Saturday, February 23, 2019

Spanking

We spanked.  I think I would spank less if I had to do over. But I have never been persuaded by the assertions of sociologists (one prominent one at UNH) that it was highly damaging.  It is nice to see a researcher who does not start from his field's usual bias coming up with a different conclusion.  It doesn't make much difference either way. The usual difficulty with the data is that abusive parents are more often also spankers. That I can believe.  When you take them out of the mix, the behavioral outcomes between children who are spanked and those who are not disappears. I oversimplify, but that's essentially it.

3 comments:

  1. Abusive parents are also often non-spankers, if by abusive we mean parents who damage their children's ability to grow up happy and likely to form productive relationships with individuals and their society.

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  2. Ditto what T99 writes. How can parents abuse? Let us count the ways.

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  3. Object lessons in moral cause/effect. We specified a list of things we would spank for, and if the offense didn't fit that list we did something else--no redefining the rules on the fly.

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