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Spare the Rod:
Why you shouldn't hit your kids
...and the importance of parenting education
by
Alan E. Kazdin, Ph.D.
originally published in Slate, September 24, 2008
Alan E. Kazdin is John M. Musser professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale University and director of
Yale's Parenting Center and Child Conduct Clinic. He is also president of the American Psychological
Association and author, most recently, of The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The typical parent, when whacking a misbehaving child, doesn't pause to wonder: "What does
science have to say about the efficacy of corporal punishment?"
If they are thinking anything at all, it's: "Here comes justice!"
And while the typical parent may not know or care, the science on corporal punishment of kids is
pretty clear. Despite the rise of the timeout and other nonphysical forms of punishment, most
American parents hit, pinch, shake, or otherwise lay violent hands on their youngsters: 63 percent
of parents physically discipline their diapar-wearing 1- to 2-year-olds, and 85 percent of
adolescents have been physically punished by their parents. Parents cite children's aggression
and failure to comply with a request as the most common reasons for hitting them.
The science also shows that corporal punishment is like smoking: It's a rare human being who can
refrain from stepping up from a mild, relatively harmless dose to an excessive and harmful one.
Three cigarettes a month won't hurt you much, and a little smack on the behind once a month
won't harm your child. But who smokes three cigarettes a month? To call corporal punishment
addictive would be imprecise, but there's a strong natural tendency to escalate the frequency and
severity of punishment. More than one-third of all parents who start out with relatively mild
punishments end up crossing the line drawn by the state to define child abuse: hitting with an
object, harsh and cruel hitting, and so on. Children, endowed with wonderful flexibility and ability
to learn, typically adapt to punishment faster than parents can escalate it, which helps encourage
a little hitting to lead to a lot of hitting. And, like frequent smoking, frequent corporal punishment
has serious, well-proven bad effects.
The negative effects on children include increased aggression and noncompliance—the very
misbehaviors that most often inspire parents to hit in the first place—as well as poor academic
achievement, poor quality of parent-child relationships, and increased risk of a mental-health
problem (depression or anxiety, for instance). High levels of corporal punishment are also
associated with problems that crop up later in life, including diminished ability to control one's
impulses and poor physical-health outcomes (cancer, heart disease, chronic respiratory disease).
Plus, there's the effect of increasing parents' aggression, and don't forget the consistent finding
that physical punishment is a weak strategy for permanently changing behavior.
But parents keep on hitting. Why? The key is corporal punishment's temporary effectiveness in
stopping a behavior. It does work—for a moment, anyway. The direct experience of that
momentary pause in misbehavior has a powerful effect, conditioning the parent to hit again next
time to achieve that jolt of fleeting success and blinding the parent to the long-term failure of
hitting to improve behavior. The research consistently shows that the unwanted behavior will
return at the same rate as before. But parents believe that corporal punishment works, and they
are further encouraged in that belief by feeling that they have a right and even a duty to punish
as harshly as necessary.
Part of the problem is that most of us pay, at best, selective attention to science—and scientists,
for their part, have not done a good job of publicizing what they know about corporal punishment.
Studies of parents have demonstrated that if they are predisposed not to see
a problem in the way they rear their children, then they tend to dismiss any
scientific finding suggesting that this presumed nonproblem is, in fact, a
problem. In other words, if parents believe that hitting is an effective way to control children's
behavior, and especially if that conviction is backed up by a strong moral, religious, or other
cultural rationale for corporal punishment, they will confidently throw out any scientific findings that
don't comport with their sense of their own experience.
The catch is that we frequently misperceive our own experience. Studies of parents' perceptions
of child rearing, in particular, show that memory is an extremely unreliable guide in judging the
efficacy of punishment. Those who believe in corporal punishment tend to remember that hitting a
child worked: She talked back to me, I slapped her face, she shut her mouth. But they tend to
forget that, after the brief pause brought on by having her face slapped, the child talked back
again, and the talking back grew nastier and more frequent over time as the slaps grew harder.
