148: Is spanking a child really so bad?

 

Jen Lumanlan  00:02

Hi, I’m Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives. But it can be so

Jessica  00:11

Do you get tired of hearing the same old intros to podcast episodes? Me too. Hi, I’m not Jen. I’m Jessica, and I’m in Burlesque Panama. Jen has just created a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes, and I got to test it out. There’s no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn’t just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development. It puts it in context for you as well. So, you can decide whether and how to use this new information. If you’d like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn’t listening to you what to do about each one. Sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe, and come over to our free Facebook group to continue the conversation about this episode. You can also thank Jen for this episode by donating to keep the podcast ad free by going to the page for this or any other episode on YourParentingMojo.com. If you’d like to start a conversation with someone about this episode or know someone who would find it useful, please forward it to them. Over time, you’re gonna get sick of hearing me read this intro as well. So come and record on yourself. You can read from a script she’s provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com and click Read the Intro and I can’t wait to hear yours.

Jen Lumanlan  01:33

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today we’re here to discuss a topic that I’ve been meaning to cover for a while and I was sort of hoping I wouldn’t have to do it. But we do need to do it. And so here we are to discuss spanking. So I’d like to address two things before we get started. The first is that I have never spanked my daughter and I never plan to spank her. And I don’t advocate that any parent I work with spank their children either. I’m going to probe the literature and ask some pretty pointed questions of my guest, and if they were taken out of context, you might think that I’m arguing in favor of spanking. And I want to be clear that I’m not but I do want us to understand the research base as well as we can. And so the second thing is that if you’re here because you’re spanking your child now, or you’ve done it in the past, and you’re wondering to what extent it might have done damage to them, or you see how close you’ve come to spanking them, and you’re worried about what impact it might do If it were to ever happen, then I want you to know that you’re not alone. If you’re this close to spanking your child, or even if spanking is not your kind of response, but you yell or walk away or completely freeze or try to placate them to get them to start crying, then that’s because you’re having a triggered reaction. It might seem like the thing that needs to change here is your child’s behavior because then you wouldn’t need to have these massive reactions but actually, these reactions come from trauma that you’ve experienced in your childhood or that you’re experiencing now due to I don’t know something like the stress from a global pandemic. If you want to learn more about the real causes of your triggered feelings, I invite you to join a free masterclass that I’m going to host next Saturday February 12, from 10 to11:30 am Pacific called how to tame your triggers around your child’s difficult behavior without having to stuff your feelings down and pretend you’re not angry. It was a long title but as we say in England, it does exactly what it says on the tin. You’ll learn all about the five categories of reasons why you feel triggered and how to navigate those situations more effectively without reciting a script, or having to grit your teeth and tell your child I’m not angry when you’re really receiving and how to repair your relationship with your child on the fewer occasions when it does still happen. It’s totally free and you can sign up at yourparentingmojo.com/triggersmasterclass.

Jen Lumanlan  01:33

We’ll have plenty of time for q&a and live coaching of one lucky parent on the call and a giveaway as well. So do sign up even if you know you can’t attend and I’ll send you the replay afterwards but of course, you do have to be there live to submit questions and maybe get coaching and to win the giveaway. So now let’s turn to our episode today on spanking. My guest for this conversation is Professor Andrew Grogan Kaylor—Professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan. Professor Gergen Taylor’s research focuses on scientific knowledge development and intervention research on children and families with the aim of reducing violence against children and improving family and child wellbeing. His current research projects examined parenting behaviors like physical punishment and parental expressions of emotional warmth, and support, and their effects on children’s aggression, anti-social behavior, and depression. He also examines the interplay of parenting behaviors and their effects on child health and mental health outcomes across socio-economic contexts, neighborhoods, and cultures. He is co-author with Dr. Elizabeth Gershoff of a seminal 2016 meta-analysis on spanking, and his paper on the case for the designation of spanking as an adverse childhood experience was selected as 2007 Teen Article of the year in the Journal Child Abuse and Neglect. Welcome Professor Grogan Kaylor

Prof. Kaylor  05:06

Thank you for inviting me.

Jen Lumanlan  05:07

I wonder if you wouldn’t mind first defining what is spanking for us, then we can sort of get into things like how prevalent it is who spanks and who gets spanked.

Prof. Kaylor  05:15

So in that spirit, I suppose we’re gonna dive, you know, and in the interest of open science, I suppose we’re going to dive right into the limitations of the research and my answer to the first question.

Jen Lumanlan  05:24

An excellent place to start.

Prof. Kaylor  05:25

Which is, you know, we define spanking or we think what we’re talking about is applying a hand to a child’s bottom to discipline them to correct their action, hopefully, not in an abusive way, but in a way that causes them to be startled, or those who spank some mild amount of pain. The reason I sort of always pause there is because we don’t give that verbose of a definition to people when we asked them. Most of the interviews that we do—we’re trying to establish a rapport, we’re trying to start a conversation about what is your family life like, and that kind of rigid definition that we probably all carry around in our heads would be off-putting. So we generally say, “How often have you spanked your child in the past week? How often have you spanked your child in the past month? How often have you done that in the past year?” In the spirit of full transparency about limitations of what we do, that might be one of them.

