By Madeline Ellis(HealthNews.com)The issue of whether or not parents should spank their children has been widely debated and continues to provoke strong feelings on both sides. Advocates of spanking view it as an effective form of discipline and maintain that reasonable use of the practice is not harmful to children. Opponents argue that hitting children is not an effective deterrent for bad behavior, but a practice that plants the seeds for later violent behavior. The spanking haggle has a lengthy history in scientific research, and two new studies that suggest children who are spanked have lower IQ’s than those who aren’t is likely to reignite the debate yet again.
The research was led by Dr. Murray A. Straus at the University of Hampshire, who has studied the effects of corporal punishment on child development for 50 years. In one study, Straus and colleague Dr. Mallie J. Paschall of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation analyzed data from 806 U.S. children who were two to four years old at enrollment and 704 between the ages of five and nine who took part in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The children’s intelligence was tested when they entered the trials and again four years later.
After accounting for factors such as socioeconomic status and parental education, that could influence scores, the researchers found that IQ’s of the younger group of children who were spanked were an average of 5 points lower four years later than the same age children who were not spanked. Scores among the older children who were spanked were an average of 2.8 points lower than those in the same age group who did not receive corporal punishment. “That’s kind of the cruelly ironic thing, because we hear that it’s OK to hit younger children because they won’t remember it,” said Straus. “This evidence says it’s worse for children between two to six, that the younger child is the most vulnerable.”
The frequency of spanking also played a role. “How often parents spanked made a difference; the more spanking the slower the development of a child’s mental ability,” Straus said. “Even small amounts of spanking made a difference.”
In the second study, Straus analyzed data from nearly 18,000 university students in 32 countries who were polled about their parents’ use of corporal punishment. When the answers were compared to national average IQ scores, the highest were in nations where spanking had either been banned or was not socially acceptable—lower in countries where spanking was more prevalent. The exceptions were the top five countries on the average-IQ list: Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, a discrepancy Straus attributed to a strong emphasis in those nations on academic excellence. “To put it in a nutshell, corporal punishment slows down the rate of development of mental ability,” Straus said. “All the kids got smarter because they got older, but the ones who were spanked, less so.”
David Day, an associate psychology professor at Ryerson University in Toronto who studies aggression and anti-social behavior in children and youth, said instead of striking their children, parents should be using positive-reinforcement techniques. “What spanking doesn’t do is promote cognitive development or language and problem-solving abilities in children,” said Day. “It’s very frightening for a child because, at a young age, they’ll have the inability to deal with stress and be afraid of being hit. It really has long-term consequences for children.” He said physical punishment is usually linked with other negative parenting techniques, such as yelling and removing food privileges, which would also be detrimental to a child’s mental and emotional development.
Straus says that while the results only show an association between spanking and intelligence, his methodology and the fact that he took into account other factors that could be at play (such as parents’ socioeconomic status) make a good case for a causal link. “You can’t say it proves it, but I think it rules out so many other alternatives; I am convinced that spanking does cause a slowdown in a child’s development of mental abilities,” Straus said
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