Tuesday, October 6, 2009


For those of us who never or rarely spanked our kids, it’s nice to have more ammunition: a study that says that spanking actually lowers kids’ IQS.

The study by Murray Strauss, of the University of New Hampshire, found that the children ages 2 to 6 of parents who don’t hit their kids had IQ scores that were 2 to 5 points higher than kids who were spanked.

This makes sense, Murray explains, when you consider that parents who don’t spank their kids are probably talking to their kids about their misdeeds instead of hitting them. Studies have also found that the children whose parents talk to them also have higher IQs.

The study also found that children who are spanked throughout childhood show signs of chronic stress.

The study tested the intelligence of children ages 2 to 5 and ages 5 to 8 and then went back and tested them again four years later. The younger group of kids who weren’t spanked scored an average of 5 points higher in the younger group and 2 and a half points in the older group.

A Duke University study of more than 2,500 toddlers from low-income families found that young children who were spanked were more aggressive and had worse cognitive abilities than kids who weren’t spanked.

The study focused on low-income families because previous research showed low-income families are more likely to spank children. Researchers aren’t sure whether this is because of the stress of money problems or because of what researcher and lead author Lisa Berlin calls:”cultural contagion” of behavior that pressures parents to follow the crowd.

Research has found people who spank tend to be younger, less educated, single and depressed or stressed. It’s more common among parents who were spanked themselves, it’s more common in the south and parents who spank are more likely to identify themselves as born again Christians It’s more common among African-Americans than whites or Hispanics.

One-third of the one-year=olds and half of the two and three-year-olds were spanked within the past two weeks.

All of this seems very depressing because the parents who believe in spanking probably aren’t going to be convinced that they should spare the rod. But maybe the studies represent a cultural shift in our society that’s been taking place over the past couple of decades.

I’ve spanked my kids a couple of times – once when my son ran into the street and another time when he put his brother into the sandbox, shut the lid and sat on it. But even then I didn’t feel right about it.

It’s never made sense to me that we should discourage bad behavior by doing something that is clearly bad behavior itself. How can we tell them to stop smacking each other if we smack them?

It’s also disturbing as a punishment because we punish our kids when we’re angry and we don’t want to be smacking our kids when we’re angry. We’ve all had that experience of feeling ourselves lose control but when that extends to spanking, it can’t be good for either the parents or the kids.

So I’m glad to hear that researchers are against spanking too. Maybe someday parents will look back on spanking like we might look back on putting people into the stockades. “Can you believe they used to do that?” these future parents might say. “Didn’t they know what it was doing to their kids?”

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