Jen Lumanlan  06:20

Yeah. Okay. And so for our purposes today, what we are talking about is a hand to the buttocks in general, but yeah, absolutely. The point that this is a limitation that we find it even hard to ask people because it’s socially unacceptable, and yet, so many people do it. I was stunned by the prevalence, right?

Prof. Kaylor  06:39

Right. I talked about some of the things we might talk about beforehand and I was thinking, well, what do I know about the prevalence, and, you know, you look in the US or you look internationally, we’ve been doing some work with international data sort of the three, four, and five-year-olds that we think of as the most likely to be exposed to spanking. That’s about a third of parents who are using it fairly consistently.

Jen Lumanlan  07:00

Ah, okay, so I had seen Dr. Gershoff paper, finding a prevalence rate of 80%. I’m curious about that discrepancy. Where do you think that comes from?

Prof. Kaylor  07:09

It hops around a lot from study to study. I would also wonder if when you talk about lifetime prevalence; has this ever happened to you, you ask people retrospectively, did they ever experience it as a child or as parents—did you ever use this with your child? Then the results are usually around 80%. But when you say, you know, is this something kind of trying to get a snapshot, is this something you’re doing regularly, right now, it’s usually around a third. But sometimes it’s around 50% in some groups of people.

Jen Lumanlan  07:38

Okay. And the advocates of spanking, and there are advocates of spanking. We’ll say that this should usually be done between the ages of two and 12. And I’m guessing that that’s because you’re assuming that on the lower end; the child doesn’t understand well enough what they did wrong for this spank to be able to have any impact. And on the higher end; the child’s probably going to start hitting you back. I would think at some point.

Prof. Kaylor  07:59

When I hear people advocating, so to speak, those are the ages that they’re talking about. Nobody advocates spanking infants, but actually Professor Shawna Lee, one of my colleagues here at the University of Michigan, she and I worked on a study where about a third of parents were reporting that they spank their one-year-old child. So in my mind, even if you’re an advocate of the practice, well below the age where there’d be any comprehension. And then, you know, I think the reason it tapers off is there’s some rough sense that it becomes for those who think that it’s in any way appropriate, it becomes much less appropriate when you’re talking about a 10-year-old or a 12-year-old. Not the hip back but just that somehow, kind of not a thing, almost. Kind of not a thing we would do.

Jen Lumanlan  08:45

Okay, all right. And of course, it’s interesting to why we suddenly shift our perspective at our age. And I don’t want to spend too much time on schools, we’re going to spend mostly our time focused on what parents do and what happens in the home. But 19 states actually do permit corporal punishment in schools as well.

Prof. Kaylor  09:03

My colleague Elizabeth Khrushchev, you mentioned is kind of the real expert on what’s going on in the legislation, but anything I’ve seen about the evidence base, it’s no better or it’s as bad if it’s done in school, if it’s done in the family, save all the research comments for later, but yeah.

Jen Lumanlan  09:20

Okay, all right. So let’s talk about the effectiveness of spanking. And we’re gonna hear this name mentioned a lot. There’s a researcher named Dr. Larzelere, and we were just chatting beforehand that neither of us are completely certain as to how that pronunciation is correct. But I think it’s pretty close. And I think it’s fair to him to say that he is an advocate for spanking as a tool for parents and that we shouldn’t tell parents not to spank because we don’t have evidence-based tools to replace it with. And he argues that the reason we shouldn’t do that is because it is effective at changing children’s behavior. And I’m wondering if you can speak to that based on the research that you have seen and done yourself as well.

Prof. Kaylor  10:01

The thing I would think about is, Prof. Gershoff and I are working on this review of 50 years of research literature on spanking, physical punishment, or whatever you would want to call it. And we went in thinking, there’s a tremendous amount of controversy about this. I mean, there’s a tremendous amount of controversy in my classrooms, sometimes I will try to establish some kind of human connection as a professor standing in front of the room and say, “This is what I’m working on” or “This is what I’m concerned about.” It’s an interesting area to work in because people in my classrooms will tell me why you’re wrong. That’s just not the case that spanking is bad. I mean, that has declined over time. So you know, we perceived that there was a tremendous amount of cultural controversy or cultural discussion. And we thought, well, let’s take this renewed look at the research base, list a done earlier review, and let us see what the research has to say. There’s just no controversy. Statistically or an evidential terms. There’s just no controversy. So when that piece came out, people would say, is there anything surprising and it’s, you know, I thought be weighing opposite cases against each other. There’s just no controversy, there’s kind of a unanimous signal out of the research so it’s very hard for me, and admittedly, I have a point of view, but it’s very hard for me to see what is the benefit. I see so many of the harms.

Jen Lumanlan  11:24

Okay. And so I’m guessing there’s sort of a short-term issue and a long-term issue here, right? Does the child’s behavior change immediately with the specific issue that you’re talking about? And also, in the longer term, is the child exhibiting what researchers tend to call externalizing behavior which is, you know, what we tend to think of as acting out? And so I’m trying to understand how he can get to a conclusion where he sees that it is effective in the short term. I’m not sure that he’s looking so much at the long term.

