April 23, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:50
2675 The First Real-Time Study of Parents Spanking Their Kids
|
Time
Text
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
This is probably the most important thing that you will hear from me for quite a while, and I can guarantee you that this astounding information will remain entirely unreported, not only in the mainstream media, of course, but even in the alternative media.
We'll read the study and we'll talk about what it means.
This is essential, essential information.
Please, please listen.
A new study based on real-time audio recordings of parents practicing corporal punishment discovered that spanking was far more common than parents admit, that children were hit for trivial misdeeds, and that children then misbehaved within 10 minutes of being punished.
Advocates of corporal punishment have outlined best practices for responsible spanking.
But real-time audio from this study revealed that parents failed to follow the guidelines, said psychologist George Holden, who was lead author on the study and a parenting and child development expert at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.
The real-time audio interactions revealed that parents were not always calm, as the guidelines recommend, but instead were often angry when they spanked or hit their child.
They didn't spank as a last resort, and they gave spankings for minor.
Infractions, not just serious misbehavior.
And while many spanking advocates recommend hitting children no more than twice, parents in the audio recordings were slapping and hitting their children more often.
From the audio, we heard parents hitting their children for the most extraordinarily mundane offenses, typically violations of social conventions, Holden said.
He's the psychologist.
Also, corporal punishment wasn't being used as a last resort, on average.
Parents hit or spanked just half a minute after the conflict began.
Parents who use corporal punishment in the audio commonly violated three of the six quote use guidelines the researchers examined.
Spanking frequently use it only for serious misbehavior and only as a last resort.
Holton says the recordings show that most parents responded either impulsively or emotionally, rather than being intentional with their discipline.
He actually favors humane alternatives to corporal punishment.
So, parents agreed to wear tape recorders to capture home interactions.
The unique recordings captured parent and child interactions in 33 families over the course of four to six evenings.
Parents volunteered to wear the recorders.
Most were mothers who were home with their children after a day's work.
The recordings captured 41 instances of corporal punishment, mainly during everyday activities such as fixing supper and bathing children.
More than 80% of the moms were married and had completed more education than the general population.
About 60% were white and worked outside the home, and their children averaged just shy of four years old, which basically means three.
They're three years old.
In 90% of the incidents, noncompliance was the immediate cause, such as sucking fingers, eating improperly, Getting out of a chair and going outside without permission.
In 49% of the incidents, the parents sounded angry prior to spanking or hitting.
On average, less than 30 seconds elapsed from the time when parents initiated non-violent discipline to when they used corporal punishment.
30 seconds.
Less than 30 seconds.
In 30 of the 41 incidents, the children misbehaved again within 10 minutes of being hit or spanked.
The youngest child hit was 7 months old.
When my daughter was seven months old, she was only crawling.
Here's a picture of a seven-month-old baby.
How can you hit that for non-compliance with social conventions?
How can you hit a child at all?
One mother hit her child 11 times in a row.
Most remarkably, the researchers noted an unusual finding.
The rate of corporal punishment exceeded estimates in other studies which relied on parents' self-reporting.
Those studies found that American parents of a two-year-old typically report that they spank or slap about 18 times a year.
A two-year-old.
The average rate we observed using the real-time audio equates to an alarming 18 times a week.
18 times a week.
Children seven months old to three years are being hit by their moms 18 times a week.
He's a professor in the SMU Department of Psychology.
So there's a couple of things that's essential to understand about this.
First of all, the research actually talks about moms, but when it's reported, it suddenly gets switched to parents.
Do you remember when there's a guy who shoots up a school?
You never know what his gender is.
It's just a person.
No, the first thing you hear is a man has shot, a man has shot, a man is responsible, a young man has shot.
But when women are hitting Pre-verbal, helpless, defenseless babies and toddlers, 18 times a week, suddenly it becomes, poof, parents.
They're moms.
Moms are in the study.
It's moms.
But somehow this gets transferred into parents because it's too traumatic.
