, women walk the streets freely
without fear of violent sexual assault. Children are well behaved and
respectful; vandalism and juvenile delinquency are rare; and Singaporean
schoolchildren perform remarkably well on international measures of academic
achievement.
I am not saying Singapore's authoritarian culture is good for Canada; we
couldn't adopt it anyway, given our different social structure, governance,
attitudes, and history. But Singapore shows that the
spanking-equals-societal-violence thesis does not even stand up to casual
scrutiny. The issue is far more complex than the antispankers purport.
UP UNTIL 1980, MANY IF NOT MOST PEDIATRICIANS AND
CHILD-CARE PROFESSIONALS endorsed spanking including
"progressive" child-rearing gurus like Dr. Benjamin Spock. But so
tremendous an ideological change occurred in the intervening years that few
Canadian child-care professionals today will publicly endorse moderate
spanking. Part of this ideological change grew out of an increased public
awareness of child abuse. But part of the change follows baby boomers' rise to
power. In The Lyric Generation, a masterful dissection of the boomer
era, Quebec writer Franηois Ricard writes that the boomer generation views
the world as an immense open field to take apart and remake as they please
"in their own image and for their own fulfilment, without hinderance and
without compromise." The boomers' wish to create a perfect world, writes
Ricard, is an "innocent desire, and therefore terrible. Before it,
all the world can do is brace itself."
In the pre-boomer era, the world had a different notion of childhood,
continues Ricard. "Even though they were lovingly adored, children were
still treated as imperfect beings, precious certainly, but incomplete, and by
virtue of that fact, obliged to bend to the authority and strictures of
adults. Thus it was that only 50 years ago, the strap and spanking were
considered perfectly normal disciplinary measures both at home and at
school." But in the postwar years, society came to see childhood as more
complete and perfect, a territory ruled by its own laws; adults now had to
conform to the rules of childhood rather than the other way around.
Many child-care professionals from the baby boomer generation assumed they
knew best how to raise other people's children; their pronouncements on the
very latest, enlightened child-rearing methods served only to undermine the
confidence of parents, who then doubted that they knew how to raise decent,
well-adjusted children. Instead of relying on intuition, tradition, and the
accumulated wisdom of community and relatives, parents began flocking to
parenting clinics and bookstores to buy mostly inane, idiotic, and impractical
child-rearing books. (I know. I have read an unnecessarily large number of
them.) These enlightened professionals brought us permissive parenting and its
numerous blessings; the antispanking movement is their latest effort to make
childhood yet more perfect, while removing the last vestiges of parental
authority.
Within the child-development professions and among the researchers,
however, a battle still rages over the meaning of corporal punishment and
spanking research. On the one side are those who want all forms of corporal
punishment, including spanking, banned because it is harmful and doesn't work.
Anthony M. Graziano, Jessica L. Hamblen, and Wendy A. Plante write in Pediatrics:
"It is . . . reasonable to assume the position that corporal punishment
in child rearing should be discouraged because it is morally objectionable
and, in any event, is not even needed." On the other side are those who
do not necessarily support spanking, but they think that there is not enough
evidence to demand a blanket ban, or to lecture parents on how to discipline
their children. People like Boys Town's Larzelere, or the venerable Diana
Baumrind of Berkeley, who has researched child development for almost 50
years, argue that spanking is effective and not harmful to children between
two and six if used sparingly to back up other non-aversive disciplinary
measures.
THOSE ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL EXPERTS WHO HAVE ACCEPTED THE antispanking
paradigm (a significant number) write as if it is the only rational decision
based on the scientific evidence. Their writings, however, reveal little
evidence, much opinion, and a good deal of exaggeration and moralizing. But
who says the acceptance of a new ideological view has to be a rational
decision? "Individual scientists embrace a new paradigm for all sorts of
reasons," wrote the late philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn in The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions. "Some of these reasons . . . lie
outside the apparent sphere of science entirely. Others must depend upon
idiosyncrasies of autobiography and personality."
Personal idiosyncracies may explain the strange comments and claims in
antispanking literature, scientific and otherwise. For instance, in a 1992
issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, David
Orentlicher pronounces, "Children are the only citizens who can be beaten
with impunity, and this probably arises from the belief that children are the
property of others rather than human beings who have rights." I must have
missed something; Orentlicher has to be writing about some Third World country
instead of the United States. As far as I know, any teacher or parent who beats
a child with impunity in any part of North America will face criminal
charges if caught.
An electronic search of the medical and psychological literature for spanking
or corporal punishment turns up several studies written or
co-authored by Straus. When some antispanking advocates claim that the
evidence against spanking is "overwhelming," in many cases, they are
referring to studies led by this tireless social researcher. Straus finds that
(1) all the really violent societies in the world allow corporal punishment of
children, (2) the greater the degree of approval of corporal punishment in a
state, the higher the murder rate, (3) the more corporal punishment in
schools, the higher the rate of violence among students, (4) the more corporal
punishment in middle childhood or early adolescence, the greater the
probability of crime and delinquent behavior, (5) corporal punishment is
associated with poor interpersonal and managerial skills, depression, suicide,
and alcohol abuse, (6) more corporal punishment means a lower likelihood of
graduating from college, (7) corporal punishment increases the risk of
becoming a generally angry person, and (8) the more corporal punishment a man
experienced the more likely he is to beat his wife.