Prof. Kaylor  11:54

I think what Prof. Larzelere has done, as I understand his published work has often been to argue that we’re overreaching. And I’ve probed and probed through the articles, and maybe my own brain limitation here, but I, you know, probed and probe, you know, if spankings bad, so is therapy is. Any kind of corrective action inevitably leads to bad outcomes. And so, you know, so there’s a two-part answer here. I think that the first part is that he thinks we’re overreaching and that we’re not controlling enough particularly for the child’s earlier bad behavior. The bad associations that we find are what we’d call statistical artifacts, I mean, their mistakes on our part, I am sure that I disagree with his reasoning. And then I think, pivot from there seems to be that this is then okay, and what some of my colleagues have said is, “Show me the large study with 1000s of families and children where the families that employ spanking; the children are so much better off.” And you know, the families that refrain from spanking are so much worse off. And as I just said, that’s never the case. Hundreds of studies, hundreds of 1000s of children. It’s just never the case. So, until I can be shown (I don’t know, if we did a study of exercise) we’d find that everybody who got out an exercise felt better, was in a better mood, and their hearts, and lungs were healthier. Show me that kind of thing—that people who spank, families who spank have better outcomes, and I’ll consider that but sort of chipping away this or that. I’m less convinced.

Jen Lumanlan  13:30

Okay. And just to go a little bit deeper into your first, I think that this is something that he does come back to repeatedly, which is teasing out cause and effect and trying to understand which is the chicken, and which is the egg. So is it that the spanking comes first, and that causes more aggression? Or is it that the child is more aggressive, and so they get spanked more? And then there’s potentially some outcome at the other end that is also more aggression. But there was more aggression at the baseline and that’s what the difference really is between the two groups of children.

Prof. Kaylor  14:00

Sure. So I mean, we, you know, I suppose we have an hour, and your questions that look pretty detailed. And it sounds like this is a science-minded podcast. So forgive me a little bit of science here. I mean, we think about maybe three things; we think—did the thing we think is the cause? Did it come before the effect? I mean, you know, I walked over to the light switch and flipped it up, and then the light came on. I mean, the light didn’t come on, and then I walked over that sort of thing. And we think, you know, is there a relationship as I flip the switch, the light is going on and off. That’s the second thing. And then we think, is there some the third and last thing is we think there’s some plausible alternative explanation. There’s something going on in the world. It’s not that Andy is flipping the light switch. There’s some other dynamic out there that is making and probably if I had time and energy, and now if I could imagine some kind of thing that might be going on sometimes, but most of the time, it’s the light switch that’s flipping the light on and off. So we’ve done the same thing with spanking, trying and not just are they related? Are they correlated? Everybody says correlation is not causation, but correlation is sometimes causation. So we’ve tried to look very carefully in the interviews and the databases we have is the spanking coming before the bad outcomes? Well, yeah, that seems to be going on. Are they related? Most of the time nobody disputes that you know, people say it’s correlation, it’s not causation. We think it’s causation. And then really the kicker can we rule out other things that are kind of common cause or other things that might be going on there, might be income is sometimes a driver of these things or maybe it’s just the people with not a lot of economic resources, they spank their kids, and their kids have behavior problems down the road, or maybe it’s something more internal to the house. It’s something about the emotional climate, that it’s not the spanking per se, it’s the tone or the effect with which it’s delivered. Any investigation that we have been able to carry out a spanking comes before the bad outcome, they are related. And we can find no other things that fully accounts for that relationship that we see. In fact, other things are usually pretty poor at explaining it away. And that relationship persists statistically.

Jen Lumanlan  16:16

Okay, great. I think that sort of leads us nicely into some of the things that Dr. Lazarle has said about positive parenting, which I know you’ve written about as an alternative to spanking. And you’ve sort of touched on a few of these four methodological fallacies that he says are present in the research on positive parenting, firstly, basing causal conclusions on correlations which you just touched on a little bit. And secondly, ignoring causal evidence and randomized trials. Thirdly, extrapolating from low usage of spanking to zero usage of spanking, and then fourthly failing to discriminate how consequences are used and in the situations that they’re used. So I think you’ve helped us to understand sort of causal correlation issue. And another way that I saw in the literature that you were trying to understand this was matching of participants in the study. So you would match them, sometimes studies would do it across like 26 to 30-something variables and say, okay, these children are alike in all of these ways. And the main difference between them is whether or not they’re spanked. And those studies and many of them are fairly consistently found that children who have never been spanked are having significantly fewer externalizing behavior issues than children who have been spanked. So is that an important way that we can try and understand the difference between the two that doesn’t rely on us having to have causal evidence where, you know, one child is randomly assigned to be spanked, and the other child is randomly assigned to not be spanked?

