148: Is spanking a child really so bad?

Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive

I’ve been thinking about producing this episode for several years now, and I always wished I wouldn’t need to do it. Then every few months I’d see a post in an online community saying something like “Is spanking really that bad? I was spanked and I turned out fine” and I knew that one day I’d have to do an episode on it - so here it is. My guest, Professor Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, has studied and written extensively about physical punishment of children, and believes spanking should be considered an Adverse Childhood Experience (which is a marker of severe trauma). I mean, if you think about it, we are actually talking about physical abuse here: hitting another human being. We only call it spanking because it’s supposed to be controlled and as punishment for an infraction. But if my husband were to hit me in a controlled way as punishment for something I’d done wrong, would we still call it spanking? (And as Dr. Grogan-Kaylor notes, if we’re spanking our child we’re almost by definition not doing it in a completely controlled way, since we’re doing it because we’re frustrated and/or angry.) In the episode we also discuss how, due to the way that a quirk in one researcher’s agenda aligned with changes in ethical rules governing experiments, that there’s actually scientific evidence from randomized controlled trials to support the efficacy of spanking at changing children’s behavior to make it acceptable to their parents! Now the rules have changed and wouldn’t permit spanking during an experiment, it isn’t possible to generate evidence against spanking. So advocates of spanking (and yes, there are some!) can honestly say that there is evidence of the highest quality in favor of spanking, and no evidence of that quality against it. And of course we have to ask ourselves: is compliance what we really want? Our instinctive response to that question might be “Yes! I do want flipping compliance - and I want it now!” But I know many parents listening to the show have a goal to raise children who speak up when they see injustice, and who are internally motivated to do the right thing…and unfortunately focusing on making children’s behavior comply with our wishes works against that. But that doesn’t mean the alternative is letting our child rule the roost. There are ways to get your needs met and also meet your child’s needs, without spanking, threatening to spank, punishing, giving Time Outs, withholding privileges, or any other tools like this. If you’re reacting in big ways (spanking, yelling, frustration, etc….) to your child’s difficult behavior right now, I invite you to join my Taming Your Triggers workshop. We’ll help you learn the real reasons why you’re feeling triggered (which aren’t really about your child’s behavior!), and what you can do to meet your needs - and your child’s needs as well. Join the waitlist to be notified when doors reopen. Click the banner below to learn more.

Jump to Highlights

01:33 Introducing today’s episode and featured guest 05:25 The definition of spanking 07:38 The age range advocated by some for spanking, ranging from two to 12 years old 09:20 The effectiveness of spanking 16:16 The critique of positive parenting research, particularly focusing on methodological fallacies outlined by Dr. Lazarle 22:24 The question of whether there might be an optimal level of spanking that leads to maximum compliance in children 24:40 How to handle defiant children who are not complying with milder disciplinary tactics 26:21 How to comprehend the overall impact of spanking on children 32:03 Dr. Diana Baumrind's surprising involvement in studies on spanking suggesting that authoritative parents, considered successful, spank their children 35:56 The legality of spanking and the absence of legal protection for children against physical punishment 38:11 Arguments against banning spanking, citing studies that suggest little evidence of parents adopting more effective disciplinary tactics after a ban 42:10 Potential cultural and racial differences in the use of spanking 44:09 Wrapping up the discussion [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan 00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives. But it can be so Jessica 00:11 Do you get tired of hearing the same old intros to podcast episodes? Me too. Hi, I'm not Jen. I'm Jessica, and I'm in Burlesque Panama. Jen has just created a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes, and I got to test it out. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development. It puts it in context for you as well. So, you can decide whether and how to use this new information. