No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Many years ago, during one of the first college classes I ever taught, I asked my students to raise their hands if they were spanked as children.
I was quite new to America at the time, and knew little about the lives of American families. On the Israeli kibbutz where I grew up, spanking children was practically unheard of. She slapped me, and then proceeded to apologize tearfully. The America we imagined was therefore a liberal haven of wealth, freedom, and opportunity, where people got high, made love, and could pursue their dreams unbounded.
Little wonder I wanted to go there. This was one of the first times I realized that my wishful ideas about what America was had little to do with what America actually was a more recent time was after the last election. The results, by my eyeball test, have not changed much. And official data back up this conclusion: Most American parents hit their little children. And most believe that they are doing something both effective and right.
The scientific case against spanking is one of those rare occasions in which, over a span of 50 years or so, a scientific controversy actually gets resolved, as various programs of increasingly rigorous research converge upon a consensus conclusion. Spanking, like any socio-behavioral phenomenon, is bound to have somewhat differing implications depending on multiple variables such as culture, timing, dose, gender, what definition of spanking is used, etc.
Local skirmishes about this will continue. In the absence of experimental evidence, causal relations are difficult to establish with certainty. Finding, as we have, that spanking strongly and consistently predicts negative developmental outcome does not in itself settle the question of whether spanking has caused the outcome.