So what's the case for not hitting? It can be argued from the science: Physical discipline doesn't
work over the long run, it has bad side effects, and mild punishment often becomes more severe
over time. Opponents of corporal punishment also advance moral and legal arguments. If you hit
another adult you can be arrested and sued, after all, so shouldn't our smallest, weakest
citizens have a right to equal or even more-than-equal protection under the
law?
In this country, if you do the same thing to your dog that you do to your child, you're more likely to
get in trouble for mistreating the dog.
The combination of scientific and moral/legal arguments has been effective in debates about
discipline in public schools. Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia have banned
corporal punishment in the schools. But so far, we have shown ourselves unwilling to extend that
debate beyond the schools and into the ideologically sacred circle of the family. Where the
argument against corporal punishment in the schools has prevailed, in fact, it has often cited
parents' individual right to punish their own children as they, and not educators acting for the
state, see fit. The situation is different in other countries. You may not be surprised to hear that
91 countries have banned corporal punishment in the schools, but you may be surprised to hear
that 23 countries have banned corporal punishment everywhere within their borders, including in
the home.
I know what you're thinking: Are there really 23 Scandinavian countries? Sweden was, indeed, the
first to pass a comprehensive ban, but the list also includes Hungary, Bulgaria, Spain, Israel,
Portugal, Greece, Uruguay, Chile, Venezuela, and New Zealand. According to advocates of the
ban, another 20 or so countries are committed to full prohibition and/or are debating prohibitionist
bills in parliament. The Council of Europe was the first intergovernmental body to launch a
campaign for universal prohibition across its 47 member countries.
Practically nobody in America knows or cares that the United Nations has set a target
date of 2009 for a universal prohibition of violence against children that would
include a ban on corporal punishment in the home. Americans no doubt have many
reasons—some of them quite good—to ignore or laugh off instructions from the United Nations on
how to raise their kids. And it's naive to think that comprehensive bans are comprehensively
effective. Kids still get hit in every country on earth. But especially because such bans are usually
promoted with large public campaigns of education and opinion-shaping (similar to successful
efforts in this country to change attitudes toward littering and smoking), they do have measurable
good effects. So far, the results suggest that after the ban is passed, parents hit less and are less
favorably inclined toward physical discipline, and the country is not overwhelmed by a wave of
brattiness and delinquency. The opposite, in fact. If anything, the results tell us that there's less
deviant child behavior.
There could conceivably be good reasons for Americans to decide, after careful consideration,
that our commitment to the privacy and individual rights of parents is too strong to allow for an
enforceable comprehensive ban on corporal punishment. But we don't seem to be ready to join
much of the rest of the world in even having a serious discussion about such a ban. In the
overheated climate of nondebate encouraged by those who would have us believe that we are
embroiled in an ongoing high-stakes culture war, we mostly just declaim our fixed opinions at one
another.
One result of this standoff is that the United States, despite being one of the primary authors of
the U.N.'s Convention on the Rights of Children, which specifies that governments must take
appropriate measures to protect children from "all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or
abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation," is one of only two nations
that have not ratified it. The other is Somalia; 192 nations have ratified it. According to my
colleague Liz Gershoff of the University of Michigan, a leading expert on corporal punishment of
children, the main arguments that have so far prevented us from ratifying it include the ones you
would expect—it would undermine American parents' authority as well as U.S. sovereignty—plus a
couple of others that you might not have expected: It would not allow 17-year-olds to enlist in the
armed forces, and (although the Supreme Court's decision in Roper v. Simmons has made this
one moot, at least for now) it would not allow executions of people who committed capital crimes
when they were under 18.
We have so far limited our national debate on corporal punishment by focusing it on the schools
and conducting it at the local and state level. We have shied away from even theoretically
questioning the primacy of rights that parents exercise in the home, where most of the hitting
takes place. Whatever one's position on corporal punishment, we ought to be able to at least
discuss it with each other like grownups.