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you what to do about each one. Sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe, and come over to our free Facebook group to continue the conversation about this episode. You can also thank Jen for this episode by donating to keep the podcast ad free by going to the page for this or any other episode on YourParentingMojo.com. If you'd like to start a conversation with someone about this episode or know someone who would find it useful, please forward it to them. Over time, you're gonna get sick of hearing me read this intro as well. So come and record on yourself. You can read from a script she's provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com and click Read the Intro and I can't wait to hear yours. Jen Lumanlan 01:33 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today we're here to discuss a topic that I've been meaning to cover for a while and I was sort of hoping I wouldn't have to do it. But we do need to do it. And so here we are to discuss spanking. So I'd like to address two things before we get started. The first is that I have never spanked my daughter and I never plan to spank her. And I don't advocate that any parent I work with spank their children either. I'm going to probe the literature and ask some pretty pointed questions of my guest, and if they were taken out of context, you might think that I'm arguing in favor of spanking. And I want to be clear that I'm not but I do want us to understand the research base as well as we can. And so the second thing is that if you're here because you're spanking your child now, or you've done it in the past, and you're wondering to what extent it might have done damage to them, or you see how close you've come to spanking them, and you're worried about what impact it might do If it were to ever happen, then I want you to know that you're not alone. If you're this close to spanking your child, or even if spanking is not your kind of response, but you yell or walk away or completely freeze or try to placate them to get them to start crying, then that's because you're having a triggered reaction. It might seem like the thing that needs to change here is your child's behavior because then you wouldn't need to have these massive reactions but actually, these reactions come from trauma that you've experienced in your childhood or that you're experiencing now due to I don't know something like the stress from a global pandemic. If you want to learn more about the real causes of your triggered feelings, I invite you to join a free masterclass that I'm going to host next Saturday February 12, from 10 to11:30 am Pacific called how to tame your triggers around your child's difficult behavior without having to stuff your feelings down and pretend you're not angry. It was a long title but as we say in England, it does exactly what it says on the tin. You'll learn all about the five categories of reasons why you feel triggered and how to navigate those situations more effectively without reciting a script, or having to grit your teeth and tell your child I'm not angry when you're really receiving and how to repair your relationship with your child on the fewer occasions when it does still happen. It’s totally free and you can sign up at yourparentingmojo.com/triggersmasterclass. Jen Lumanlan 01:33 We'll have plenty of time for q&a and live coaching of one lucky parent on the call and a giveaway as well. So do sign up even if you know you can't attend and I'll send you the replay afterwards but of course, you do have to be there live to submit questions and maybe get coaching and to win the giveaway. So now let's turn to our episode today on spanking. My guest for this conversation is Professor Andrew Grogan Kaylor—Professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan. Professor Gergen Taylor's research focuses on scientific knowledge development and intervention research on children and families with the aim of reducing violence against children and improving family and child wellbeing. His current research projects examined parenting behaviors like physical punishment and parental expressions of emotional warmth, and support, and their effects on children's aggression, anti-social behavior, and depression. He also examines the interplay of parenting behaviors and their effects on child health and mental health outcomes across socio-economic contexts, neighborhoods, and cultures. He is co-author with Dr. Elizabeth Gershoff of a seminal 2016 meta-analysis on spanking, and his paper on the case for the designation of spanking as an adverse childhood experience was selected as 2007 Teen Article of the year in the Journal Child Abuse and Neglect. Welcome Professor Grogan Kaylor Prof. Kaylor 05:06 Thank you for inviting me. Jen Lumanlan 05:07 I wonder if you wouldn't mind first defining what is spanking for us, then we can sort of get into things like how prevalent it is who spanks and who gets spanked. Prof. Kaylor 05:15 So in that spirit, I suppose we're gonna dive, you know, and in the interest of open science, I suppose we're going to dive right into the limitations of the research and my answer to the first question. Jen Lumanlan 05:24 An excellent place to start. Prof. Kaylor 05:25 Which is, you know, we define spanking or we think what we're talking about is applying a hand to a child's bottom to discipline them to correct their action, hopefully, not in an abusive way, but in a way that causes them to be startled, or those who spank some mild amount of pain. The reason I sort of always pause there is because we don't give that verbose of a definition to people when we asked them. Most of the interviews that we do—we're trying to establish a rapport, we're trying to start a conversation about what is your family life like, and that kind of rigid definition that we probably all carry around in our heads would be off-putting. So we generally say, “How often have you spanked your child in the past week? How often have you spanked your child in the past month? How often have you done that in the past year?” In the spirit of full transparency about limitations of what we do, that might be one of them. Jen Lumanlan 06:20 Yeah. Okay. And so for our purposes today, what we are talking about is a hand to the buttocks in general, but yeah, absolutely. The point