Progressive parents don’t spank. Corporal punishment is considered a relic from an age when parents told their children to do something “because I said so!” brandishing a stiffened hand, their faces frozen in a bug-eyed expression of authoritarian menace. In Denis Leary’s No Cure for Cancer (1993) he says “My parents used to beat the living shit out of me, okay? And looking back on it, I'm glad they did, and I'm looking forward to beating the shit out of my kids! Aren’t you? For no reason whatsoever!” No! Don’t ever do that, Denis! Treat your children equitably, and they’ll learn to resolve their conflicts without violence. Or will they?

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s new book Nurture Shock seems to have the unstated premise of turning conventional notions of parenting and childhood development upside down. The co-authors aren’t experts in the field. They’re journalists. They don’t have a theory to push. The book consists of research by experts from North American academic institutions, and their conclusions are uniformly surprising. Here are a few:

-Attempts to boost kids’ self esteem with frequent affirmations makes them achieve less.

-School programs for the gifted select the wrong kids 73% of the time.

-Racially integrated schools are more likely to produce racist kids.

-Strategies to encourage kids to tell the truth turn them into better liars.

-When teens argue with their parents it strengthens the relationship.

And here’s the issue this article looks at specifically: How does corporal punishment (or the lack of it) affects a child’s behaviour? The answer: hardly at all. Or rather, it depends on how a spanking is given. But it’s a myth that if you raise children without physical punishment of any kind they’ll grow into peaceful souls who would never use violence to solve a problem.

The following excerpt from the book refers to a long-term study of the effect of corporal punishment on 453 kids, both black and white, tracking them from kindergarten through grade eleven. There are important contexual details I’ve left out, so I’ve included a fuller version of this excerpt as an end note.

“...one has to consider how the parent is acting when giving the spanking, and how those actions label the child. In a culture where spanking is accepted practice, it becomes ‘the normal thing that goes on in this culture when a kid does something he shouldn’t.’ Even if the parent might spank her child only two or three times in his life, it’s treated as ordinary consequences. In the black community Dodge studied, a spanking was seen as something that every kid went through.

Conversely, in the white community Dodge studied, physical discipline was a mostly-unspoken taboo. It was saved only for the worst offenses. The parent was usually very angry at the child and had lost his or her temper. The implicit message was: ‘What you have done is so deviant that you deserve a special punishment, which is spanking.’ It marked the child as someone who has lost his place within traditional society.

It’s not just a white-black thing either. A University of Texas study of conservative Protestants found that one-third of them spanked their kids three or more times a week, largely encouraged by Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. The study found no negative effects from this corporal punishment - precisely because it was conveyed as normal.

Each in its own way, the work of Cummings and Dodge demonstrate the same dynamic: an oversimplified view of aggression leads parents to sometimes makes it worse for kids when they’re trying to do the right thing. Children key off their parents’ reaction more than the argument or physical discipline itself.”

Another study looked at children with Progressive Dads, Traditional Dads and Disengaged Dads. The Progressive Dads easily outpaced their competition in terms of being more engaged with their kids and spouses, in parenting independently, playing with their kids and being more supportive when they did. They were just as likely as Moms to stay home when their kid was sick. But these same Progressive Dads had poorer marital quality, and “rated their family functioning lower than the fathers in couples who took on traditional roles. Their greater involvement may have lead to increased conflict over parenting practices - which in turn would affect the kids.” Kids are described by another researcher as “emotional geiger counters” and the book also describes the negative effect of parents moving an argument out of the hearing range of their children. When parents resolve a dispute in private, the child sees and feels the emotional impact of the fighting they witnessed but not of the resolution they didn’t.

Progressive parenting espouses a postmodern value at its core: no one is better than anyone else. A child’s feelings are just as valid as an adult’s. Those feelings should be respected,
and just like we wouldn’t spank an adult for breaking a rule, neither should we do this with kids. So with this collapse of a natural hierarchy (and note, progressive parents still acknowledge this hierarchy in matters like planning the family budget, or figuring out where to get the car repaired - there are some areas where it’s unquestioned that everyone is not equal) the good elements of the authoritarian worldview are thrown out, and the result: “the children of Progressive Dads were aggressive and acted out in school nearly as much as the kids with fathers who were distant or disengaged.”

To me, this argues for a view of parenting that integrates the best elements of the various styles along the developmental ladder. Too much corporal punishment - or even infrequent spanking done in rage - terrorizes a child, can ruin the relationship and saddle them with a lifetime’s worth of anger issues they might pass on to their own children. Exclusive reliance on calm, rational discussion can lead to a child believing they can get away with whatever they want, leaving them unprepared for the many situations in life when they can’t. So what does an Integral Parent do? Talk when it’s time to talk, and spank when it’s time to spank, always reacting in the moment, attentive to the developmental stage of their child and to what’s the best course of action in that moment, never relying on a single strategy as the only solution to every problem.