All this stuff must seem pretty compelling to true believers. But more
thoughtful academics and laypeople will shake their heads and wonder. Straus's
studies, it seems, always confirm his hypotheses. However, it's not the
indefatigable researcher's batting average of 1.000 that the skeptic finds
amazing; it's his ability to show connections between corporal punishment and
virtually anything bad. At this rate, he may soon show that corporal
punishment is associated with both world wars, and the Vietnam and the Persian
Gulf wars.
Straus's critics not only question his conclusions, they question his
methodology. Donileen R. Loseke of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New
York, writes in the journal Social Problems: "Straus's text
represents one type of sociology, an 'academic' sociology that mimics the
methods of the natural sciences, a sociology where the scientist claims expert
status and tells others how they should think about their lives." Demie
Kurz of the University of Pennsylvania writes in the same journal:
"Efforts by social scientists to predict adult functioning based on
childhood experiences have been disappointing. Some children in adverse
circumstances appear to be relatively invulnerable and thrive, while other
children in privileged circumstances falter. . . . Straus does not adequately
explain how physical punishment received in childhood becomes translated
across the life cycle into adult acts of violence."
In the August 1994 issue of the Journal of Marriage and the Family,
Ronald L. Simons, Christine Johnson, and Rand D. Conger of Iowa State
University present evidence that challenges some of Straus's and other
antispanking researchers' findings. Before relating their findings based
on a sample of 332 families to find out how harsh corporal punishment and
parental involvement affected adolescents Simons and his colleagues
summarized the criticisms of the antispanking studies done by Straus and
others: "Critics have noted that most of these studies suffer from
serious methodological limitations that preclude firm conclusions. The
difficulties most often cited relate to sampling, measurement, and failure to
utilize control groups." Their own study showed that the level of
parental support and involvement with children, not corporal punishment,
predicted negative outcomes. "Once the effect of parental involvement was
removed, corporal punishment showed no detrimental impact on adolescent
aggressiveness, delinquency, or psychological well-being." Doesn't this
fit better with what we know about the real world? A world in which nearly all
our parents spanked, and we didn't all grow up to be rapists and murderers?
But what has to be considered the most powerful criticism of antispanking
research because it comes from the master himself can be found in
Straus's latest study published in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent
Medicine. Perhaps to show what a great step forward he has taken in this
new study, he writes, "Most [previous] studies have relied on
correlational data, which cannot establish CP [corporal punishment] as a cause
of behavioral or emotional problems for children. Even the few longitudinal
studies have failed to control for a child's aggression at the time, or have
confounded spanking with other disciplinary practices. Thus controversy
continues to exist, and there are strong grounds for caution about whether
existing research supports the theory that CP causes ASB [antisocial behavior]
by children."
So, many of the studies antispankers cite actually show that spanking is correlated
with antisocial behaviors, rather than show it to be causally related.
Why is this a problem? Because correlation doesn't tell us much about cause,
as British psychologist Robin Dunbar shows in The Trouble with Science:
Researchers at Israel's Tel Aviv University once reported that people with
thin moustaches are more likely to get ulcers than anyone else, yet you'd be a
fool to cut off your thin moustache based on this evidence. It merely means
that many people who have ulcers have thin moustaches (perhaps due to an
uptight personality), and not that thin moustaches cause ulcers. "The
central problem in science," writes Dunbar, "is how to differentiate
between real causal effects and the spurious ones that are due to confounding
variables."
To be fair to Straus, in many of his studies, he does warn that the data is
correlational and therefore the conclusions cannot be taken as definitive. But
the more evangelical of his followers haven't heeded these words of caution;
in movements that want to change the world, impatient followers often ignore
the caveats of their more subtle leaders, as do reporters hungry for a
sensational story.
To improve the evidence for causality, Straus embarked on the study that
would later appear in Archives of Pediatrics and garner so much media
attention. This longitudinal study, co-authored by David B. Sugarman, and Jean
Giles-Sims, looked at a sample of 807 mothers (aged 14 to 21 when first
interviewed and aged 21 to 28 when assessed for Straus's data) of children six
to nine years. Straus statistically controlled for variables demographic
characteristics, the children's prior aggressive behavior, the children's
gender, and the level of emotional support in the family that could muddy
the results. Straus and his colleagues, of course, found that after
controlling for all these effects, "CP remains a statistically
significant predictor of ASB two years later."
The criticisms have already come pouring in. "Straus's study doesn't
demonstrate a causal relationship between spanking and aggressive
behavior," says Dr. Den Trumbull, a Montgomery, Alabama, pediatrician.
