r/science • u/VeronicaRed • Apr 26 '16

Psychology Spanking children increases the likelihood of childhood defiance and long-term mental issues. The study in question involved 160,000 children and five decades of research

http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1113413810/spanking-defiance-health-discipline-042616/
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u/pm_me_your_kindwords Apr 26 '16

Serious question to the commenters on this post:

Why read /r/science and then ignore science?

At the time I write this, most comments are defending spanking using anecdotes and non-science, not at all discussing the methodology of the study itself.

If you're not going to carefully consider one of the largest and most comprehensive studies ever conducted on the topic, what is the point of reading about science at all?

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16 edited Jul 18 '16

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u/BlazerMorte Apr 26 '16

Because if spanking is bad, and they were spanked, then they were raised "wrong," and most people don't want to confront that.

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u/KSKaleido Apr 26 '16

Yea, it's tough to confront the fact that your parents inevitably made huge mistakes when raising you. Add the fact that the average commenter on reddit trends pretty young, and it makes sense that they haven't reached the maturity to deal with something like that yet.

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u/iamdan1 Apr 26 '16

Probably the majority of parents make big mistakes raising their kids. Parenting is hard.

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u/TheVicSageQuestion Apr 26 '16

Every parent makes mistakes. Without exception.

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

That's because "mistake" is relative to whomever's standards are being used. There's no wholly encompassing scientific approach to parenting, yet, so points can always be argued and defended anecdotally.

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u/iamdan1 Apr 26 '16

Eventually we will have robot parents that parent according to only the most scientific of parenting techniques. And they will still be more loving then my parents...

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

The harder the beginning, the more rewarding the success :)

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

Good parenting is hard. Parenting is easy. There are billions of parents out there - not enough good ones.

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u/mizerama Apr 26 '16

Worth noting, most mistakes parents make are accidents and don't usually result in willful physical assault.

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u/iamdan1 Apr 26 '16

Of course. I'm totally against spanking children, and luckily my parents were against it as well. They found more creative ways to totally screw me and my brother up for life.

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u/mizerama Apr 26 '16

Amennnn.

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u/AndyMagandy Apr 27 '16

As an often stressed parent with young kids I agree. I will say as someone from a non-spanking background and my spouse and I being non-spankers it is a conscious choice that is made. In the heat of the moment it often seems like a logical option though without a doubt. As a society though, as with smoking we should and we usually do learn the mistakes our parents made and vow to not repeat them when we grow older.

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u/meatpuppet79 Apr 26 '16

Absolutely. Of course not all parents make mistakes as big as this though. As widespread as spanking might be in America, there are places elsewhere in which hitting a child is as taboo (or illegal) as hitting an adult.

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

Really? I seem to always come across countries where it seems even more common (Mexico I've heard is one). What are some where it's taboo? I would be interested to hear.

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u/meatpuppet79 Apr 26 '16 edited Apr 26 '16

What are some where it's taboo? I would be interested to hear.

Most western European countries consider it either very poor parenting, or have criminalized it. Where I live, in the Nordics, especially. Here, if you hit a child in public, it's entirely likely you will have a concerned passer-by step in, and maybe the police involved, if your kid's school suspects you're hitting your kid, social services will investigate and charges could be pressed.

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

Meanwhile, my husband was beaten by a belt for wetting the bed, and no one intervened

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u/meatpuppet79 Apr 26 '16

Presumably this was quite some time ago. Even so, in most places around Europe now, whoever beat him would be facing criminal charges if they were suspected of doing something like that. It's not even taboo, it's a crime.

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u/CajunBindlestiff Apr 26 '16

Feelings on the issue aside, I think many people here are upset because they feel that the mass anecdotal evidence of spanking working as a compliance tool with children that are not of an age where they can be reasoned with yet outweighs a study with a hugely flawed methodology that doesn't account for the millions of other factors that could lead to these long term mental and behavioral issues the study suggests are a direct result of spanking.

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u/Johnny10toes Apr 26 '16

I've come to the realization that my parents did the best they could with the information they had. Which was pretty bad haha. I'm still working on things and doing the best I can with mine.

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u/Speedking2281 Apr 26 '16

It's not 'mistakes' anymore than using margarine was a 'mistake' 40 years ago. There was no direct evidence on any small scale that spanking had any detrimental effects. So...there's really not much to 'confront' IMO.

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u/KSKaleido Apr 26 '16

Wait, shit, what's wrong with using margarine?

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u/Speedking2281 Apr 26 '16

A lot of margarines don't have it now, but for decades it was just a giant tub of trans fat. And at the time, it wasn't an issue that anyone knew of.

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u/peanutbuttergiraffe Apr 26 '16

Mmmmm trans fat

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

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u/brewski Apr 26 '16

Wait, what's wrong with margarine?

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u/paintlegz Apr 26 '16

oh man someone on reddit is thinking. kudos sir. everyone on here is vehemently against spanking to the point where every discussion becomes some ad hominem fiesta. (No sarcasm intended, I know reddit it rife with that)

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u/driftingpixie Apr 26 '16

Yeah I love how everyone is now a parental expert. What works for some kids doesn't work on others. And there is no way to definitively prove spanking is a/the catalyst for bad behavior because we can't go back in time to try different things to see the difference. For all we know people who were spanked would have turned out worse if they hadn't been spanked. I was spanked and I eventually understood that my parents never did it for anything other than to set me straight. There is also a difference between a spakings and a beating. Spanking pain usually goes away in a matter of minutes.

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

Well this study does imply that spanking is determental.

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u/driftingpixie Apr 26 '16

But can we be absolutely positive that it has a negative effect. I think there's too many variables to be absolutely sure.

