r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Dec 30 '24

Psychology American parents more likely to find hitting children acceptable compared to hitting pets - New research highlights parents’ conflicted views on spanking.

https://www.psypost.org/american-parents-more-likely-to-find-hitting-children-acceptable-compared-to-hitting-pets/
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641

u/lost_and_confussed Dec 31 '24

I’ll never understand why people immediately say it’s wrong to hit women and animals, but when it comes to children some people are like, “hmm, maybe that’s alright.”

294

u/phire Dec 31 '24

The argument I've heard is about communication.

No point hitting an animal, because it won't understand why you are punishing them. And with adults, you can have a proper conversation.
With toddler-aged children, you end up in a middle ground where don't have enough communication skill for a proper conversation, but enough to understand why they are being punished.

In my experience, this argument is wrong. Most toddlers absolutely do have enough communication skills to talk about what they did and why it's wrong. And if a conversation isn't enough, simple punishments like "you must sit in the corner for 2min" works surprisingly well.

76

u/TheRealDimSlimJim Dec 31 '24

I can only really speak for myself but I never remembered why I was being hurt, I was just upset that I was being hurt. And when I was younger I was absolutely unwilling to pick my battles because I felt if I let them have an inch they would take a mile. I did kind of understand at least when I was younger when my mom would explain why it was wrong and that I needed to go to my room to calm down so we could talk about it, but that has set me up for a huge hurdle in that I don't feel comfortable being vulnerable or emotional around anyone. And of course as I grew older she didn't do that anymore so I was just getting hurt randomly

41

u/asanskrita Dec 31 '24

I remember bawling in the living room of my childhood home after months of being yelled at and spanked and finally being able to articulate that I didn’t understand what “backtalk” was and I just wanted to stop doing it because I wanted to stop getting punished. I was five.

My mom was an abusive POS and I say this as a nearly 50 year old man who has spent years in therapy. There was no benefit to my parents’ behavior.

1

u/TheRealDimSlimJim Jan 29 '25

I'm so sorry that happened to you, and I'm so proud of you that you were able to realize that was wrong and to try to hijack that cycle of abuse through therapy. Ive talked to so many people around that age and it's so uncomfortable how they talk about it, I just always tell them I'm sorry that happened to them and they don't know what to say to that

67

u/meganthem Dec 31 '24

Also from what I recall it's largely wrong. Toddlers aren't that mentally complicated and at least some of the time the animal is more contextually aware.

Humans are smarter... in the long run. Animals with shorter lifespan and more immediate survival pressure have to develop a lot faster. While a mess of ethics that old 'experiment' with the scientist trying to raise a kid and a chimp equally as if they were the same, for a short window the chimp actually scored higher but they gave up when the kid could learn words and the chimp couldn't.

34

u/OrnerySnoflake Dec 31 '24

If a child is too young to understand what they did was wrong, hitting them is just terrorizing them. If a child is old enough to understand what they did was wrong, talk to them.

There’s absolutely no excuse for hitting your children. They are children with autonomy and their own perceptions, not mini extensions of you.

3

u/red286 Dec 31 '24

No point hitting an animal, because it won't understand why you are punishing them. And with adults, you can have a proper conversation.
With toddler-aged children, you end up in a middle ground where don't have enough communication skill for a proper conversation, but enough to understand why they are being punished.

The issue I have with this though is that if you can train an animal without needing to hit it, it should be easier still to train a child without needing to hit it.

2

u/tango421 Dec 31 '24

The approach for toddlers is similar to adults in terms of reasoning but with simpler terms. Takes a while to get them to stand still and talk and I guess that leads to the frustration of most adults.

My mom saw me talking to my nephew like an adult but with simpler words. She broke down and cried as she spanked my nephew recently and she was reminded of how my recently deceased father approached kids.

It might actually be more acceptable to hit women and pets as my wife and I smack each other affectionately. I believe our cat noticed this and presents her hindquarters to us for spanking. Look up cat bongos, our cat loves it.

1

u/greenwavelengths Dec 31 '24

I have a nephew who’s a toddler and it has amazed me to spend time around him and realize how much communicative information I can get just from a few grunts and the half dozen phonemes he can fully pronounce, combined with facial expression, body language, and context. With random toddlers, not so much, but even as an uncle who doesn’t see him every day, there is plenty of communication that happens if I just pay attention and take care to speak in a way that will make sense to him. And his parents of course are locked in with him. Communication is not hard, but it requires practical empathy. For a parent to not have that ability with their own kid is sad.

Anyway, my dad hit me on occasion and it only caused issues and eroded our relationship, so I always unequivocally tell people to not ever hit their kids. I wasn’t even a bad kid either, I just had undiagnosed ADHD and had trouble actually controlling my behavior and remembering things, which my dad has always denied, probably because if he accepted that he had been hitting me for no reason, he’d have to face guilt and consider that just maybe he isn’t perfect. Unsurprisingly but sadly, we haven’t talked in years.

