Spare the Rod?

It's a topic that riles up emotions and opinions the way few others do in the contentious world of parenting philosophies. Spanking. Should you? How could you? Is it right? Is it wrong? Online message boards are flooded with messages on the topic: the confessions, the wrath, the full-on support. "Yes, I've done it, even though I always swore I wouldn't," writes one. "Sometimes spanking works best," responds another. And then there are the vocal opponents. "Spanking," writes one, "is abuse."

The spanking wrangle has a long history in scientific research, and new findings to be reported today at the American Psychological Association Summit Conference on Violence and Abuse in Relationships will intensify the debate yet again. In a provocative paper, Murray Straus, co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, says that spanking kids increases their risk of sexual problems as adults. Straus, a longtime researcher in the field, analyzed four prior studies and found that teens or young adults whose parents used corporal punishment were more likely to coerce dating partners into having sex or to engage in risky or masochistic sex.

One stat: the 25 percent of university students who ranked highest on a corporal punishment scale insisted on sex without a condom, compared with the 12.5 percent of university students who scored lowest on the scale. Another: 75 percent of college students who'd been spanked a lot said they were sexually aroused by masochistic sex, compared with 40 percent of students who were never spanked. "It's so consistent with so many other studies showing harmful side effects," says Straus. "It didn't surprise me."

The new study has its weaknesses, but so does just about every other paper in the field. For starters, you can't study spanking in the randomized double-blind way you can a medication. It would be ethically inappropriate to divide a bunch of kids into two groups, spank some, spare others and then compare how they fare 10 or 20 years down the road. And double-blind? Impossible to disguise spanking in a dummy pill. So there's no way to absolutely prove cause and effect. The study also relies on students' own recollections of their childhood experiences. Straus says he controlled for people covering up mistreatment by their parents. On the other hand, the students could also have exaggerated. "It's possible," says Strauss, "though I don't find it too plausible."

Elizabeth Gershoff, a researcher at University of Michigan's School of Social Work, says Straus's findings are consistent with the literature. "I have every faith in his research," Gershoff says. "The more children are spanked, the more aggressive they are and the more likely they are to engage in delinquent or at-risk behaviors." Sexual behavior is just one example of that behavior, she says. One lesson kids learn, says Gershoff, is that if you have the power in a relationship, you can use aggression to get your way. Another: "[Kids] may learn that sometimes there's pain and fear involved in loving relationships."

Gershoff, who published a large analysis of the spanking research in 2002 and has just completed a new paper about spanking in the context of human rights and public policy, says spanking may work to gets kids' attention, but it doesn't teach them how to behave appropriately in the long-term. A little tap once in a while is going to have minimal risk, but the risk increases "the more you do it and the harder you do it," she says. "I think everything we know from the research is that it doesn't work and it might have negative side effects."