"At best it demonstrates an association between abusive corporal
punishment and aggression in children." For many years Trumbull, a fellow
of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a member of the AAP's Section on
Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, has been an incisive critic of the
views of Straus and other antispankers. Trumbull criticizes Straus's new study
for excluding children aged two to six, the age at which spanking is most
effective. "He had the data, but he didn't publish the results. Instead,
he chose children between six to nine years of age, a group, I believe, where
spanking should be infrequently needed and used."
Trumbull also argues that the children with whom Straus found his strongest
association had been spanked three or more times in the previous week.
"If you are spanking children three times a week at ages six to nine
years, it is a marker for dysfunctional parenting. You are obviously having
difficulty with the child, and the child may actually have other problems
going on."
Boys Town's Larzelere also criticized Straus's study. Although he
acknowledges that it is better designed than other studies that tried to show
detrimental outcomes for physical punishment, "the only thing Straus et
al. . . . have proven is that spanking six- to nine-year-olds at the rate of
156 times a year has a small but detrimental effect." Larzelere
calculates this effect as a meagre 1.3 per cent increase in antisocial
behavior. And furthermore, says Larzelere, because of the wording of the
study's questions, most of the children who were actually spanked from 1 to 25
times a year fell into Straus's non-spanking and most improved group. This
obviously skews the results in the direction Straus wants. "The parents
were asked how many times in the past week they spanked their six- to
nine-year-old child. I point out to Straus that the parents who were spanking
occasionally, say once a year or even up to as many times as 25 times a year,
are more likely to be in his no-spanking group since they were only asked,
'how many times did you spank in the past week.'"
Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine published Larzelere's
critique in the March 1998 issue, which included two other critical letters;
in one of them, Dr. Balamurali K. Ambati of the Beth Israel Medical Center in
New York, Dr. Jayakrishna Ambati, and Dr. Ambati M. Rao write: "This
highly publicized article is riddled with methodological and statistical flaws
that cast light more on the long-established biases of Dr. Straus and
colleagues than on CP's use in discipline. . . . Corporal punishment is a
time-tested tool employed in the disciplinary armamentarium of many cultures.
The erosion of traditional family values in the United States has paralleled
efforts to impugn this practice, and [the U.S.] rises in social decay, while
Eastern societies (where CP is common) continue to best the United States in
both academic and social indicators of youth welfare. . . . The sweeping
conclusion of Straus et al. that elimination of CP will reduce the level of
violence in U.S. society is based on little more than statistical quicksand
and methodological thin ice."
The most powerful critique of Straus's work comes from the study by Dr.
Marjorie Lindner Gunnoe of the Department of Psychology, Calvin College, Grand
Rapids, Michigan, and Carrie Lea Mariner of Child Trends Inc., Washington
that directly follows his in the journal. Although every media outlet, with
the notable exception of the New York Times, ignored it, both Trumbull
and Larzelere think Gunnoe's study is stronger and better designed, and
Larzelere describes it as a top 10 "gold standard" study. Like
Straus, Gunnoe sets out to test whether spanking causes aggression in
children; like Straus, she controlled for confounding variables. But her
sample size of 1,112 children is larger than Straus's, the 4 to 11 age range
is wider, and she examined the effects of spanking after a longer period than
Straus five years, as opposed to two.
Unlike Straus, Gunnoe does not assume the simplistic theoretical link
between spanking and aggression, violence, and murder. She focuses, more
realistically, on the family context. Like most child-development experts, she
believes that harsh and abusive discipline can create violent and antisocial
individuals, normal spanking may or may not, depending on the cultural
context, child's age, and the meaning the child ascribes to that spanking.
So if, for instance, a culture treats the strap and the cane as normal
disciplinary measures that loving parents use to correct children, the child
will accept them as such. If children understand and accept the authority of
their parents, then spanking is unlikely to have negative outcomes. Children
see spanking either as an expression of legitimate parental authority, or as a
personal attack, and different outcomes result in either case. In my view,
this theoretical formulation better explains the real world.
Gunnoe found that spanking deters fighting for all children aged four to
seven years; she found no evidence that spanking boys younger than six or
girls younger than eight fostered aggression. She also found a link between
spanking outcome and race. She discovered that African-American children whose
parents spank generally fight less. She theorizes that this may be because
African-Americans regard spanking as necessary and good for the kind of
environment they live in. African-Americans tend to regard
"time-outs" the nouveau method of discipline that puts a child
in a corner or chair for a few minutes with mild contempt as a "white
thing."
Gunnoe did find that spanking creates aggression in one subgroup 8- to
11-year-old white boys in single mother families. Boys in such families, she
argues, may tend to see themselves as more similar to adults, taking the place
of the absent father. Consequently, some may see spanking as a personal
attack. Furthermore, other research shows that single mothers tend to have
difficulties maintaining normal parental authority over their sons, putting
these boys at risk for antisocial behavior and delinquency.
Gunnoe's finding about single mothers forms the core of her criticism of
Straus's study. She wonders why two similar studies should come up with such
different results and attributes the difference to Straus's choice of data.
Straus did not account for "interactions between family structure,"
she writes. "This is potentially consequential, given that the older
children in [Straus's study] are, owing to the sample design, a group of
children born to young and disproportionately single mothers."