Why you shouldn't hit your kids
...and the importance of parenting education
by
Alan E. Kazdin, Ph.D.
originally published in Slate, September 24, 2008
Alan E. Kazdin is John M. Musser professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale University and director of
Yale's Parenting Center and Child Conduct Clinic. He is also president of the American Psychological
Association and author, most recently, of The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The typical parent, when whacking a misbehaving child, doesn't pause to wonder: "What does
science have to say about the efficacy of corporal punishment?"
If they are thinking anything at all, it's: "Here comes justice!"
And while the typical parent may not know or care, the science on corporal punishment of kids is
pretty clear. Despite the rise of the timeout and other nonphysical forms of punishment, most
American parents hit, pinch, shake, or otherwise lay violent hands on their youngsters: 63 percent
of parents physically discipline their diapar-wearing 1- to 2-year-olds, and 85 percent of
adolescents have been physically punished by their parents. Parents cite children's aggression
and failure to comply with a request as the most common reasons for hitting them.
The science also shows that corporal punishment is like smoking: It's a rare human being who can
refrain from stepping up from a mild, relatively harmless dose to an excessive and harmful one.
Three cigarettes a month won't hurt you much, and a little smack on the behind once a month
won't harm your child. But who smokes three cigarettes a month? To call corporal punishment
addictive would be imprecise, but there's a strong natural tendency to escalate the frequency and
severity of punishment. More than one-third of all parents who start out with relatively mild
punishments end up crossing the line drawn by the state to define child abuse: hitting with an
object, harsh and cruel hitting, and so on. Children, endowed with wonderful flexibility and ability
to learn, typically adapt to punishment faster than parents can escalate it, which helps encourage
a little hitting to lead to a lot of hitting. And, like frequent smoking, frequent corporal punishment
has serious, well-proven bad effects.
The negative effects on children include increased aggression and noncompliance—the very
misbehaviors that most often inspire parents to hit in the first place—as well as poor academic
achievement, poor quality of parent-child relationships, and increased risk of a mental-health
problem (depression or anxiety, for instance). High levels of corporal punishment are also
associated with problems that crop up later in life, including diminished ability to control one's
impulses and poor physical-health outcomes (cancer, heart disease, chronic respiratory disease).
Plus, there's the effect of increasing parents' aggression, and don't forget the consistent finding
that physical punishment is a weak strategy for permanently changing behavior.
But parents keep on hitting. Why? The key is corporal punishment's temporary effectiveness in
stopping a behavior. It does work—for a moment, anyway. The direct experience of that
momentary pause in misbehavior has a powerful effect, conditioning the parent to hit again next
time to achieve that jolt of fleeting success and blinding the parent to the long-term failure of
hitting to improve behavior. The research consistently shows that the unwanted behavior will
return at the same rate as before. But parents believe that corporal punishment works, and they
are further encouraged in that belief by feeling that they have a right and even a duty to punish
as harshly as necessary.
Part of the problem is that most of us pay, at best, selective attention to science—and scientists,
for their part, have not done a good job of publicizing what they know about corporal punishment.
Studies of parents have demonstrated that if they are predisposed not to see
a problem in the way they rear their children, then they tend to dismiss any
scientific finding suggesting that this presumed nonproblem is, in fact, a
problem. In other words, if parents believe that hitting is an effective way to control children's
behavior, and especially if that conviction is backed up by a strong moral, religious, or other
cultural rationale for corporal punishment, they will confidently throw out any scientific findings that
don't comport with their sense of their own experience.
The catch is that we frequently misperceive our own experience. Studies of parents' perceptions
of child rearing, in particular, show that memory is an extremely unreliable guide in judging the
efficacy of punishment. Those who believe in corporal punishment tend to remember that hitting a
child worked: She talked back to me, I slapped her face, she shut her mouth. But they tend to
forget that, after the brief pause brought on by having her face slapped, the child talked back
again, and the talking back grew nastier and more frequent over time as the slaps grew harder.
