One tenet of parenting about which Shanthala and I have had no disagreement at all is spanking. We both agreed that unlike our parents’ generation, we wouldn’t spank Maya, no matter what the circumstances were. Why ? Because we thought that by spanking we were forcing our view on the child violently, that by using violence to enforce a behavior, we were telling her that it was OK to use violence to achieve your goals, that the act was humiliating to a child, possibly even terrorizing. Charity is not the only thing that begins at home. I also thought that once we thought occasional corporal punishment was OK, we would find it easier to spank when we were tired and Maya was cranky. Using the rod is easy, sparing it for an alternative option is not.
Besides these reasons, the data seems to show that spanking is not good for the kids w.r.t their cognitive development and social behavior. For example, a recent study by Duke University’s Center for Child and Family Policy concluded that spanking children when they were very young (1 year or less) slowed their intellectual development and led to aggressive behavior at an older age. Not everybody agrees with the data however. And this article in Wall Street Journal last October shows why:
“Statistical analysis of spanking’s effects on cognition are clouded by many complicating factors. Effects can be attributed to the wrong cause, statisticians say; rather than spanking causing problems in children, it is possible that their existing cognitive problems can make spanking more likely. Moreover, any effects of spanking are difficult to measure and probably small. And unlike, say, a study on prescription drugs that removes a misleading placebo effect, no ethical study can assign some children to be spanked. Instead, parents must be trusted to remember and share their disciplinary practices.“
The Duke University study was considered methodologically more sound than many other studies on the effects of spanking partly because it showed that kids who had more problems at age one were not getting spanked more at an older age. But still, not everyone is convinced, even if spanking is largely frowned upon in this US of A, an act liable to get you on the front pages if you’re a celebrity. In any case, my reasons for not spanking were not based on whether Maya’s cognitive development was affected.
I was surprised, however, to read that children who were never spanked fared worse than children who had been spanked. In the (now discontinued) blog by the authors of “NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children”, the authors write:
“For decades, research on spanking was challenged by the lack of a control group to compare against – almost all kids (90+%) had been spanked at least once, at some time in their early lives. New research shows that now up to 25% of kids are never spanked, so it’s a fair question: How are they turning out? Are they turning out better? Surprisingly, they’re not.“
They quote the newly published work by Dr. Marjorie Gunnoe, a Professor of Psychology at Calvin College. She looked at data from a new population study, Portraits of American Life, that is underway that involves 2,600 people and their adolescent children who are interviewed every three years for the next twenty years. Some 25% of the teens in the study say that they’ve never been spanked. She looked at the data for bad outcomes such as antisocial behavior, violence and depression as well as good outcomes such as academic aspirations and rank, hope for their future and volunteer work. They write in the blog:
“those who’d been spanked just when they were young—ages 2 to 6—were doing a little better as teenagers than those who’d never been spanked. On almost every measure.
A separate group of teens had been spanked until they were in elementary school. Their last spanking had been between the ages of 7 and 11. These teens didn’t turn out badly, either.
Compared with the never-spanked, they were slightly worse off on negative outcomes, but a little better off on the good outcomes.
Only the teenagers who were still being spanked clearly showed problems.”
The authors speculate that a possible reason for this is that progressive dads (defined as dads who can function as moms) are inconsistent when it comes to enforcing discipline. They quote the work of Dr. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, a developmental psychologist at Ohio State University:
“Schoppe-Sullivan found that children of progressive dads were acting out more in school. This was likely because the fathers were inconsistent disciplinarians; they were emotionally uncertain about when and how to punish, and thus they were reinventing the wheel every time they had to reprimand their child. And there was more conflict in their marriage over how best to parent, and how to divide parenting responsibilities.
I admit to taking a leap here, but if the progressive parents are the ones who never spank (or at least there’s a large overlap), then perhaps the consistency of discipline is more important than the form of discipline. In other words, spanking regularly isn’t the problem; the problem is having no regular form of discipline at all.“
In an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Po Bronson, one of the authors of “Nurture Shock” elaborates further the mindset of progressive dads:
“Progressive dads – they imagine this wonderful, you know, tight bond with their kids, and they haven’t really thought about the fact that disciplining their kid is going to be part of the job. And they don’t necessarily – they know how to be great to their kid and nice to their kid but they don’t necessarily have a strategy for disciplining. And as a result they experiment as discipliners. They – one day they’ll say well, you know, no dessert. And the next day they’ll act really mean to their kid or angry or offended, trying to show their kid what they’ve done is wrong. And then the next day they’ll withdraw some other privilege or say you have to go to bed early and it becomes very inconsistent.“
I admit that I find myself vacillating about when to punish or enforce my view. Some cases are easy. For example, wearing a helmet when riding a bike or sitting in the toddler car seat. But others, I’m much less certain about. For example, in India Maya sometimes protests wearing a diaper. I’m not sure what makes her protest. Is it because she feels hot ? Or because she doesn’t want to go out ? If going out is not critical, I let her not wear the diaper and we don’t go out either. I tell her several times: “Maya, no diaper, no park”. Is this being inconsistent ? In our first week here, Maya would insist that she was not tired, going to sleep only when I sat on a stretch out chair holding her. This was troublesome, but I chalked her demand to her being disoriented and jetlagged. Past that first week, she didn’t insist on that behavior.
When do I take her point of view into consideration and when do I not ? Life is not predictable. Should my response to the situations Maya objects to be that fixed ? I remember reading in a book about non-violence that non-violent alternatives to a situation are difficult to conjure up because we have so little practice. Similarly, finding options that work for both the parents and child are harder than just doing what the parents want. Sigh. Work life seems such a breeze compared to parenting. No wonder many hand the problem over to the mom.
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