I'd like you to really try and understand why this is so essential.
I'm sure that you do.
But it's really important to understand how essential this is.
Imagine if a study came out where husbands wore recorders and it was found out that the husbands were hitting their wives 18 times a week for things like the supper being a little bit cold, the beer being a little bit too warm, the chips being served without the dip.
Crack!
They just reach up and hit their wives.
18 times a week, wives were being hit by their husbands.
Can you imagine?
The supernova Nevada desert melting Krakatoa that would erupt in the media about such base and abominable attacks upon wives by husbands.
This will go entirely unreported.
It will be mentioned in a few places, perhaps, but it will not be picked up on as the fundamental and root cause of almost all the dysfunctions we see in society.
This will remain unexamined, because this is women acting in the most vicious, brutal, cowardly, bullying, plain, satanic, evil fashion that can be imagined, and therefore we can't see it.
Because most of us, I certainly did grow up with an extraordinarily violent mother, To the point where I had to submit or I could face brain injuries and concussions.
A lot of us have faced violence at the hands of women and our general terror of women is something that is vastly underestimated in society.
It's why we can't look at this stuff directly.
If this was any other class or group that was regularly assaulting another helpless class or group, It would be all over the media.
This we can't look at.
It's too agonizing because most of us have experienced this violence.
Between 70 and 90 percent of parents, depending on the study, report hitting their children.
Now, they're lying about it.
Probably enormously by a factor of about 50, right?
They say, well, we hit maybe 18 times a year, maybe 20 times a year.
On average, while they're being recorded, these moms know that they're being recorded, they are hitting their 7-month-old, 12-month-old, 18-month-old, 24, 36-month-old children, babies, toddlers.
They are hitting them 18 times a week.
A week!
450 times a year, give or take.
Hundreds and hundreds of times a year.
These toddlers are being smacked.
Hit.
Out of nowhere.
And the moms are hitting these toddlers on average less than 30 seconds after the initiation of a conflict.
I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times.
Don't talk back.
Listen.
Back!
This is why the world is so fucked up.
This is really the only reason.
Certainly it's the one we can do the most about.
Why the world is so screwed up.
I know that you're going to want to rush to the defense of these women and say, well, they're stressed, maybe they're not supported by their husband, maybe they've had a bad day at work, the working mom's life is not easy, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
I understand that impulse.
Resist that impulse.
It is unjust and unfair to women.
We want to treat women with the same respect that men have been treated.
This is what I hear from women all the time, and I believe it.
I have a loving wife, I have a wonderful daughter, and I want her to grow up with full moral agency.
I want her to be treated as a full moral agent by society.
It's really important to me.
So, listen up.
When spousal abuse is talked about, when it began to be talked about in the 60s and 70s, which was about the same time that child abuse, it was in the 50s really when one doctor in particular began suspecting that all of the broken bones and concussions and contusions and bruises he was seeing were not the result of kids falling out of trees, but rather assault on the part of parents.
But in the 60s and 70s, you really began to hear about spousal abuse, right?
Husbands hitting their wives.
And when this topic came to light within society, I don't remember a single time that It was explained as, well, you understand, it's stressful being a sole provider for a family.
Sometimes wives don't listen.
Sometimes wives can be disobedient.
Sometimes that goddamn dinner is just a little too cold, and the beer is too warm, and the chips don't even have the dip.
So you've got to understand, after a difficult day at work, if he's got a difficult wife who's not listening to him, who's not doing what he says, who's not obeying, He grew up in a household where maybe his dad hit his mom and his mom put up with it and so on.
So we've got to really approach and understand why husbands hit their wives.
We've got to understand it with compassion.
We've got to educate them.
There was none of that.
There was like, call the cops just to have his ass thrown in jail.
He's a bastard.
This is what men faced with domestic violence when it came up as a topic.
And hitting your wife Wrong enough as that is, is morally, virtually insignificant in moral evil to hitting a baby and a toddler.
When you get married, your wife Got to test drive you, right?