So what's the case for not hitting? It can be argued from the science: Physical discipline doesn't
work over the long run, it has bad side effects, and mild punishment often becomes more severe
over time. Opponents of corporal punishment also advance moral and legal arguments. If you hit
another adult you can be arrested and sued, after all, so shouldn't our smallest, weakest
citizens have a right to equal or even more-than-equal protection under the
law?
In this country, if you do the same thing to your dog that you do to your child, you're more likely to
get in trouble for mistreating the dog.
The combination of scientific and moral/legal arguments has been effective in debates about
discipline in public schools. Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia have banned
corporal punishment in the schools. But so far, we have shown ourselves unwilling to extend that
debate beyond the schools and into the ideologically sacred circle of the family. Where the
argument against corporal punishment in the schools has prevailed, in fact, it has often cited
parents' individual right to punish their own children as they, and not educators acting for the
state, see fit. The situation is different in other countries. You may not be surprised to hear that
91 countries have banned corporal punishment in the schools, but you may be surprised to hear
that 23 countries have banned corporal punishment everywhere within their borders, including in
the home.
I know what you're thinking: Are there really 23 Scandinavian countries? Sweden was, indeed, the
first to pass a comprehensive ban, but the list also includes Hungary, Bulgaria, Spain, Israel,
Portugal, Greece, Uruguay, Chile, Venezuela, and New Zealand. According to advocates of the
ban, another 20 or so countries are committed to full prohibition and/or are debating prohibitionist
bills in parliament. The Council of Europe was the first intergovernmental body to launch a
campaign for universal prohibition across its 47 member countries.
Practically nobody in America knows or cares that the United Nations has set a target
date of 2009 for a universal prohibition of violence against children that would
include a ban on corporal punishment in the home. Americans no doubt have many
reasons—some of them quite good—to ignore or laugh off instructions from the United Nations on
how to raise their kids. And it's naive to think that comprehensive bans are comprehensively
effective. Kids still get hit in every country on earth. But especially because such bans are usually
promoted with large public campaigns of education and opinion-shaping (similar to successful
efforts in this country to change attitudes toward littering and smoking), they do have measurable
good effects. So far, the results suggest that after the ban is passed, parents hit less and are less
favorably inclined toward physical discipline, and the country is not overwhelmed by a wave of
brattiness and delinquency. The opposite, in fact. If anything, the results tell us that there's less
deviant child behavior.
There could conceivably be good reasons for Americans to decide, after careful consideration,
that our commitment to the privacy and individual rights of parents is too strong to allow for an
enforceable comprehensive ban on corporal punishment. But we don't seem to be ready to join
much of the rest of the world in even having a serious discussion about such a ban. In the
overheated climate of nondebate encouraged by those who would have us believe that we are
embroiled in an ongoing high-stakes culture war, we mostly just declaim our fixed opinions at one
another.
One result of this standoff is that the United States, despite being one of the primary authors of
the U.N.'s Convention on the Rights of Children, which specifies that governments must take
appropriate measures to protect children from "all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or
abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation," is one of only two nations
that have not ratified it. The other is Somalia; 192 nations have ratified it. According to my
colleague Liz Gershoff of the University of Michigan, a leading expert on corporal punishment of
children, the main arguments that have so far prevented us from ratifying it include the ones you
would expect—it would undermine American parents' authority as well as U.S. sovereignty—plus a
couple of others that you might not have expected: It would not allow 17-year-olds to enlist in the
armed forces, and (although the Supreme Court's decision in Roper v. Simmons has made this
one moot, at least for now) it would not allow executions of people who committed capital crimes
when they were under 18.
We have so far limited our national debate on corporal punishment by focusing it on the schools
and conducting it at the local and state level. We have shied away from even theoretically
questioning the primacy of rights that parents exercise in the home, where most of the hitting
takes place. Whatever one's position on corporal punishment, we ought to be able to at least
discuss it with each other like grownups.