So, the scientific evidence is weak for the claim that spanking leads to
all kinds of very bad things for children and society. Anyone really
interested in an overall view of what the best known U.S. experts actually say
on the subject should read the August 1996 supplement to the journal Pediatrics.
(Most of the primary North American research has been done in the U.S. In
Canada, research tends to involve reviewing the empirical work of researchers
in the U.S. and elsewhere.) It published papers presented at a conference on
the consequences of corporal punishment called by the American Academy of
Pediatrics and held at Elk Grove Village, Illinois, in February that year. The
conference was held ostensibly to help the AAP reach a position on spanking,
which it had been unable to do for six years. All the heavyweights in
child-development research were there 24 of them, including Straus himself
but they could not reach an agreement on the consequences of spanking,
many of them rejecting the idea that normal disciplinary spanking is harmful.
One of the 13 consensus statements they made states, "Data relative to
the long-term consequences of spanking of preschool children are
inconclusive."
Dr. Larzelere's thoroughly rigorous review of what he considers quality
studies on spanking is particularly worth reading. Of the 35 studies that met
his stringent inclusion standards, 9 (26 per cent) found beneficial outcomes,
14 (40 per cent) neutral outcomes, and 12 (34 per cent) found predominantly
detrimental outcomes. After finding that 66 per cent of the reliable studies
see no harm in spanking, Larzelere declared in his personal conference
statement that "antispanking rhetoric far exceeds its empirical
support."
Yet antispanking advocates continue to sign up supporters for their cause.
In April this year, the AAP's Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and
Family Health, claiming to be guided by information from the conference, came
out with a document that took a strong antispanking stance. This despite the
lack of consensus among the 24 experts invited, and despite the fact that the
experts agreed that conclusions couldn't be drawn without more research. Why
would they now take such a strong stance when nothing new and definitive has
been published to clear up the controversy? One of the 24 experts at the
conference attributes it to politics, not science he suggests they
succumbed to pressure from outside child-advocate organizations.
In any case, in 1996, the Canadian Paediatric Society's Psychosocial
Paediatrics Committee also carried out a review of virtually the same
evidence, and came to the more evidence-based conclusion that
"Controversy persists regarding the consequences of spanking. Additional
research is needed to clarify issues." In an article written last year in
the CPS journal Paediatrics and Child Health, the chair of the
committee, Dr. William J. Mahoney, wrote: "What is missing from the
available literature is evidence that disciplinary spanking administered in a
non-angry situation has negative outcomes. There is some evidence that it can
be effective." I recently spoke to Calgary pediatrician Dr. Peter Nieman,
a member of the Psychosocial Paediatrics Committee of the CPS, and the
principal author of its statement on discipline. "We thoroughly examined
the evidence from both Canada and the U.S," he said. "The truth is,
there is really not enough scientific data to say that appropriate
disciplinary spanking is bad, period, and it should be banned, period.
Appropriate spanking is not harmful physically or mentally to a child."
SO WHERE DOES THIS REJECTION OF THEIR SCIENTIFIC CLAIMS LEAVE THE
antispanking lobby? With a lot of sermonizing, loads of half-baked opinions,
and very poor moral arguments. In the spring 1994 issue of Empathic
Parenting, the journal of the Canadian Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children, British child psychologist Penelope Leach writes,
"Spanking is wrong because we all agree that hitting people is wrong and
children are people." This sort of argument may sound good on first
reading, but we can't make such blanket statements because in many situations
most of us agree hitting people is "necessary." If you go to a bar
and start a brawl, the bouncers may use reasonable force to eject you; if you
go outside and continue, the police will show up, and ask you to cease and
desist. If you do not and "show verbal non-compliance," you might
receive a disabling whack, delivered to the outside of the thigh with a
nightstick. Comfortable middle-class antispankers forget that our society
gives authority figures the right to use "reasonable force" to
control public disturbances; similarly, in that microcosm of society, the
family, the authority figures of the home parents should have the
right to do the same to control the behavior of their children.
Leach's arguments get worse: "When a mugger hits an old lady for
money," she writes, "or a child hits another for candy, is it any
different from when a parent hits a child to get him to obey?" It's
difficult to take this seriously. Unlike normal parental spanking, mugging for
money and snatching candy are purely egotistical acts; when responsible
parents spank their children, they seek neither personal satisfaction nor
gain: they seek to correct inappropriate behavior, for the child's ultimate
benefit. In many cases, the parent is reluctant to spank, and feels terrible
after doing it. Does this describe the average mugger or candy-snatching kid?
Other antispankers argue that if we consider ourselves moral beings, we
should not strike children to correct them. But parents who spank generally do
so as part of a larger effort to teach children moral behavior. Antispankers
argue that this is illogical, because you can't teach people not to hit others
by hitting them, yet many useful, and even necessary, human behaviors appear
illogical on paper. We fight large conflagrations by setting small controlled
fires; in medicine, we end major pain and suffering by inflicting the
relatively minor pain of surgery, injection, or dental operation. Causing
children minor pain to correct a larger ill is neither inherently immoral nor
illogical.
