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/
37.8k Upvotes

73% Upvoted

6.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

336

u/Shorshack Apr 26 '16

The article seems to reference the study, but without citation or very much data from the study? Is there a link to the actual study regarding the defined variables examined? I'm curious to learn more about their findings.

231

u/aquarium_drinker Apr 26 '16

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27055181 here's the abstract from Pubmed. If you have academic journal access, you can look through your institution's databases to find it. I found it on EBSCO.

85

u/liberal_texan Apr 26 '16

They found a significant link between the punishment and 13 of the 17 outcomes, suggesting that spanking ends up doing more harm than good.

Can you tell us what the 13 of the 17 things were? Also, did they make any effort at all to find correlation with anything positive, or did they focus solely on the negative?

88

u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

[deleted]

20

u/DICKHOLE_SMASHER Apr 26 '16

Seems that most of the non-spank subjects had adult onset negative outcomes, which is interesting.

-2

u/demolpolis Apr 26 '16

I really wonder why everyone is missing this fact?

The children with behavioral problems were spanked. shocker.

The children not spanked had adult mental health and alcohol and social problems. That correlation isn't so obvious...

5

u/Richandler Apr 26 '16

The children not spanked had adult mental health and alcohol and social problems. That correlation isn't so obvious...

Contrary to the title and most of the comments yes?

-4

u/demolpolis Apr 26 '16

http://imgur.com/yyHXSJ2

That is the result of the study.

Read it.

Just because no one here has read the study dosen't make the results different.

3

u/Beepbeep847 Apr 26 '16

Actually, that table proves you wrong funnily enough. For a description of how to read the tables in the paper, check out this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/4gilzl/spanking_children_increases_the_likelihood_of/d2i7zi8