Prof. Kaylor  17:38

Right. So we take our critics seriously. And exactly as you’ve mentioned, my friend and colleague, Jorge Cortez over at Harvard, he and I, and a bunch of other folks worked on a study where we did exactly that you’re trying to match children, I don’t know, 25, 26, 30 variables to make sure that they’re otherwise alike. Maybe that’s another way of saying it, you know, you’re trying to rule out the alternative, there’s not something else going on, there’s not some other difference. So, lo and behold, we found that amongst otherwise similar children, the spanking made a difference. Sometimes we sort of try to, you know, is it really the aggression that’s causing the spanking, or is that the spanking that’s causing the aggression? We try to kind of model those dynamic processes a little more explicitly. We throw our statistical scrutiny at the evidence, and it doesn’t go away. I do think this evidence is causal, I mean, we know that the gold standard scientific evidence for causality is randomized. It just is, and if you’re testing an intervention, I’m working on a mental health intervention right now to help people with the mental health issue, and you assign the usual treatment, and then some people randomly get a better treatment. And you can do that because you’re not withholding something or hurting people but in so many of the things we study, we just were ethically unable to do that you cannot randomly assign children to be hit, you cannot randomly assign them to be deprived. And then people sort of collapse into this nostrum of, well, correlation is not causation ignoring, we did the same way with smoking and lung cancer. We didn’t randomly make some people smoke and you know, check in with them several decades later. Other things I’m going to cut myself off because I’m going to get on a tirade here but asbestos and lung disease, lead paint, and cognitive delays in children. We know we can’t randomly assign, we still think we can find some measure of causal and you know, I’m going to say causal a loud and clear, we still think we can find some approximation of causality and make a public policy decision to help people. So yeah, excuse the tirade but I do wonder why we have such difficulty in doing the very same thing and protect each other.

Jen Lumanlan  20:00

Yeah, as we do in other aspects of health. And to go into it a little bit further, in this randomized controlled trial, Dr. Lazarle sort of has a quirk of time on his side, from what I’ve read in the research. There was this period in the 80s, where the ethics controls were not quite as strict as they are now and there was a Dr. Roberts working at the University of Idaho, who actually did randomly assign children to be in a condition where they were or weren’t spanked in a certain laboratory situation. And so he points to this evidence; these are tiny trials, these are eight children in each condition, and in a highly simulated environment, where he’s basically saying, “Well, you know, you have to have access to a four foot by five-foot room with a certain high sheet of plywood.” And if you have that, then you’re in this condition. And if parents don’t have that at home, then you better spank because clearly, you don’t have the conditions in place. So he has this randomized “controlled trial” (which I’m putting it in quotes for those of you not watching on YouTube), in support of again, “spanking,” which to me, it doesn’t seem as though it cuts the mustard even though when we hear a randomized control trial, we’re like, oh, yeah, that’s the gold standard.

Prof. Kaylor  21:05

Yeah. And again, this may be my own cognitive limitations. I’ve read those studies many, many times. And for me, they are very difficult to understand these few tiny early studies, it’s just difficult to understand. And in some of our earlier conversations, you and I have noted that Prof. Gershoff came to one conclusion about what those very, very small studies, eight children said, and then she and I looked at them about a decade later. And well, you know, it looks like Professor Roberts was doing this. And we actually think we might have made a mistake. And actually, this is how to calculate the numbers. So they’re very, very, very difficult. They’re very, very small. But then the other point is, they’re very, very, very small. And I imagine there might be a study of eight smokers out there who all did just fine. And it took me probably about 20 years, at least 15 years, I really do, I believe in randomized clinical trials. And I believe that we’re always trying to approximate them as best we can, but the other side of the coin is how many people are we talking about? And a small study can be a very noisy study, so yeah, there’s probably eight people exposed to asbestos who just, you know, went on to live lovely lives, and I wouldn’t base public health decisions on that.

Jen Lumanlan  22:24

Okay. Thank you for that those analogies. What about the case that there’s an optimal level of spanking somewhere above zero that results in maximum compliance. And I think separately, we’ll address the issue that compliance is our goal here. Do you think that there is a sort of level at which spanking is not harmful and actually, is does help to change children’s behavior?

Prof. Kaylor  22:45

Now, maybe I’m going to jump off the research for a minute. Been talking to some of my clinical social work colleagues about this, and sort of, you know, what do they see clinically, think theoretically. If you think about it, it’s so disruptive. If you think about this, in terms of attachment theory, you know, this is the person where I’m supposed to be grounded and I’m supposed to be supported at the time of my life, infancy, and young childhood where I’m most vulnerable. And this person sometimes loves me, or you know, loves me most of the time, but every now and then just hits me, and conversations with more clinically minded colleagues, they’ve convinced me sort of thinking in these attachment terms, what could be more disruptive and dysregulated. I think the evidence base isn’t as good as it could be but I apologize for shouting out to all my colleagues, but this has been such a collaborative endeavor. If I was just a talking head, I’d be misrepresenting so I’m thinking of Julie ma at the University of Michigan Flint who did a study with children in Chile. And she looked very carefully at that particular question. There’s almost a stair step of effect that the one spanking is bad, and the five spankings a week or five times is bad. But it’s not like the one spanking a week is somehow normative or okay.

Jen Lumanlan  24:02

Right. Okay. And then that sort of leads me into what about defiant children? You know, children are not complying. And Dr. Lazarle earlier says, “Parents should choose from the mildest disciplinary tactics that will be effective in any disciplinary situation. But defiant children need stronger tactics to enforce milder tactics to achieve that goal.” And so what I think he usually advocates for is timeout, and then when the child won’t stay in timeout, the parent should then spank. So is there a point at which timeout is not a useful tool with a child anymore? Hinges on time out. (we’ll get there hopefully if we have time) And spanking is needed in some way, if compliance is the thing you’re going for.