Antispankers suggest, in place of spanking, time-outs, reasoning, and
removal of privileges. These are fine measures, which should be among every
parent's disciplinary tools. But are they workable at all times and for all
ages? Antispanking dogmatists stoutly insist that they are; if you point out
that these measures are not working for your kid, you're simply not doing it
right, you incompetent parent. But columnist John Rosemond, the bκte noire of
the U.S. psychological community, explains that time-outs sometimes don't
work. "The letter writer advises that time-out will work if it is used
consistently," he writes in one of his newspaper columns. "The
problem is, one cannot use time-out consistently. It is difficult, if not
impossible, to use if a behavior problem occurs away from home or when the
parents are rushing out of the house to make an appointment. And children who
are inclined toward misbehavior figure these things out quickly." As a
parent, I wholeheartedly agree. As for reasoning, a review of studies on
verbal explanation and reasoning led by Nathan J. Blum of the University of
Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and published in Pediatrics, found
that "verbal explanations and instructions are not effective in changing
young children's problem behaviors."
RATHER THAN A REPEAL, CHILD-WELFARE ADVOCATES SHOULD CALL FOR AN amendment
to the Criminal Code's Section 43, to close loopholes that allow abusive
parents to escape punishment. Instead of allowing parents the right to use
"reasonable force" which can be interpreted in various ways
the law could clearly specify what is acceptable and what is not. But it
should not ban spanking outright.
I personally believe that a large number of do-gooders out there are just
itching to get their hands on a legal stick with which to beat that
Neanderthal pro-spanking majority among parents. A general survey of Americans
shows that antispanking is the moral view of a minority of the population: The
greatest supporters of antispanking are educated, white, middle-class women. I
have absolutely nothing against educated, white, middle-class women; I just
don't think that the morality of this minority should be imposed on the rest
of us. A blanket ban will especially affect immigrants whom, I suspect, more
often spank their children. Why criminalize a growing segment of our
population, the majority of whom are otherwise law abiding, simply because
they have a different view on how to raise decent children?
Where is all this leading? Retired Vancouver child psychiatrist Thomas P.
Millar thinks that the antispanking movement is part of a wider agenda to ban
all forms of punishment. It is easy to dismiss this claim until you discover
that eminent antispanker Dr. Joan McCord of Temple University argues that we
should question the value of all forms of punishment because they all
lead to the same evil things Straus claims for spanking. The battle lines over
this particular conflict have already been drawn: At a conference on
Research in Discipline, held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1996, McCord
declared that the research showed that all punishment is unnecessary and
undesirable, while another heavyweight in the field, Berkeley's Baumrind,
argued that the research showed the opposite.
If we are headed for McCord's world, we should heed the warning of that
great historian of Roman affairs, Jιrτme Carcopino, writing in his
masterpiece Daily Life in Ancient Rome. He was describing the Roman
Empire at the height of its prosperity and decadence, just before it embarked
on its 350-year decline: "The laws had once more adapted themselves to
public feeling which, condemning the atrocious severities of the past, asked .
. . nothing more of paternal authority than . . . natural affection. . . .
But, unhappily, the Romans failed to strike the happy mean. They were not
content to lessen the old severity; they yielded to the impulse to become far
too complaisant. . . . The result was that they were succeeded by a generation
of idlers and wastrels."
To comment, write to OkeyChigbo@nextcity.com
Letters
-
Joan E. Durrant
, associate professor, Department of Family Studies,
University of Manitoba, responds: July 25, 1998
-
Corinne Robertshaw
, coordinator, Repeal 43 Committee, Toronto,
responds: August 15, 1998
-
Okey Chigbo
replies
-
Caz Dawson
, Owen Sound, Ontario, responds: September 14, 1998
-
Tom Johnson
, responds: September 29, 1998
Joan E. Durrant, associate professor, Department of Family Studies,
University of Manitoba, responds: July 25, 1998
As a child clinical psychologist and a researcher with a special interest
in corporal punishment, I wish to correct some of the inaccuracies in Okey
Chigbo's piece on spanking. Mr. Chigbo paints a picture of researchers in this
area as conspiratorial, bent on prosecuting parents for trivial acts based on
suspect evidence.
In fact, a recent metanalysis of many independent studies consistently
associates "normative" (what some call "non-abusive")
physical punishment with negative developmental outcomes. These include
childhood aggression (30 studies), antisocial behavior (6 studies), decreased
internalization of moral values (7 studies), poorer quality of the
parent-child relationship (13 studies), and poorer mental health in childhood
(12 studies) and adulthood (8 studies). Such rare consistency in social
science research suggests reliable relationships.
Mr. Chigbo, however, distorts these findings, caricaturing them with:
"an occasional swat . . . can turn their little darlings into dangerously
aggressive adolescents" or "rapists and murderers." No
researcher would ever make such a ridiculous claim. Rather, risk increases
with the amount of physical punishment. By analogy, most smokers do not die of
smoking-related diseases, but the relationship between smoking and such
diseases puts them at higher risk of doing so. As all human behavior is
determined by numerous interacting factors, no simple relationships exist
between parental behavior and child outcomes. However, we can certainly
identify risk factors that may predispose a child to, for example, aggression.
