Spanking

[talon]

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63B2XR20100412

Although the new study doesn't prove that corporal punishment causes aggression by itself, it shows that the link remains even after excluding a broad range of possible explanations. and ... surveys show that as many as 90 percent of parents spank their children.

Their own data damns them. Their premise is that spanking causes children to become bullies. If spanking causes children to grow into being bullies, and 90% of parents spank, why aren't there more bullies?

I believe it's because they want spanking to be wrong no matter what.

I believe there is a right way and a wrong way to spank, and spanking the right way benefits children. "Spanking" is defined by the article and by me as "open-handed hitting that does not injure the child" and I further refine it by inserting "on a clothed or protected by padding portion of the body" after "hitting". Spanking is loud, usually because the hand is cupped to make the maximum noise, and it is the noise combined with the tactility of the spanking that makes it effective. Sometimes, clapping your hands works as well as a spanking.

And people, clicker training works as awesomely for infants, toddlers, and pre-schoolers as it does for horses, dogs, and cats.

Spanking should be more sturm und drang than hurt. It should never leave marks, not even red ones that fade quickly. Spanking should never be done on bare skin.

The sole exception to that is the surprise slap on the hand when a child is reaching for something dangerous and you're in the wrong position to stop the child in any other way. Sure, it would be better to gently move the child's hand or to grasp the wrist to stop the hand from touching the forbidden item, but sometimes the reaction to the child's imminent danger is faster and sharper than thought. In my experience, it's the parental fear that affects the child more than the slap.

There are other times when parents exert physical dominance over a small child - grabbing their arm and dragging them back from crossing a street when there's an approaching car used to be very common. Similar act-now-explain-later events happen with small children getting themselves obliviously into dangerous situations.

Once the shock of danger is past, it's important that the parent explain in terms the child understands and then demonstrates the safe or proper way to accomplish the task (crossing the street, getting off the sofa, etc.). In a spanking situation, telling the child why you are spanking them (it calms you down to pause and organize your thoughts enough to say why in one short sentence), spanking them, then giving a lengthier explanation - it helps to have demonstrations and visual aids. I had a felt board and felt cut-outs and we did a story about whatever caused me to spank my kids, and we role-played the event the right way, but spanking or hand-clapping came first to get their attention. If I'd known about clicker-training when my kids were small, I'd have done that instead.

The studies are inconclusive and there's no proof that spanking turns children into bullies.

It's my opinion that lack of discipline and lack of enforcement of house rules causes children to be bullies far more than spanking does. The factors that lead to a child becoming a bully are diverse, but - and this is my opinion based on years of babysitting, child-rearing, teaching, and observation - children who are either severely dominated at home or who lack any form of discernible discipline are the ones most likely to bully - the one as "payback" and the other because that's how they get what they want at home from their parents. The other way is that the parents encourage the child in aggressive behavior because it's "cute" when they are toddlers and then have no clue how to reverse that when the child is older and still behaving aggressively - or that the parents keep continuing aggressive behavior because they think it's the "right" way to behave.

Spanking isn't a factor in those situations, although corporal punishment often is - beating a child, walloping them on bare skin to leave red marks, bruises, and welts or even ruptured skin, using paddles, whips, wooden spoons, or other weapons to hit a child, jerking them around in anger and never rationally and on their level explaining to them why they are being hurt.

Spanking a child is a viable form of discipline when done right (open-handed on clothed or otherwise padded parts of the child's body that does not injure the child or leave marks accomplished with a terse before explanation and a lengthier after explanation given at the child's current level of understanding and accompanied by modeling correct behavior and perhaps with story-telling and visual aids). Spanking can happen after a time-out - the time-out being more for the parent than the child so the parent can collect thoughts and workout the explanations and demonstrations to teach the child the correct way to behave, but usually by that point, the shock of the spanking for attention-getting purposes has passed. Spanking is usually an immediate reaction to an immediate event and a time-out changes the spanking from a reaction to a planned event, and that often negates the need for a spanking.

Of course, many parents abuse the time-out, too, using it purely for punitive purposes and not as a time to recoup and plan out the real discipline.

Toddlers and small children don't yet have the cognitive capacity to think through their behavior, they often act on impulse. What they did seemed like a good idea at the time. Sticking a small child in a chair to "think about what they did" is useless. The child is going to fuss and fidget because they are ready for the next thing. Putting a child in time-out to calm down is more effective and sets the child up to be more receptive to the modeling and storytelling.

There is no link between properly done spanking and becoming a bully and there never will be.