Prof. Kaylor  24:40

No, you know, having a defiant child that’s difficult is so wearing and I think people are looking for solutions. And again, I’ve you know, I’ve got clinical social work colleagues who would be so much better at telling you about, you know, taking away privileges in a structured and developmentally appropriate way. I mean, that’s usually the sort of thing they talk about. And it’s arduous and given that there’s no magic solution, spanking is certainly not the magic solution.

Jen Lumanlan  25:07

Okay, there’s an interesting way of putting it. We’re almost looking for a magic solution to ensure compliance; if compliance is what we’re going for. And there is no single magic solution. And if you’re choosing between non-magic solutions that hurt your child it’s probably not the one to go with. Is that an accurate sort of encapsulation?

Prof. Kaylor  25:26

There’s probably some evidence that for the more disruptive or more aggressive child, it’s actually worse, almost fuel on the fire. And my heart goes out to people, but there’s no magic. Is kind of the long-term patient investments. And that’s what the research would say, and that’s what my clinical colleagues would say.

Jen Lumanlan  25:46

All right. And so I want to come back to something we’ve touched on a few times, but to be super crystal clear on it, whether spanking is harmful to children. And I think that your meta-analysis was criticized in some quarters for not separating children who have been spanked with things, you know, being hit with an object, hitting the face instead of the sort of hand to the buttock that we’ve talked about when we came in, and several other studies and rely on recalls, and adult being spanked, and confounding with physical abuse. How can we understand the totality of the picture about whether spanking is harmful to children?

Prof. Kaylor  26:21

Two ways probably. I’m gonna go back to the meta-analysis Elizabeth Gershoff and I, we worked so hard to parse out the abusive spanking and the hitting with objects, and the beating with objects, the word beating itself. So we worked so hard to read each of those articles, it feels like 20 times, making sure that we’re excluding the spanking that is not what we think of as the customary or the normative spanking. So we think, you know, we wrote the article, but we think that we did a pretty good job of talking about normal or usual spanking, and we cut out all of that other stuff. And we find a lot of harm. I mean, we find, however, many outcomes, you know, the mental health problems, the behavior problems, all of those sorts of things. So that’s part of it. And then I would go back to my earlier point of I challenged someone else to do the large sample study with a careful definition of normative spanking and find, “Hey, it’s okay,” actually, when we hit kids and young childhood, they all do better in school, or they all go to college and graduate with all A’s. I just don’t think that study is out there. And in the 15 years, I’ve been working on it, people will sort of chip away at our conclusions, which is fine, the scientific debate is fine. But show me the study where this is such a good thing. Show me the study where this is so helpful to children.

Jen Lumanlan  27:53

Okay, and so you’ve actually made the case, then, as we mentioned in the introduction, that spanking in childhood should be considered an adverse childhood experience. Can you tell us how you came to that conclusion?

Prof. Kaylor  28:02

It’s interesting to me, I got interested in this about 15 years ago, and I thought, this is an interesting new research direction and had a really good idea for a paper and I thought, you know, I’ll write a paper on this, and then I’ll move on. Well, I’m very interested in parenting and child development but the spanking paper that I’m writing is a one-off. And 15 years later, there still seems to be quite a bit of debate. And as we’ve been part of this debate and this conversation, I think, you know, a number of people are recognizing, there are things that we clearly think of as adverse childhood experiences, like abuse, or like having a parent who’s experiencing mental illness or a parent who’s incarcerated. Those are hard things to go through as a child. And then you look at the long-term outcomes of those things. Lo and behold, the long-term outcomes of spanking are pretty much in the same ballpark. So given that there’s this consistent, ongoing, growing evidence base of how bad it is. It’s interesting how long these things take. But it’s almost as if we collectively are suddenly realizing like, wow, we have this list of adverse childhood experiences. Maybe we should add spanking to the list. I think we should add spank into the list.

Jen Lumanlan  29:20

Yeah. And one thing that I was interested in diving into the literature on was the case of how do you separate abuse from spanking, and you had sent me a paper actually written in Canada about the legality of spanking there. And there were a number of conditions that the Canadian Supreme Court had sort of defined as abuse; one of them is the other way around. It was saying that’s not abuse if (and there’s like four things before this) it is corrective that is not the result of the caregivers’ frustration, loss of temper, or abusive personality. And I’m thinking, “Well, what parent doesn’t spank their child when they’re not frustrated?” I mean, the whole reason perceived that there is a need to spank is because you’re frustrated by your child’s inability to adhere to some behavior that you think they should be able to do. And so, to me, it’s like, it’s almost like there is no spanking that isn’t abusive based on that definition, because inherently we are doing it because we’re frustrated If we’re spanking.