One such factor is physical punishment.
Mr. Chigbo correctly points out that spanking studies tend to be
correlational in design and that correlation differs from causation. Every
researcher knows this and states so clearly. However, correlation is not, as
Mr. Chigbo suggests, equivalent to the relationship between "thin
moustaches" and "ulcers."
First, the relationship between spanking and poor development outcomes is
robust across samples, methodologies, and a range of statistical and
methodological controls. Second, this relationship has a theoretical basis:
For decades, we have known that children who observe aggressive behavior are
more likely to exhibit it themselves. Third, when parents of aggressive
children stop using spanking and other harsh methods of punishment, their
children become less aggressive.
Researchers rely on correlational methodologies for ethical reasons. The
only way to demonstrate conclusively that spanking causes increased aggression
is to randomly assign children to be spanked, an approach widely considered
unethical.
Mr. Chigbo approvingly cites Dr. Robert Larzelere's review of spanking
studies. If he had read some of these studies himself, he may have been more
cautious in his conclusions. First, one "quality" study
demonstrating spanking's "beneficial outcomes" to Dr. Larzelere
involved a sample of one extremely conduct-disordered child and had absolutely
no controls to determine whether spanking influenced this one child's
behavior. Second, most of the other articles showing "beneficial
outcomes" involved a series of studies into the best methods to induce
severely behavior-disordered children to stay in a time-out chair. These
studies determined that spanking was not necessary, even for those very
difficult-to-manage children. Even if it were, these children received an
average of 8 spankings in a 20-minute period. Calling spanking that is
required almost every three minutes "effective" is a serious
exaggeration.
Mr. Chigbo suggests that spanking should be in a parent's repertoire
because it can induce immediate compliance. I would argue that,
precisely for this reason, it should be avoided. Research on animal and human
learning demonstrates that we can become desensitized to virtually any
punishment. Parents who rely on physical punishment may need to increase the
punishment as their children become accustomed to it, making physical
punishment a risk factor for abuse.
Despite his repeated criticisms on the basis of correlational data, Mr.
Chigbo bases his analysis of societal violence levels on purely correlational
and, I might add, extremely simplified material. It is absurd to attribute
fluctuations in societal violence to a single factor, such as changes in the
prevalence of physical punishment. Violence obviously results from a number of
risk factors, which may include socioeconomic stresses, societal racism, gun
control laws, alcohol consumption, and so on. Physical punishment appears to
be one such factor. Although most children who received physical punishment do
not become dangerous offenders, most such offenders received high levels of
physical punishment as children.
Mr. Chigbo turns to Sweden to show that reducing physical punishment may
actually increase societal violence. I have lived in Sweden specifically to
study the effects of the 1979 corporal punishment ban and am intimately
familiar with social trends there. His conclusions about this country are
completely mistaken. Although police reports of youth violence have increased,
this increase results from a nationwide antibullying campaign. School
principals now routinely report all incidents of even minor bullying to
discourage this once accepted schoolyard behavior, a practice that contributes
substantially to the statistical trend Mr. Chigbo describes.
Contrary to Mr. Chigbo's dire prediction of a prosecutorial free-for-all
following Sweden's legislative change, the ban did not increase child assault
prosecutions. Further, child welfare has become more supportive and
preventive, reducing out-of-home placements by 50 per cent since 1982. Sweden
also has one of the world's lowest child homicide rates. Since 1975, Sweden
has witnessed 15 years without a single child dying of physical abuse.
Although reducing youth crime was never the goal of the Swedish corporal
punishment ban, since the mid-1970s, youth theft and drug dealing and their
use of alcohol and drugs have decreased substantially. While these changes
cannot be attributed directly to the ban, they do demonstrate desirable shifts
that do not require physical punishment.
Mr. Chigbo sensationalizes current efforts to repeal the Canadian law that
permits teachers and parents to use physical punishment. Canadians are not
"pro-spanking." In fact, surveys indicate that the majority don't
view spanking as effective or desirable. Those who support the repeal are
themselves mostly parents and likely have spanked their children at one time
or another. Their interest is not in persecuting parents facing child-rearing
challenges but in inhibiting parents from using physical punishment by
removing society's stamp of approval. They want to remove a legal sanction
that has led to acquittals in cases of injury (e.g., welts from whippings with
extension cords, a broken tooth from a punch to the face, bruises from kicks
and punches). Those most prominent in the repeal effort are developing
guidelines to avoid trivial prosecution. They also support efforts to augment
parental resources.
While Mr. Chigbo uses the David Peterson case as evidence that
"minor" spanking will be prosecuted, he leaves out a few details,
such as the fact that the child was a five-year-old girl who had her pants and
underwear pulled down, was splayed across the trunk of a car, and was hit in
the presence of onlookers granted, with an "open hand." That her
father was otherwise "mild mannered" and well educated is irrelevant
to the fact that this child was publicly humiliated and sexualized. Would Mr.
