All Episodes
Previous Next
May 1, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:01:52
2681 How To Lower Your Child's IQ - A Conversation with Dr. Murray A. Straus

Stefan Molyneux speaks with Dr. Murray A. Straus about the prevalence, social causes and scientifically proven negative effects of spanking.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyne from Friedman Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
I have Dr.
Murray A. Strauss on the show today.
He is a professor emeritus of sociology and co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire.
He's author of The Primordial Violence.
Let me just hold that up, make sure that the audience can see it.
You can get it on Kindle and you can get it through Amazon.
We'll put links to it on the show.
Very powerful and essential reading for any moral human being interested in the future of the planet.
And he, of course, has been working on this, if I remember rightly, since 1968.
Is that the right year?
That's the right ear.
Okay, good, good.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
I'm going to...
Assume that this interview is going to be shared with people who are pro-spanking, who believe it's necessary and useful and good.
And as you pointed out in the book, some parents think that they have to spank, otherwise their kid's going to end up in an electric chair.
I wonder if you'd be so kind as to help people who are pro-spanking to understand where the other arguments come from.
Well, by the other arguments, you mean why you shouldn't spank.
Yeah.
Well, they come from many sources.
For me, they come from empirical research, from scientific research.
But for some people, they come from religious beliefs about How other human beings should be treated and cultural values in general.
That's the primary thing that influenced Sweden.
To ban spanking, all spanking of kids in 1979, they passed a law, the first anywhere in the world, saying that parents are not permitted to do this.
They repealed the law that exists everywhere, almost every Everywhere else gave parents permission to hate kids.
And it was done primarily on the basis of moral conviction that this is not a humane way to treat children.
This is not the kind of country we want to be in.
So I subscribe to that also.
But in my own case, being a scientist, I rely primarily on the scientific evidence, which is overwhelming, totally overwhelming.
There have been over a hundred studies Which examined the question of is spanking associated with behavior problems of children, such as being destructive, such as being depressed when they're adults, such as being delinquent, such as hitting their partner when they're an adult.
And 93% of these more than 100 studies have found spanking has a harmful long-term effect.
There's almost nothing else in child development research where there's 93% agreement, or in most medical research, where there's 93% agreement in the results of the studies.
And these are studies done in many nations, not just...
U.S. or Canada, but in many nations, including my own 32-nation study, they all show harmful side effects.
Now, there are, of course, some studies that don't.
93% mean that 7% do not.
So the defenders who attempt to defend it on a scientific basis, most defenders attempt to defend it on a moral basis.
They say, God expects you to spank kids.
And it would be violating God's will if you didn't do it.
That sort of basis.
But those who attempt to defend spanking on a scientific basis sees on the 7% Rather than the 93% and say, look, here's a study that didn't find this.
Here's another study that didn't find this.
And it seems impressive unless you look at the whole balance of studies by a mode of analysis called meta-analysis.
Elizabeth Gershoff, a psychologist at the University of Texas, has done that, and she's done a statistical analysis of all these studies and finds the evidence is overwhelming.
Right.
Now, the 7%, I mean, if smoking killed 93% of smokers, we would not say, looking at the 7%, well, it's not dangerous, right?
There are, of course, a wide variety.
There are genetics which, combined with Aggression within the household can produce different outcomes.
There appear to be some sort of indestructible children.
No matter what you do to them, they seem to turn out all right, which is probably something to do with genetics or epigenetics as well.
So it seems like, I think only a third, as you point out in the book, only a third of long-term heavy smokers die of a smoking-related ailment, but we would not necessarily as a result then say that smoking is not bad for you.
Yeah.
Though the two-thirds who do not suffer from it, Often do.
I can tell you I did.
I used to be a smoker.
And when the research started coming out, I was very doubtful.
I said, well, I've been smoking for 20 years and I'm in very good health, which was true.
But that doesn't mean that smoking doesn't cause these diseases.
It just means that I was one of the lucky two-thirds Where it didn't.
Not one of the one-third that did.
So that's true with almost every harmful or beneficial thing found by medicine and by social science.
That it's The data are the probability, the chances of it happening, not that it will happen.
So it's very hard to take that into account.
But if you, for example, if you get a flu shot, well, it doesn't mean you're not going to get the flu.
Some people get flu shots too, but most do not.
So it applies to beneficial things as harmful.
It's not 100% benefit, and it's not 100% harmful.
Well, and of course, as a parent, you don't know.
Even if we say 7% of children who are spanked suffer no negative effects, you don't know that ahead of time.
In the same way that if you're a smoker, you don't know if you're going to be in the one-third who dies from it or the two-thirds who don't.
If you knew that ahead of time, you'd kind of make your decision accordingly.
Exactly.
But you are rolling some very significant and dangerous dice with regards to your children by focusing on the 7% because you don't know if your kids are going to be in the 7% who are not negatively affected according to studies or the 93% who are significantly negatively affected.
So even if we accept the 7%, it still would strongly condemn spanking because you don't know.
Yeah.
Well, this gets back, I want to say two things about this.
This gets back to your earlier question about what are the basis of the belief of both those who are favor-spanking and don't.
Well, parents have no way, as you just pointed out, of looking into the future for their child, what they can see.
Child is misbehaving.
They slap the child's hand.
The child stops it.
So they can see it worked.
And there's no doubt about that.
It doesn't 100% work.
Some kids right after their hand is slapped do it again.
But most kids stop.
So the evidence that parents can see is that spanking works and life goes on okay.
What they can't see is looking down the road six months or six years and looking at the long-term harmful effects.