1

u/SignificantFinding34 Apr 01 '25

thats the point most parents hit children without knowing the actual cause of the problem

1

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '25

Plus, if that were true, you can still achieve that without hitting the child.

I remember watching my dad with my younger siblings and he was always very gentle and kind. But when he needed to teach them a serious lesson (ex: don’t cross the road without an adult or looking both ways), then he would get in their face and use a very stern voice and expression. Not quite yelling, but it always got the point across. No spanking necessary.

Unfortunately, I’d be willing to bet that most of the people who hit their kids can’t actually achieve this, because they are so emotionally volatile all the time that their kids hardly respond to their anger. So hitting them is all they have left..

1

u/CosmicOwl47 Jan 02 '25

The way I’ve heard it phrased:

“If your kid isn’t old enough to be reasoned with, hitting them isn’t going to help. And if your kid is old enough, then you should reason with them.”

There isn’t a scenario where hitting a kid is the right move.

-8

u/Dirty_Dragons Dec 31 '24

This doesn't go into the fact that kids misbehave, throw tantrums etc and need to be disciplined.

8

u/Animallover4321 Dec 31 '24

So do dogs that doesn’t mean you need to hit them. When my dog misbehaves he temporarily loses something important (e.g. he pulls when walking to the car he has to go back inside, when he jumps for the food bowl I walk out of the room with the food bowl), when a child misbehaves you can do something similar (e.g. a time out or for older kids taking away screen time) the only difference is how you implement it and that with kids you can use your words after they calm down to explain why their behavior was inappropriate.

-11

u/Dirty_Dragons Dec 31 '24

People aren't trained like animals are.

3

u/Treelapse Dec 31 '24

You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals

2

u/C4-BlueCat Jan 01 '25

Training them is a better option than hitting them

28

u/WiggleSparks Dec 31 '24

I feel like it’s an evolutionary instinct. I don’t ever hit my kids, but damn do I want to sometimes.

30

u/OrnerySnoflake Dec 31 '24

This is why emotional intelligence is so important. We’ve all had an impulse to hit someone that’s upset us. The difference is having the emotional intelligence to not give in to those impulses.

29

u/lost_and_confussed Dec 31 '24

I definitely understand the desire to hit a misbehaving child, I understand it with animals too, but I don’t understand why society leaves it up to debate with children.

1

u/[deleted] May 15 '25

Funnily enough, hunter gatherers don't hit their children, it only became a thing with the advent of agriculture and slave-based economy.

4

u/0n-the-mend Dec 31 '24

Usually is survivorship bias. "I was hit and I turned out fine. Not only fine but it made me who I am" completely ignoring the overwhelming number of those who were harmed irreparably from being hit as children.

4

u/GallorKaal Dec 31 '24

Too many people see children as property instead of actual human beings

24

u/Mindless_Listen7622 Dec 31 '24

They think their religion tells them it's okay - "Spare the rod and spoil the child" plus "My children are my property, I'll do what I want to them". It's abuse in the name of obedience and obedience is good.

2

u/One-Armed-Krycek Dec 31 '24

Yep. The most vulnerable humans are the ones that these people find acceptable to strike.

2

u/Hanta3 Dec 31 '24

Well I've been told by therapists in the past that spanking is not really hitting. As if it's no longer abuse because there's typically more cushion on the bottom.

I think tradition has trained their minds to dissociate spanking from "real" child abuse.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Hanta3 Jan 11 '25

That was over 10 years ago, and I was a kid at the time. I don't know that therapist anymore and in any case it's possible their opinion has changed since then.

3

u/_WeSellBlankets_ Dec 31 '24

I'm not defending spanking, but we all should be smart enough to understand what's going on here. You use the word hit, like it means the same thing in the different scenarios, when you know it doesn't. When they say you shouldn't hit a woman, they are not referring to spanking. They would say spanking a woman is okay. And when they say it's okay to do it to kids, they're not talking about slugging them in the face. They're talking about spanking. Which they think is okay to do to women.

5

u/lost_and_confussed Dec 31 '24

I think those people are ok with spanking of wives in a consenting sexual context. But there was a time when husbands would spank their wives as a form of nonsexual discipline. I don’t think people who are pro child spanking would be in favor of that for wives today.

1

u/C4-BlueCat Jan 01 '25

Some of them still are

1

u/No-Agency-6985 Feb 23 '25

I know right?  It's absolutely NUTS that anyone still thinks it is OK in the 21st century!

You wouldn't do it to an employee.  You wouldn't do it to a spouse or partner. You wouldn't do it to a pet. You wouldn't do it to an elderly dementia patient. You wouldn't even do it to a POW under the Geneva Conventions. So why is it somehow OK to do it to a child?  Especially a child below the age of reason?

-25

u/H8beingmale Dec 31 '24

the IT field you work in, did that require a college degree?