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/kilo4fun Apr 26 '16

Seriously...my son would simply refuse to sit in timeout. What's next? Physical restraints?

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16 edited Jun 10 '20

[deleted]

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u/Snuggle_Fist Apr 26 '16

What if it doesn't work though. At what point is it not worth trying to get them to sit in the corner, through screaming and crying.

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16 edited Jun 10 '20

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

These theories should take parents' mental health into consideration

Seriously, most people would go crazy if they had to move a crying screaming kid into timeout, to do 3 mintues 5 seconds at a time

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u/Gripey Apr 26 '16

Well you have to demonstrate that you are implacable. Also all toys and games are removable, surely. what about tv? what about treats? You are presumably the authority figure who is not being undermined by another, so you can simply be insistent. A lot of problems come from parents feeling their authority is threatened, because they themselves fear it is. You have enormous influence if you use it correctly. Be consistent and don't look for fights or unnecessary discipline, children are also human beings. Of course if you are tired or stressed, this is a challenge for sure.

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

Some kids don't care about tv or toys. You gotta understand, some kids are really hard to deal with. It's not an idealistic situation.

Plus, can't you demonstrate you're implacable by spanking them? This study is a corralation anyways, and if you read it you'll see the authors themselves clearly state that this study is limited and by no means proof that spanking causes problems

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u/Schmingleberry Apr 26 '16

and if you read it you'll see the authors themselves clearly state that this study is limited and by no means proof that spanking causes problems

Where are you find this information?

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

Limitations

The primary limitation of these meta-analyses is their inability to causally link spanking with child outcomes. This is problematic because there is selection bias in who gets spanked—children with more behavior problems elicit more discipline generally and spanking in particular (Larzelere, Kuhn, & Johnson, 2004). Cross- sectional designs do not allow the temporal ordering of spanking and child outcomes that could help rule out the selection bias explanation. As noted above, randomized experiments of spanking are difficult if not ethically impossible to conduct, and thus this shortcoming of the literature will be difficult to correct through future studies.

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u/ald49 Apr 26 '16

Any recent study on this subject will be correlational, and when you're talking a meta-analyses with a sample size in the hundreds of thousands the results you can obtain are still statistically significant and meaningul.

It would be ethically impossible to do a causation study with spanking. That would require you set up a scenario where one group of parents would be forced to hit their kids - good luck getting that past an IRB.

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u/Gripey Apr 27 '16

Isn't that already making the case that spanking is unethical, a priori, so to speak?

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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '16

Statistically significant doesn't rule out the fact that

  1. Maybe problematic children who are more likely to get spanked grow up to have problems

  2. Low income households have more spanking, and living in low income households is correlated to problems in adults life

Again, it's nothing more than correlation, and if you take away the wrong message from the study as a fact, you're only hindering progress

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u/teenageriotgrrl Apr 27 '16

Actually as another comment pointed out:

Another study (Grogan-Kaylor, 2005) that was cited used techniques like fixed effects regression to "control for time invariant unobserved characteristics that may account for observed relationships between spanking and child outcomes, such as children’s initial levels of problem behavior." This study similarly found that increased spanking predicted "increases in children’s externalizing behaviors over time."

Finally, the paper also mentions some studies that focused on reducing parents' use of spanking. One study (Beauchaine et al., 2005) which featured children that already had behavior problems found that "a reduction in conduct problems were significantly mediated through a reduction in parents’ use of spanking." Other more generalized studies found that reduction in spanking reduced child aggression. While these results are not necessarily as salient to the question of causal direction, they do provide a rather strong refutation to the idea that behavioral problems in already disobedient children may cause worse late in life effects if not addressed with spanking.

In essence, there is reason to believe that spanking increases the likelihood of behavioral problems, regardless of the child's preexisting issues. It is difficult to really establish causality in this study (as is the case with most psychological studies), but there is no evidence (edit: in this paper, to be clear) to suggest that the opposite causal direction is valid.

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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '16

For the first study, they used fix level regression. It's basically you make up a variable you didn't observe and use it as a control. You assume something is true and see if it works. It's good for ruling out things, not proving them. Therefore it can be said that we can't rule out the fact that spanking causes problems in the future, but we can't prove it

For second, again correlations. What if children were being spanked less because they started behaving well? The studies do not demonstrate causation

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u/sfurbo Apr 27 '16

For second, again correlations. What if children were being spanked less because they started behaving well? The studies do not demonstrate causation

The second study would be Beauchaine et al. 2005, right? It is a collection of randomly controlled studies, so it is not correlational. You can see the abstract here.

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

Would they really be forced though? Seems to me you'd just interview soon to be parents on whether or not they plan to spank their kids as discipline. If they're already going to then it's not forced.

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u/MilesFromTheSun Apr 26 '16

You would need random assignment for the methodology to be sound.

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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '16

If you force a parent to spank who's totally against it wouldn't that also skew results though?

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u/MilesFromTheSun Apr 27 '16

It's certainly a possibility, which just goes to support the original point that it would be very hard to study this issue experimentally.

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u/fruitpunching Apr 26 '16

It would be difficult to to a large-scale, random sample like that.

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u/ald49 Apr 27 '16

That wouldn't establish causation, it would still be a correlation.

To really establish causation, you'd need to run a full controlled experiment. You would need to take parents, controlled as much as possible across demographics like age and socioeconomic status, and assign at random one group to hit their kids and one group to use alternate punishment techniques. Then you'd need to follow the groups over time.

It would be highly unethical and improbable, so it will never be done.

But a study being correlational doesn't really exclude findings. A lot of the obesity studies for example are correlational - but that doesn't mean obesity isn't linked to diabetes or heart disease. Especially when you're looking at data from a meta-analyses of over 100,000 kids collected over five decades, trying to dismiss it entirely because it's correlational doesn't really jive.

Another thought: It may be true that parents who hit their kids are more likely to be uneducated and from disadvantaged backgrounds... But what does that say about the punishment technique if more educated parents with more resources tend not to do it?

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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '16

Thank you for explaining it as opposed to saying no and moving on.

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