You went out on a couple of dates.
You went out on more dates.
You became boyfriend and girlfriend.
Maybe you got engaged after a year or two.
You're engaged for a year or so.
You got married.
She can choose to stay.
She can choose to leave.
She's a legal adult.
She's there completely by choice, fundamentally.
But babies aren't there by choice.
They don't choose their parents, and they can't leave.
And they have no legal rights, no independence, no concept of how to get out, no support, no voice, no protection.
So, hitting a toddler, hitting children evil enough, hitting a toddler stone evil, hitting a baby, I mean, this is just fucking satanic.
I mean, this is just about as evil a thing as can be imagined.
It is the lowest and most bullying form of cowardice and viciousness that can possibly be considered in the world.
And women are 100% responsible.
Dads are too.
I got it.
But we all know that dads can be bastards, right?
We don't get the degree to which moms can be just evil bitches, right?
Moms and women are 100% responsible for hitting their children, for hitting their toddlers.
Moms go insane if there's BPA in the bottles.
And yet, the toxicity of spanking and its effects on the brain have been replicated in almost all studies and have been known for at least 30 years.
And in the post-war period, Spock was writing, a parenting expert, was writing about not spanking children.
The data has been out for 30 years.
The negative effects of hitting children in terms of lowering their IQ, in terms of screwing up their emotional self-regulation, provoking inattention, provoking oppositional defiance, promoting social problems among their peers is so well known.
It's like a decade or two behind the link between smoking and lung cancer.
It's just a little bit behind that and everybody knows who takes any time to look into it.
So, these women are consciously performing an act of the greatest abuse of power conceivable in the known universe.
You know, because you always hear, well, you know, it's always abuse when a man does this to a woman because there's a power disparity in the patriarchy and the man has power and the woman is less powerful and blah blah blah, right?
There is no greater power disparity than between a parent and a child.
That is the greatest conceivable power disparity that could possibly exist.
A wife has full legal rights, is there by choice, can leave any time.
None of that apply to a child.
If abuse based on power disparity is immoral, as it is in the case, as is perceived by women in general, when a husband hits his wife, abuse of a mom or a dad to his or her child and toddler and baby is absolutely, completely and totally immoral.
I've got videos.
You can look at the facts about spanking.
I've got spanking interviews all over the place.
This is well known and well understood.
The media in general doesn't want to tell you about it because so many parents are still spanking and they don't want to change their behavior and they don't want to apologize to their children.
Maybe they lie to themselves about how much they spank.
But the reality is that this vicious form of ape-like dominance and brutality and bullying and cowardice and viciousness is occurring continually, particularly in America and England and Canada.
Some places in Europe have banned the practice of spanking, But it is absolutely cowardly and vicious.
Now, when parents are exposed to the facts about spanking, they tend to spank less, which is why I'm continually promoting the facts about spanking.
So, please, please look into the facts.
Stop hitting your children.
Apologize for hitting your children.
Apologize to them.
Make restitution as best you can and be a better parent.
Because let me tell you what's going to happen, my friends.
You don't want to be on the tail end of history.
Like the last guy fighting to maintain slavery was really a dick, right?
I mean, a complete asshole.
You don't want to be the parent who's clinging on to this ancient and brutal practice.
When society as a whole has moved beyond it.
It's like the circumcision argument.
You don't want to be the last guy to circumcise, the last mom or dad to approve the circumcision of your son.
It's just a brutal and barbaric practice.
Activists, science, and those who are knowledgeable, and those who have any kind of public platform, oh, I'm telling you, we are going to continue to pound the drum that tells the people the immorality of hitting children.
That hitting children is far worse morally than hitting a wife, than hitting a person in a wheelchair.
Hitting a person in a wheelchair?
Imagine you go up and you hit someone in a wheelchair because they don't do what you want.
Imagine if that was caught on tape.
Some guy hitting someone in a wheelchair.
Bang!
But a man in a wheelchair has infinitely more independence and power and autonomy than a baby or a toddler.
