Spare the Rod?

Not every scientist agrees. Robert Larzelere, a human development researcher at Oklahoma State University, says that "conditional" or "backup" spanking in two-to-six-year-old kids can be useful. The spanking needs to be nonabusive (two open-hand swats on the behind from a parent who's not "angrily out of control") and it needs to be used not as a first line of response but as a backup to other kinds of discipline, like timeouts, grounding and reasoning. "Under these conditions, the evidence suggests that it's effective," says Larzelere. Too often, he says, spanking research lumps corporal punishment into one big group, failing to draw the line between overly severe punishment and a couple of taps on the buttocks. His conclusion: conditional spanking isn't more harmful than any other kind of discipline. The key, he says, is that parents need to discriminate between "inappropriate and appropriate use."

No single study is likely to stop the practice of spanking. The Bible says, "He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him," and plenty of Americans interpret the passage literally. The Christian group Focus on the Family, for example, says there's no excuse for abusing a child, but spanking is OK when it's done right. "We believe that appropriate, disciplinary spanking, used in the context of a warm, nurturing parent-child relationship, is not abusive or harmful to the emotional well-being of the child," says Bill Maier, Focus on the Family's vice president and psychologist in residence, in an e-mail.

But researchers like Straus, who calls himself a humanist, say children need to be protected. Nobody knows exactly how many people spank their kids, but in one survey Straus found that more than 90 percent of Americans have spanked their toddlers, and while not all will turn out to have dysfunctional sex lives or be aggressive adults, he and others are worried about those who might.

Should there be a policy against it? The American Academy of Pediatrics goes as far as to say that parents should be encouraged to use other methods of discipline. Twenty-two states, meanwhile, still allow spanking in schools. And while there's plenty of grass-roots effort to end it (the group End Physical Punishment of Children, or EPOCH-USA, is holding its annual SpankOut Day on April 30), many Americans are wary of taking too radical a step. When Sally Lieber, an assemblywoman in Silicon Valley, introduced a bill last year that would ban corporal punishment in her state, the public let her know that they didn't want the government messing with their parental rights. "It obviously touched a nerve," says Lieber. "It was like being in the eye of giant cultural hurricane." A hurricane that shows no signs of dissipating.

© 2008