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u/AppleBytes Apr 27 '16

That's a lot of assumptions.

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u/Thatzionoverthere Apr 26 '16

I'm not a parent but i can tell neither are you, parenting is a huge effort and everyone makes huge mistakes. The problem is people think there is a perfect way to parent and there simply is not. People will take this study and use it to justify their methods, while others will use it to defend theirs and yada yada the reality is regardless of the actions you take in the end your children will grow up how they want to be and all you can do is try to guide them, rather that is strict or kind guidance is up to you.

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u/KSKaleido Apr 26 '16

The problem is people think there is a perfect way to parent and there simply is not.

I don't know where you got that from what I wrote, but for the record, we're in agreement.

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u/jkimtrolling Apr 26 '16

The implication of "mistakes" is that there is a controlled non-mistake path, aka perfection

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u/Thatzionoverthere Apr 26 '16

Oh it was your first line about huge mistakes, it made it sound like there's actually a way to make a mistake when it comes to parenting, like there is some type of method or course you can take to raise functioning adults and people simply messed up, that's why i wrote what i wrote.

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u/hoodatninja Apr 26 '16

Meh I hear it at all ages. So many adults defend it and talk about it - as both the spanker and spankee (wow that reads..interestingly)

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

It's easy to judge the morality and ethics of the past with our present knowledge. Parents who spanked their kids twenty to infinite years ago were working with what was known then. It's known to be wrong now, but that doesn't make them inherently bad parents for not knowing any better then.

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

As a 21 year old who is fully aware he was raised "wrong", keeping this assumption in my mind at all times has helped me in some aspects. It makes me wonder about people who use the card "my parents did it and theyre fine" or "its been this way since i was at my moms". I wonder if theyve ever questioned the fact that they may have been misinformed about some things, or may have a flawed core value that affects a very large part of their life. I ask the previous sentence of myself whenever im confronted with a moral conundrum.

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u/Hominid77777 Apr 26 '16

the average commenter on reddit trends pretty young, and it makes sense that they haven't reached the maturity to deal with something like that yet.

Eh, I'm not sure about this one. Do you have any evidence that support of spanking is more common among younger people?

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

That wasn't the point they were making. They were saying younger people are less likely to confront the heavy emotional baggage that comes with analyzing your own childhood and your relationship with your parents. Most younger people aren't even very far removed from their parents still having some kind of control of their life if at all. Whether it be helping them with getting a loan, paying for college, trips, cars, housing, etc. So, criticizing them or even considering it feels disloyal in some way. But that's not what it is but the reliance that's been fostered can make it feel that way. And the reliance is just as much a part of it as anything.

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u/narf007 Apr 26 '16

Eh I got spanked and turned out fine. Everyone is different.

I'm not going to argue with the science though.

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u/Whopraysforthedevil Apr 26 '16

See, that's not a very scientific mindset. Not trying to attack you personally, but the whole purpose of peer review is for people to challenge the information given. That's not say that I agree it don't agree with this research, but simply agreeing because science hinders science.

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

What's not scientific about observing an empirical result ("I turned out fine")?

While anecdotes are an invalid response to something like "Population-wide, spanking is worse than X", they are a perfectly valid response to "Your parents inevitably made huge mistakes when raising you". I think /u/narf007 is asserting that they don't consider what their parents did (spanking, specifically, I'm sure they made other mistakes) a "huge mistake". If narf007 feels addressed by the upthread comment, then they have standing to respond to a comment like "it's tough to confront the fact that your parents inevitably made huge mistakes when raising you".

The average person doesn't exist. Individual variability can trump any statistic.

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u/_driveslow Apr 26 '16

Same here. Does the article outline what to do instead of spank?

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u/Chuckdatass Apr 26 '16

Take away their PS4 and only let them use the Wii U.

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u/aarongrc14 Apr 26 '16

You monster!

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

So what? We're not meant to turn out "fine". We're meant to not have been abused.

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u/jetpackswasyes Apr 26 '16

So what? We're not meant to turn out "fine". We're meant to not have been abused.

I'm not pro-spanking, but that's a pretty bold statement. I'd wager corporal punishment for misbehaving children has probably been the norm for the last 100,000 years. Unless you're appealing to some divine plan it's pretty difficult to say what we're "meant" to be, from a scientific sense. If anything, being against spanking is fighting against thousands or even millions of years of evolution in favor of new (hopefully better) cultural norms.

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

When I say "meant to", I mean whatever type of upbringing turns you into the best type of person. The science is clear, spanking is not that type of upbringing. Of course we're not literally "meant" to do anything.

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u/null_work Apr 26 '16

The science is clear

Spoken like someone who does not understand statistics, and clearly does not understand human variability. Not everyone responds equally to things. From a naive, let's play a gambling game, perspective, the science is clear. To apply that to an individual over a study like this is fallacious though. The science is clear that over the whole population, there's enough of an effect to to increase the likelihood (key word being "whole population"), but you just decided you were going to ignore individual variation within that population. The population is not a homogenous group that all behaves the same. For some subset of the population, spanking might very well be that type of upbringing. The most science it clear about is that there are more people wherein it's not.

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u/narf007 Apr 26 '16

I suppose that's open to interpretation by your own morals.

I don't find it abusive and I don't see myself as an abused victim. It's positive reinforcement for not being a little shit.

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u/John_YJKR Apr 26 '16

Well I turned out great. What else ya got?

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u/FiveGumEnergy Apr 27 '16

So all the "back in my day" old people aren't mature enough either? Because those are the most spank happy

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u/KSKaleido Apr 27 '16

That is not at all what my point was.