Chigbo support anyone doing this to his child?
Finally, I object to the overall tone of Mr. Chigbo's piece. While I
realize that journalists and academic researchers present information very
differently, the sharp contrast between his condescending voice in describing
Dr. Murray Straus ("the master himself," the "doyen of
antispanking advocates") and his respectful tone in presenting those who
support Mr. Chigbo's position ("venerable," "incisive
critic") suggests bias. Further, such a lack of respect for one of North
America's most prominent family violence researchers shows Mr. Chigbo to be
quite unfamiliar with Dr. Straus's work. Dr. Straus has been studying family
violence for almost 30 years; his studies were the first to demonstrate the
prevalence of spousal violence in the United States, and current efforts to
assist battered women and eradicate wife abuse owe much to his empirical work.
Mr. Chigbo began his piece with an anecdote to illustrate the wisdom of
spanking to induce a four-year-old to leave his day-care centre (despite his
disclaimer that he doesn't support spanking "for every little
thing"). He sarcastically criticizes the efforts of the child's mother
and teachers to deal with this frustrating situation in a mature, controlled
manner. While these attempts may not have been immediately effective, I am not
convinced, as Mr. Chigbo is, that a spanking would have been any better. In
fact, it likely would have resembled the hitting that the mother was
attempting to stop and increased the child's negativism and resistance to
going home. The following statement by Mr. Chigbo may be most revealing:
"Perhaps some non-aversive method of discipline would have made that
terrible child comply with his mother's request quickly, but I cannot
think of it." Enough said.
Corinne Robertshaw, coordinator, Repeal 43 Committee, Toronto, responds:
August 15, 1998
Okey Chigbo asks me to explain why U.S. tourist David Peterson was charged
with assaulting his five-year-old daughter and why he spent the night in a
London jail for a "minor" assault.
Mr. Peterson put his daughter on the trunk of a car in a public parking
lot, took down her underpants, and hit her hard with his hand six to eight
times. Onlookers were so alarmed by the child's screams that police were
called. Mr. Peterson, however, was acquitted under section 43 of the Criminal
Code allowing "reasonable" force for the "correction" of
children a section dating from 1892. He spent a night in jail because he
was a non-resident without funds to post a bond.
That Mr. Chigbo considers this a minor matter speaks volumes about his
complacency concerning assaults on children and underscores the need to end
this dangerous, unjust, and discriminatory section. Would he consider it a
minor matter if the law allowed this to be done to him?
Okey Chigbo replies
Throughout her letter, Professor Durrant neglects to identify her sources,
which is rather strange for an academic. Her distortions and sleights of hand
confirm much of what I wrote about the antispanking movement. It would take an
entirely new essay to point them all out, so I will focus on the more
egregious examples.
"A recent metanalysis" associates non-abusive "physical
punishment with negative developmental outcomes." Where was this
mysterious metanalysis published? Was it in a pamphlet circulated among her
fellow antispankers? Or in a reputable peer-reviewed journal? This information
could shed light on the discrepancy between her claims and what reputable
researchers and even Dr. Straus say: that most antispanking research
is unreliable. As recently as February 1998, Randal D. Day and Gary W.
Peterson wrote in Journal of Marriage and the Family that "most of
the studies of spanking have methodological problems." One wonders why
the controversy continues since this recent metanalysis solved this problem
once and for all.
"Risk increases with the amount of physical punishment." Odd
statement this. Risk also increases with the speed of driving; the amount of
medicinal drugs taken; and the number of sharp objects in your home. Do we ban
cars, medicinal drugs, or kitchen knives?
Professor Durrant repeats Dr. Straus's flawed smoking analogy. While we
know that smoking is inherently toxic, we don't know that moderate spanking is
dangerous. In the manner of the best propaganda, the smoking analogy subtly
links spanking to something we all agree is pathological.
"This relationship has a theoretical basis: . . . children who observe
aggressive behavior are more likely to exhibit it themselves." Professor
Durrant has clearly forgotten her earlier statement: "As all human
behavior is determined by numerous interacting factors, no simple
relationships exist between parental behavior and child outcomes." She
posits a simplistic theoretical model for the way children learn from parents
despite an extensive literature that criticizes this model. As pointed out by
Dr. Diana Baumrind, who has studied parent-child relationships for over 40
years, while children do indeed copy some behavior, most realize at a very
early age that their parents do several things that they cannot, and perhaps
should not, do.
"When parents of aggressive children stop using spanking and other
harsh methods of punishment, their children become less aggressive." My
essay is on mild parental spanking, and Professor Durrant slips in "harsh
methods." What are these methods? Throwing the child across the room?
Punching the kid in the face? Obviously, when you stop doing these things, the
child's aggression will decline. Furthermore, I do not advocate "high
levels of physical punishment."
As for Dr. Robert Larzelere's review, my essay never set out to find
studies that support the use of spanking (given the politics of the age, who
would conduct such a study?); rather, it shows that scientific evidence does
not support demands for a total ban. If I were to remove Dr. Larzelere's
review from my essay, my conclusions would be unaffected.