He can call the police, he can have you charged, he lives on his own, he's independent, right?
If you punch or hit a man in a wheelchair, you are considered to be a despicable, vile, cowardly, brutal human being.
That is infinitely morally superior to hitting a baby or a toddler who didn't goddamn well choose you as a parent, can't get out the door, and has no rights.
I won't speak for others.
I will continue to bend every fiber of my being to communicate the evil effects and evil intentions of spanking.
It's not because you think it works.
It's not because you think it's effective, because it's clearly not.
Spanking just goes on and on.
You do it because you were bullied.
You haven't dealt with it.
You're acting out the bullying.
It's plain and simple.
It is a failure to process history, which results in a replication of abuse.
You just have to go and recognize how much you suffered as a child for being hit, and that will build a wall of empathy between you and further evil deeds.
I am going to continue to tell your children and to tell the world as loudly and vociferally as I can, and I've only really just begun.
I've only really just begun.
I mean, we've had 70, 80 million downloads of this show already, and I've only just begun.
I am a relatively young man, and I have got a long way to go in getting the word out there.
The couple of hundred thousand parents that I've convinced to stop spanking is just a drop in the bucket of the world population and of the conveyor belt of new parents dedicated to spanking and screaming and yelling and hitting and that fertility is constantly dumping on the world.
I am going to continue and ever more loudly and ever more efficaciously to communicate to your children, to your children, The evils of what you are doing.
I can't be stopped.
I won't be stopped.
I'm not going to stop.
I'm only going to try and do it louder and stronger.
So I encourage you to stop now with the information.
You must stop now.
You must find other ways to interact with your children other than pounding them down like some immature spastic Zeus devil god.
You must find other ways to do it.
Reason with them.
I've been a stay-at-home dad to an incredibly active five-year-old girl.
I never need to raise my voice.
I never need to hit.
It just takes a little patience and curiosity and consideration and a recognition that she's not there by choice.
I want to parent.
I want to be a dad in the way that if my daughter could choose any father in the world, she would still get to choose me.
That's the only way that I can bring a semblance of volunteerism.
The fact that you're parenting It's involuntary.
Your children are not there by choice.
Your children are there involuntarily.
They're in the ABC, the accidental biological cage.
This should not be a cause for you to lower your standards, but rather to raise your standards.
That which is involuntary must be dealt with with the greatest virtue.
Don't be like the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Well, you've got to come here for your license so I don't have to be nice to you, and by the way, I'm going on break.
Don't be that person.
The fact that your children aren't there by choice means that you must, you must, you must treat them the very best of all the relationships that you have.
Treat them better than your waiter.
Treat them more politely than the IRS agent who comes to your house.
Treat them as politely as a cop who pulls you over for speeding.
Treat them more politely, more respectfully, more peacefully, with greater empathy, depth, and negotiation than anybody else in your life.
The fact that they're not there by choice should elevate your standards if you wish to be loved by your children rather than lowering your standards.
Because when your children grow up, my friends, when they grow up, they will hear loud and clear from all the experts, and I am not an expert in this, I am merely a megaphone for the experts in this, they will hear loud and clearly that spanking was immoral,
that spanking is worse than wife beating, And they will make their decisions accordingly and it is my great hope that you will have and maintain a great relationship with your children when they grow up to be adults.
But what happened when poor husband behavior was rejected in the 60s?
The divorce rate went up 300 plus percent and has continued to rise in many ways ever since.
When bad behavior is revealed in general to society as a whole, through art, through publicity, through channels like this, there is a great sundering and splitting of human relations between the old and the new.
Don't have that happen to your family.
It's going to happen if you don't change.
You will likely have enormous problems with your children when they grow up and look back at you as a giant flame-fisted hitting robot of stupidity and malevolence.
Don't let that happen.
Stop now.
Get the research now.
Understand now and avert the disaster.
of the rising sun of moral clarity around hitting children, yelling at children, bullying children.