But this proves difficult if not impossible in a culture where corporal punishment - especially in public - is the gravest offence there is for a parent. In Lock 'n' Load (1997) Denis Leary reverses his position from a mere four years before and says “I love my kids. Trying to bring em up the right way. Not spanking em. I find I don’t have to spank em. I find waving the gun around pretty much gets the same job done...” He goes on to describe finding his daughter having scratched “an entire Picasso tableau” on the side of his brand new Toyota Land Cruiser with a rock, and he swallows his rage and doesn’t even let himself yell at her, not wanting to “scar her for life and ruin her artistic temperament”.

So how can you administer an integral spanking in a society that denies its possibility? It seems this is an area where the postmodern ethos wins. As Bronson and Merryman mentioned, the cultural context of a spanking completely influences its psychological effect. If your child is the only one she knows who gets spanked, no matter how appropriate the action on the parent’s part is, no matter how rare the occasion, and how much time the parent spends otherwise loving and talking with their child, she’ll likely feel stigmatized and brutalized anyway.

In that same chapter Bronson and Merryman detail how various other efforts to raise peaceful children have failed. Zero tolerance programs intended to eliminate bullying in schools increase children’s anxiety, because kids make mistakes, and if they’re in a system where there are no mitigating circumstances and no excuses, it ends up being the authority figures who scare them more than the bullies. Furthermore, most stress inducing behaviour - name calling, social exclusion - doesn’t come from the big dumb brutes, but from the popular, achieving, admired kids. A related point - restricting children to watching eduational TV shows doesn’t, in fact, descrease their inclination for physical aggression - it increases it almost as much as kids who watch violent media. Not only that - educational programming increases kids’ capacity for relational aggression: insults, cliques, friendship withdrawal. In his book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts Dr. Gabor Mate points out that the same brain circuits that register physical pain also register emotional pain. So scientifically speaking, physical pain and emotional pain are the same thing. Someone brandishing cruel words is just as damaging to a child as someone brandishing fists. Maybe worse.

I don’t see this issue being resolved any time soon. The social prohibition against corporal punishment is so strong that it’s heresy to even question it. And I can’t deny I’d feel horribly awkward and disapprove if I saw a parent giving their screaming child a smack. But if these strategies we’ve adopted as a culture to raise better children really are failing and continue to fail, I would imagine the evidence for this (such as Nurture Shock and the studies cited therein) will keep building. The more we look into it for ourselves and talk about it, the more likely it is these issues will be discussed at length and in depth. And maybe the research cited in Nurture Shock will be shown to be flawed or incomplete by other studies (I've since found one study that claims that children who get spanked have lower IQs than those who don't). Whatever paths we take to refine our approach, I hope our debates don't consist of name-calling, and that our choices are guided by evidence, and not subjective preference, or statements that begin with the phrase “Everybody knows”.

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Excerpt from Nurture Shock by Ashely Merryman and Po Bronson, pg 186- 187

“...so Dodge conducted a long-term study of corporal punishment’s affect on 453 kids, both black and white, tracking them from kindergarten through eleventh grade.

When Dodge’s team presented its findings at a conference, the data did not make people happy. This wasn’t because blacks used corporal punishment more than whites. (They did, but not by much.) Rather, Dodge’s team had found a reverse correlation in black families - the more a child was spanked, the less aggressive the child over time. The spanked black kid was all around less likely to be in trouble.

Scholars publicly castigated Dodge’s team, saying its findings were racist and dangerous to report. Journalists rushed to interview Dodge and the study’s lead author, Dr. Jennifer Lansford. A national news reporter asked Dodge if his research meant the key to effective punishment was to hit children more frequently. The reporter may have been facetious in his query, but Dodge and Lansford - both of whom remain adamantly against the use of physical discipline - were so horrified by such questions that they enlisted a team of fourteen scholars to study the use of corporal punishment around the world.

Why would spanking trigger such problems in white children, but cause no problems for black children, even when used a little more frequently? With the help of the subsequent international studies, Dodge has pieced together an explanation for his team’s results. To understand, one has to consider how the parent is acting when giving the spanking, and how those actions label the child. In a culture where spanking is accepted practice [an African-American community, in this study’s case], it becomes ‘the normal thing that goes on in this culture when a kid does something he shouldn’t.’ Even if the parent might spank her child only two or three times in his life, it’s treated as ordinary consequences. In the black community Dodge studied, a spanking was seen as something that every kid went through.

Conversely, in the white community Dodge studied, physical discipline was a mostly-unspoken taboo. It was saved only for the worst offenses. The parent was usually very angry at the child and had lost his or her temper. The implicit message was: ‘What you have done is so deviant that you deserve a special punishment, which is spanking.’ It marked the child as someone who has lost his place within traditional society.

It’s not just a white-black thing either. A University of Texas study of conservative Protestants found that one-third of them spanked their kids three or more times a week, largely encouraged by Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. The study found no negative effects from this corporal punishment - precisely because it was conveyed as normal.

Each in its own way, the work of Cummings and Dodge demonstrate the same dynamic: an oversimplified view of aggression leads parents to sometimes makes it worse for kids when they’re trying to do the right thing. Children key off their parents’ reaction more than the argument or physical discipline itself.”