"We can become desensitized to virtually any punishment." This
statement, more than anything else, reveals that Professor Durrant belongs to
that class of academics that really, really believes research studies explain
life's complexities. It also reveals her limited experience. I grew up in a
country that practised Victorian-style caning in schools, and I can guarantee
Professor Durrant that no one I know became "desensitized" to it.
"Parent's who rely on physical punishment." My position has
absolutely nothing to do with parents who rely on physical punishment.
I believe parents should be free to spank (not use "physical
punishment," which can mean anything) if they so choose, on rare
occasions, perhaps when everything else has failed.
Professor Durrant should read criticisms of antispanking with a little more
care. She erroneously claims that I said that reducing physical punishment may
increase societal violence. Rather, I said that banning spanking does not
reduce societal violence as antispankers argue. Then she pulls out the hoary
chestnut of increased reporting to explain Sweden's rise in youth violence.
For a better understanding, we could look at Swedish conviction figures
(rather than reported figures) for 15- to 17-year-olds. Statistics Sweden
began recording convictions for assault in 1982, following which, we do see a
fairly steady rise, up to 1989 510, 502, 564, 579, 628, 592, 712, 781. Ten
years after that traditionally lenient country banned spanking, assault
convictions in that age range rose by at least 53 per cent. Both the assault
conviction figures and the sixfold increase in reported youth violence cases
after the ban suggest that it's more than just trivial bullying. Other
antispanking apologists accept the increase but blame it on an inexplicable
"worldwide rise in youth crime." Like Margaret Mead in Samoa,
Professor Durrant went to Sweden and saw what she wanted to see.
I don't know why Professor Durrant cites the figures on child deaths. Since
the absence of child deaths predates the spanking ban by four years, the total
ban appears superfluous.
Professor Durrant outdoes herself in the David Peterson case. The
bare-bottom spanking that the Peterson family gave in rare situation becomes,
in her masterful description, a case of sexual abuse ("sexualized,"
"splayed across the trunk," "pants and underwear pulled
down"). Corinne Robertshaw's "screams," "hit her
hard," and so on are more of the same strained efforts to elicit moral
outrage.
Finally, Professor Durrant claims that it is "mature" to wait out
the kid in my opening scene. Antispankers and radical child advocates believe
that the world should completely revolve around the whims of a child that
some of the day-care workers might need to catch a train to their homes, or
that the mother might have urgent business to attend to after dinner, is
irrelevant.
Professor Durrant doesn't tell how she would have dealt with that child. If
she could have persuaded him to co-operate, more power to her. I applaud any
parent who can raise decent, well-behaved children without the need for
spanking. But given that children differ, some parents will find that
impossible. Pediatrician Dr. Peter Nieman, principal writer of the Canadian
Paediatric Society's statement on discipline, generally discourages spanking
but suggests that to re-establish the parental authority so vital in child
rearing, the parent may try spanking, with a loving hug and an explanation
afterward. I would say that when a 3- to 4-year-old punches his mother in the
face and refuses to co-operate with her, that mother has lost parental
authority. I also submit that, in such a situation, a dogged refusal to try
spanking seems particularly obtuse.
Caz Dawson, Owen Sound, Ontario, responds: September 14, 1998
I just read through The NEXT CITY for
the first time and wanted to drop a short note of appreciation for your very
articulate piece regarding corporal punishment.
To you I say, "Bravo excellent piece." It's refreshing to see
someone stand up with some backbone and have something truly sensible to say
on the matter.
I've seen both sides of the issue played out in the lives of my peers
those who use corporal punishment to excess and those who've swung like a
pendulum to the other extreme using "reason" to discipline their
children. Neither work. The extreme use of corporal punishment merely breeds
resentment and anger and a great deal of distrust in the young charges. The
attempt to use "reason" with a child that only understands the
"black and white," or is controlling and manipulating the issue at
hand via unacceptable behavior (as was seen in the case you cited at the
beginning of your article), is, at best, a futile endeavor.
Me, I fall into the middle ground of this issue. I use discussion when my
children understand the rights and wrongs, and when my children put on a
display of a complete lack of regard for those around them, or attempt to
control and manipulate their surroundings in such a way that they're
exhibiting decidedly anti-social behavior, they've received a swat on the
backside. I'm quite happy to say that I have intelligent, well-adjusted kids
who understand what respecting the boundaries and feelings of others truly is.
Compassionate guidance is not anemic and listless. What we invest into our
children will be reaped good or bad. Me, I would like to see my children
become balanced, caring individuals who are looking out for those around them.
Those attributes aren't learned so much as they are taught by example. How
else does one learn boundaries if there are no boundaries presented?
Your article is timely and intelligent here's hoping it opens up a
great deal of discussion on both sides of the issue. We need to find the
common ground (if that is ever possible in this society) and reinforce those
things that we do know bring positive influence and guidance into the arena of
child-rearing. Again, my kudos to you for an excellent article. Keep up the
good work.