Prof. Kaylor  30:20

I’m going off of the research and just conversations I have with people because a lot of people end up talking to me about these issues. And that is a common thread in conversations I have, you know, I don’t think the research does a very good job of measuring parental anger, I’m not actually sure that that’s going to be the most fruitful or helpful direction, but anyway, we don’t do the greatest job there. But when people talk to me, they will say, you know, my parents were angry, they hit me or spank me or my parents would get more, and more angry, and then they would hit me or spank me. So a couple of 100 anecdotes would lead me to suspect that that’s a pretty common.

Jen Lumanlan  31:01

Yeah, and one of the things I was most shocked to find was Dr. Diana Baumrind has been so active in this field and not in the way we might expect. So, you had already mentioned the attachment and the links to attachment. And for those of you who are thinking, Baumrind? Where have I heard that before? In Parenting styles; authoritarian and permissive. And so she has worked with Dr. Lazarle consistently on studies related to this topic. And I want to quote from one of their studies, “Since only a small proportion of the large majority of parents who spank their children ever abused them. And the most successful parents meaning authoritative parents are average in their use of spanking. It is illogical to presume that abusive corporal punishment can be discouraged only by completely enjoying all spanking. Today, there has been no convincing evidence of spanking bans, reduced child physical abuse.” I don’t even know what to make of that. It almost seems as though you know, she’s created this category and called these people successful parents, and they happen to spank, and therefore spanking is not harmful to children seems to be the argument. How would you respond to that?

Prof. Kaylor  32:03

As a simple, straightforward person as I am. You know, looking at the research base, you know, we can talk about the parenting styles in just a second but quite apart from parenting styles, how does this thing, wow, if you do this thing called spanking, how’s it gonna work out for you? And nothing’s deterministic in child development but your child is more likely to be depressed, your child is more likely to be anxious. There’s some evidence of more likely to use substances, less likely to do well in school. I certainly think we should classify it as an adverse childhood experience. I’m not really sure where I’m going to come down on is it abuse? But is it a thing you want to do? Is it a thing you want to encourage? If you’re in the position of advising other parents or giving advice to families, do you want to be telling them that this is okay? There’s no evidence and in fact, there’s so much evidence that this is the wrong thing to do. It’s just out-and-out puzzling. I will say about the parenting styles that was important in seminal work for his time but if you think, you know, there’s sort of her parenting style are you know, are you higher, low in control kind of cross-referenced with? Are you high or low involvement? I think those the dimension is and it kind of makes the single-mindedness. Warmth and demandingness, yes, make this little two-by-two table that you cross reference. Everybody fits in a little box. And the more I’ve thought about it, I think that it is just not a complicated enough metaphor for parenting for something as complex and multi-dimensional as parenting. Everybody fits in a little two-by-two box, and, you know, I’ve always thought, well, where do you put spanking? And in her conceptualization, spanking as part of this authoritative that you’re warm, but you are also demanding, and you’re also imposing some control. And I think this is a case where the theory distorts reality. I’ve started to think, do you remember equalizers on a stereo? Do you? Maybe I had too many stereos when I was young or so old that I had so many stereos, but I think of all these little knobs, you know, I can turn up the bass or I can turn up, you know, the subwoofer, I can turn up the mid-range, I can turn up the treble. And if you open up iTunes, you have a little equalizer where you can adjust all the different levels to make your different sorts of music sound optimal. And I think that idea I need to work on the metaphor, obviously. But that idea of there being a multiplicity of levers, yeah, is so much more attuned to the reality and complexity of parenting and that everybody fits in one of these two by two boxes. It just seems overly simple for what we know about parenting. So then you think about, you’ve got this multiplicity of levers, well, one of those levers that you would want to turn way down is harsh physical punishment. That’s something you want to make sure you never do pretty much.

Jen Lumanlan  35:01

Okay, I appreciate the metaphor. And I have a feeling as an episode coming on, on the parenting styles. So okay, so let’s talk about banning spanking, and the legality of spanking. And children are the only group of American citizens who can be legally subjected to physical punishment. But when adults are surveyed about whether they think that’s okay, a majority of them will usually say that’s okay. And it seems as though it’s sort of linked to not wanting the government to have any say over how parents run their families. And so, I want to dive into this a little bit and figure out whether should spanking be banned and not just for well, it’s bad and so it should be banned. But what would it actually mean? And what could be some potential unintended consequences from that? And I have a couple of ideas that I’d like to run by you as well. Okay. So firstly, should it be banned?

Prof. Kaylor  35:56

Yeah, I suppose evidence that this is something harmful, and I would come down on the side of a banned definitely. Something we haven’t touched on yet is that when you think about a global conversation about parenting and child development, I believe it’s 62 countries at this point around the world have implemented country-level bans on the use of physical punishment. So, I often think this is an area perhaps there are others where we in the United States are a little out of step with the rest of the globe thinks and so when you pay attention to a global conversation, and international conversation, particularly as it’s, you know, sort of run through the United Nations and UNICEF countries are banning spanking, we are behind the times. I’m not sure if we wanted to get into this territory yet. But you know, there is the convention, United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which early on did not talked about protecting children from violence in general and didn’t quite clarify that they were indeed talking about physical punishment, as well. Later on, they clarified that the United States is the only non-signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Jen Lumanlan  37:06

Oh, I thought it was Sudan, Sudan signed, no?