that this is a limitation that we find it even hard to ask people because it's socially unacceptable, and yet, so many people do it. I was stunned by the prevalence, right? Prof. Kaylor 06:39 Right. I talked about some of the things we might talk about beforehand and I was thinking, well, what do I know about the prevalence, and, you know, you look in the US or you look internationally, we've been doing some work with international data sort of the three, four, and five-year-olds that we think of as the most likely to be exposed to spanking. That's about a third of parents who are using it fairly consistently. Jen Lumanlan 07:00 Ah, okay, so I had seen Dr. Gershoff paper, finding a prevalence rate of 80%. I'm curious about that discrepancy. Where do you think that comes from? Prof. Kaylor 07:09 It hops around a lot from study to study. I would also wonder if when you talk about lifetime prevalence; has this ever happened to you, you ask people retrospectively, did they ever experience it as a child or as parents—did you ever use this with your child? Then the results are usually around 80%. But when you say, you know, is this something kind of trying to get a snapshot, is this something you're doing regularly, right now, it's usually around a third. But sometimes it's around 50% in some groups of people. Jen Lumanlan 07:38 Okay. And the advocates of spanking, and there are advocates of spanking. We'll say that this should usually be done between the ages of two and 12. And I'm guessing that that's because you're assuming that on the lower end; the child doesn't understand well enough what they did wrong for this spank to be able to have any impact. And on the higher end; the child's probably going to start hitting you back. I would think at some point. Prof. Kaylor 07:59 When I hear people advocating, so to speak, those are the ages that they're talking about. Nobody advocates spanking infants, but actually Professor Shawna Lee, one of my colleagues here at the University of Michigan, she and I worked on a study where about a third of parents were reporting that they spank their one-year-old child. So in my mind, even if you're an advocate of the practice, well below the age where there'd be any comprehension. And then, you know, I think the reason it tapers off is there's some rough sense that it becomes for those who think that it's in any way appropriate, it becomes much less appropriate when you're talking about a 10-year-old or a 12-year-old. Not the hip back but just that somehow, kind of not a thing, almost. Kind of not a thing we would do. Jen Lumanlan 08:45 Okay, all right. And of course, it's interesting to why we suddenly shift our perspective at our age. And I don't want to spend too much time on schools, we're going to spend mostly our time focused on what parents do and what happens in the home. But 19 states actually do permit corporal punishment in schools as well. Prof. Kaylor 09:03 My colleague Elizabeth Khrushchev, you mentioned is kind of the real expert on what's going on in the legislation, but anything I've seen about the evidence base, it's no better or it's as bad if it's done in school, if it's done in the family, save all the research comments for later, but yeah. Jen Lumanlan 09:20 Okay, all right. So let's talk about the effectiveness of spanking. And we're gonna hear this name mentioned a lot. There's a researcher named Dr. Larzelere, and we were just chatting beforehand that neither of us are completely certain as to how that pronunciation is correct. But I think it's pretty close. And I think it's fair to him to say that he is an advocate for spanking as a tool for parents and that we shouldn't tell parents not to spank because we don't have evidence-based tools to replace it with. And he argues that the reason we shouldn't do that is because it is effective at changing children's behavior. And I'm wondering if you can speak to that based on the research that you have seen and done yourself as well. Prof. Kaylor 10:01 The thing I would think about is, Prof. Gershoff and I are working on this review of 50 years of research literature on spanking, physical punishment, or whatever you would want to call it. And we went in thinking, there's a tremendous amount of controversy about this. I mean, there's a tremendous amount of controversy in my classrooms, sometimes I will try to establish some kind of human connection as a professor standing in front of the room and say, “This is what I'm working on” or “This is what I'm concerned about.” It's an interesting area to work in because people in my classrooms will tell me why you're wrong. That's just not the case that spanking is bad. I mean, that has declined over time. So you know, we perceived that there was a tremendous amount of cultural controversy or cultural discussion. And we thought, well, let's take this renewed look at the research base, list a done earlier review, and let us see what the research has to say. There's just no controversy. Statistically or an evidential terms. There's just no controversy. So when that piece came out, people would say, is there anything surprising and it's, you know, I thought be weighing opposite cases against each other. There's just no controversy, there's kind of a unanimous signal out of the research so it's very hard for me, and admittedly, I have a point of view, but it's very hard for me to see what is the benefit. I see so many of the harms. Jen Lumanlan 11:24 Okay. And so I'm guessing there's sort of a short-term issue and a long-term issue here, right?...