Prof. Kaylor  37:09

We are the only non-signatory that at the time. The treaty was originally being side ahead of standing government capable of ratifying treaties. So, Sudan gets a little bit of a waiver because during that time period they had other stuff going on.

Jen Lumanlan  37:22

Okay. Yeah, there is a broad movement further afield, and Dr. Lazarle and Dr. Baumrind argue that 30 years after Sweden passed its first banking ban, there’s little evidence that parents use more effective and less aversive disciplinary tactics, apparently, they’re more likely to use physical restraint, and what they call coercive verbal control. Another study from Quebec, which I assume is banned spanking, as well, reported increased psychological aggression, yelling, screaming, cursing, calling your child stupid, that kind of thing. So when we think about potential unintended consequences, we might be able to say, you know, I am conceptually easily say, “Yes, I think spanking should be banned.” But what happens after that, when it comes to what options parents have if they don’t feel as though they have other options that are necessarily less harmful to the child?

Prof. Kaylor  38:11

I think you always need to pair it with what are the other options because took me a long time of talking about this to realize not just okay, or it’s not sufficient for me as a researcher to say, these are the negatives, these are the things you shouldn’t do. So I think, you know, at a treatment level, at a family services level, at a country level, if we’re thinking about banning spanking, that has to be paired with, well, you know, these are good ways to deal with your child, because, you know, children will sometimes do things that adults do not wish them to do. That’s just reality. And we’re not pretending that that’s not going to happen. We’re trying to find optimal ways to enhance child development. So you’ve got to talk about the structured and developmentally appropriate taking away of privileges, you’ve got to talk about having the conversations you’ve got to talk about, you know, what, what’s it like to listen to your kid? What does that mean, trying to get inside your kid’s head? Because I think for so many of us that were not presented to us as part of our toolkit, and those are skills we have to learn. Yeah, I would like to advocate for bans on spanking coming out of the evidence base, but at the same time, I think that has to be paired with, do you do? And then sorry, there’s one more piece where you got to think that the people are caught in difficult circumstances, right? Not everybody has a secure job or a secure home or feels secure in their own life. So there’s all kinds of macro-level thinking that we have to do about, you know, how can we give people the opportunity to take the time or how can we make sure that they have the space in their work lives so they can stop and pause and listen to their what their kids are doing. There are a lot of dimensions to this. So yes, bans, but bans and a lot of support. A lot of resources.

Jen Lumanlan  40:00

Yeah, I was just thinking yes. And as you were saying, and I really appreciate you bringing up some of the structural issues. And I think that there is a lot of that at play when we think about issues like poverty and structural racism that have people feeling as though they’re at the end of their rope, even patriarchy that we think about we’re not trained culturally to share what we’re thinking, to even what we’re feeling, to even understand fully ourselves what we’re feeling. Never mind, share that with somebody else. Never mind, ask a child, who’s in a traditionally, hierarchically subservient position to us. How are you feeling about this? I agree with you. I think there’s a lot of that at play. And one of my other concerns about potentially banning spanking was there are some families that are more likely than other families to have child protective services called. And so, I’m thinking, okay, what if we ban spanking with the best of intentions to protect children’s health and well-being? A Black family whom somebody sees them spanking their child, they’re more likely to have child protective services called. Protective Services is more likely to respond to that call in a certain way and we may end up with an even more detrimental effect of you know, potentially family separation. We’re talking about one’s child protective services gets involved in communities that have already been so disrupted by structural racism. Where does that fit in our idealistic, yes, we think spanking should be banned view.

Prof. Kaylor  41:17

Maybe it’s another yes. And absolutely, we clearly have a pandemic of racism in this country. And we clearly have miles to go on that issue. We’ve clearly got things to work on but there are still children, Black families, and White families that I think the other thing to remember is that sort, you know, when CPS is called, that actually, so infrequently results in removal from the home, I mean, we have this idea that that is always going on, and that’s actually sort of a last-resort outcome. So I think we can do both. I think we can have both goals, dear to our hearts, we want to eliminate racism, and we want to protect children. I just don’t see those in contradiction.

Jen Lumanlan  42:01

Okay. Are there differences that you see between how people in countries outside the US and maybe people in different racial backgrounds, and how they’ve used spanking?

Prof. Kaylor  42:10

I think there are differences, you know, within the US and around the globe, I was trying to think just this morning, because I knew we were going to talk about this. What’s the driver here? And I think, actually, the driver, you know, everything is obvious once you know the answer, but the driver is if something in your culture tells you it’s okay. If it’s the thing that other people do all the time, is the biggest thing that I can see. We’ve just finished a study where we’re trying to look at sort of who spanks actually, you know, demographic characteristics, or is it material resources? Everybody knows this answer already when we tell them, even though they didn’t do the study, we did the study. But everybody has this, we already knew that. But the biggest predictor is, is this kind of a thing that goes on in your group a lot group or your culture or your country. And so that seems to be kind of the biggest predictor. I guess the other thing I wanted to say is that lends rise to this question of, you know, if it’s more common, doesn’t that mean it’s more, okay? Children don’t perceive it as so abnormal, or as out of line, and that’s something where colleagues and I have done a lot of work. And there just doesn’t seem to be any evidence of that. This is a country where there’s a lot of physical punishment that seems to be bad. This is a country where there’s not a lot of physical punishment that seems to be bad. That kind of contextual thing makes a lot of difference to how many people spank but not how bad it is.

Jen Lumanlan  43:33

Okay, so just to clarify, and be super clear about what you’re saying, you’re saying that even if it’s more common in some countries and others amongst younger people than others, that doesn’t mean there’s a difference in how it impacts the children, it’s still harmful to the child, no matter how common it is in that culture, or what that culture is viewer spanking is, is that right?

Prof. Kaylor  43:50

Yeah. And you will look at this sort of country by country or neighborhood by neighborhood and yeah, kind of people, we tend to do what we see modeled around us, but that doesn’t mean that our children are going to be any better or any worse off. Spanking is equally as bad. Whether you’re doing it in a place where it’s always done or a place where it’s never done.

Jen Lumanlan  44:09

Okay, great. And then as we wrap up, I want to think about, okay, well, if we’re not spanking, what are we doing? And you’ve mentioned, withdrawing privileges a couple of times. And you know, timeout is also an option that is discussed a lot. My opinion on timeout is that what you’re essentially doing when you’re telling your child go in this room, or if you’re, you know, in one of the Idaho studies, it’s you’re gonna go in this very small room and I’m going to be outside and you have to stay in there for a period of time, that’s often the number of minutes of the child’s age. If a child is two, they go in for two minutes. What the parent is essentially doing is I’m withdrawing my love from you, my approval of you, my affection for you, for this period of time. Until your behavior complies with my wishes, with my demands, and nowhere in this do I ever see the idea that perhaps the parent’s wish or demand is not appropriate. It’s not age appropriate or maybe it’s something that’s that came down to us from our parents. And there’s really no real reason we do it. It’s more of a habit than anything else and we don’t ever consider the idea that well, maybe the child might actually have an idea about how to do this thing that’s worth considering. So timeout and withdrawal are punishments? Do you think, a good alternative to spanking? Or should we be looking beyond those tools to figure out how to work with our children in a way that enables them to see our perspective and we see their perspective, so we can actually work together on finding a solution that works for both of us.

Prof. Kaylor  45:43

So, Andy, the researcher thinks that research based on timeout is pretty conflicted. Andy’s a person who thinks about what Andy the researcher does, sort of sits back and thinks, you know, I’m starting to think that sometimes the best we can do in a disciplinary situation is not screw it up too badly. And timeout. Yeah, there are, to me, just kind of personally very disturbing elements of I’m withholding my attention, I’m withholding my love, I’m withholding my affection. I mentioned that I wrote this one paper, and I thought I would be done with this topic 15 years ago, and here I am, I am making this massive, slow pivot, I’m boring all my research colleagues with it like I’m switching direction. I think well, you know, I do think that the case that spanking is an adverse childhood experience, I think we’re kind of done with that. I think the evidence is that that one’s kind of done. And so what would I like to do? Well, for the next 15 years, I’d like to think about positive happy things and I would like to put an evidence base under them. And I don’t think we’ve quite done that but I’ve been looking, you know, reading my own papers like, oh, yeah, we thought about that. And we wrote about that I see this suggestion, it’s more than a suggestion. I mean, and it’s not just me, it’s other people as well, that, you know, it’s these long-term investments that we make in kids, it’s the warmth, it’s the emotional support, is the pretty clearly saying, you know, I love you. It’s not just like, I’m around, and I’m happy and unpleasant. But like, clearly directive saying to children, I love you, I value, you’re important to me, it’s making clear that we enjoy spending time with kids. It’s making sure they know that we will listen to their perspective, we will talk things out with them, and we will hear them out. It’s all of those things. And I think there are varying degrees of robust evidence underlying some of those things, and maybe kind of the more positive discipline-focused ones, we could do a better job strengthening the research base. So that’s kind of the next 15 years.

Jen Lumanlan  47:46

Well, now I’m really excited.

Prof. Kaylor  47:49

Well, we could put it on the calendar. Yes. 2036.

Jen Lumanlan  47:56

Well, in the meantime, thank you very much for sharing your time with us for putting 15 years of work into helping us to understand that spanking is not associated with better outcomes for children. And that really the case is fairly clear from what we can tell and what the research is about that. I’m really grateful for your taking the time to talk with us today and explain that to us.

Prof. Kaylor  48:17

Thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation.

Jen Lumanlan  48:20

Don’t forget that you can find all of the references for today’s episode at yourparentingmojo.com/spanking and you can also sign up for the free how to tame your triggers around your child’s difficult behavior masterclass at yourparentingmojo.com/triggersmasterclass. I will look forward to seeing you there.

Jessica  48:39

Hi, this is just from Burlesque Panama. I’m a Your Parenting Mojo fan and I hope you enjoy this show as much as I do. If you found this episode especially enlightening or useful, you can also donate to help Jen produce more content like this and also save us from those interminable ads then you can do that and also subscribe in the link that Jen just mentioned. And don’t forget to head to yourparentingmojo.com to record your own message for the show.

 

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