And if they were able to do that, just as if when I was a smoker I was able to look down the road six months or six years, it would Change the opinion of most people, not the opinion of people who are committed on the basis that this is what God expects, of which there are a large number, but most people.
I wonder if you could take a few minutes to talk about the negative effects of spanking that are established by the research and the degree to which it's, you know, immediate compliance but problems down the road, the degree to which that has been established.
Well, to overstate things only a little bit, anything that you can think of that you wouldn't want to have happen to your child is more likely to happen if you spank.
So you name it, there's probably been a study in the hundreds that have been done which show it.
For example, you want a child to do well in school.
And this is one of those ironic things, since a lot of parents spank when a child doesn't do homework, the more spanking, the less likely the child is to do well in school.
But even before that, on IQ tests, starting when the child is a toddler, and then tests repeated, this is one of the studies in the book, repeated over a four and six year period.
The more the kids were spanked, the more likely they were to fall behind The level of other kids, the average level, and especially of that minority who were not, small minority who were not spanked.
Now, all these kids got smarter from age two to six.
Six-year-olds just incredibly smarter than two-year-olds.
So they all, you know, there's some exception, but on average they all got smarter whether they were spanked or not.
But the more they were spanked, the greater the child was likely to fall behind the average increase.
So if you want a smart kid, you want a smart kid who's going to graduate from college.
You want a kid who's going to get a good job and have a high income.
All of these things, the probability of it happening is decreased if you spank.
Now, not by much.
Everyone can say, well, look, I spanked my kid.
She's graduated from college.
But that's like the smoker, the heavy smoker, who doesn't get a smoking-related disease.
Most heavy smokers, most kids who are spanked, most kids who are brought up horribly, One of the myths with a kernel of truth about child abuse.
Most abused kids do not grow up to abuse their own kids.
Four or five times more do than non-abused kids, but most do not.
Well, let's take hitting a partner later in life.
Spanking provides a model of relationships.
The partner misbehaves and persists in it.
Then it provides a moral justification, and a certain proportion of people act on that implicit moral justification.
So I've forgotten the exact figure.
It's in this book, The Primordial Violence.
But let's say of those who were never or rarely spanked, 3% hit a partner later in life.
Well, let's make it bigger, 5%, because it's pretty big, the percent of hit partners.
And among those who are spanked a lot, it increases the probability of hitting a partner later in life five times, a five-fold increase.
So that's five times five, 25%.
Which means that 75% of people who were spanked the most do not hit a partner.
But it's five times more than those who were not spanked a lot as a child.
So, all of these harmful side effects seem implausible.
Because they are all based on the percent who suffer, which is always less.
Children brought up in the worst circumstances imaginable, most of them are going to turn out to be great citizens.
Does that mean we should bring up children under those worst circumstances?
No.
Well, I appreciate that clarification.
Just to continue the list of things that have been found.
So we have delinquency as a child, lower IQ, lower school performance, less graduation from college, hitting a partner later in life, depression, anxiety.
Drug addiction, I think.
There's some more that I don't think I'm...
Well, crime as an adult.
Not just the crime of hitting a partner, but theft.
Yeah, and given these risk factors, I think parents, there are very productive alternatives to spanking which do not have these risk factors.
The people have so associated spanking with parenting that it feels like, I think for a lot of people, if you say don't spank, you're telling them don't parent, don't have an opinion, don't correct your children, don't have an influence, don't guide them and all that.
And that's not true.
You can be a very effective sports coach without cracking the kids over the head with a hockey stick or anything.
And I would argue that the best kind of guidance is modeling non-coercive solutions to interpersonal conflicts.
That to me is the essence of helping your children become better adults, becoming productive adults.
It gives them the best chance.
How much of adult life is negotiating situations where you're not allowed to hit people?
Well, hopefully all of your adult life is that way.
And if you model and show children through your example and through your negotiation with them, How you resolve personal conflicts and differences of opinion through reason, through evidence, through patience, through empathy, through curiosity, through sympathy, all of the, I guess, rhyming words of interpersonal virtue.
I think that that does a huge amount.
It's not about correcting behavior like they're puppies.
It's about modeling for them the tools that are going to give them the best chance for success in life, and that all involves non-coercion.
You're teaching them how to resolve conflicts in a way that they cannot legally use with adult-to-adult conflicts, Yes, I thoroughly agree with that.
One of the ironic things is that when you spank, it introduces things that make that modeling less likely.
For one thing, there's less examples of negotiation and explaining.
I've had many parents tell me, well, Yeah, but I don't have time for all that explaining stuff.
And of course, that's just what the child needs, is time spent doing all that explaining stuff.
And so when you spank, you're denying the parent and the child an opportunity to see A model, a role model, enacting the kind of behavior that you want the child to do when they're old.
But there's another process involved, namely spanking chips away at the bond between parents and child.
No one incident.
But since this is something that's typically happened several times a week, each incident, you know, multiply that by 52 weeks, by 10 years, there's all these little chips at the bond and it gradually reduces the bond.
And we know that For children to follow the example of the parents, it's much more likely if there's a strong bond between parent and child.
So spanking makes it, even when the parent is an exemplary role model, makes it less likely that the child's going to follow that role model.
Oh yeah, there's nothing more inefficient in relationships than a lack of trust because then everything becomes a battle and everything becomes a war of attrition.
I have found that, you know, for instance, keeping my word to my daughter means that I get to ask her reasonably to keep her word to me and because I've modeled that example for many years, she really...
It kind of has to and can't find a way out of it.
Personal credibility in relationships is incredibly efficient.
Trust is one of the most valuable things to retain in relationships.
And if you are, as a parent, using aggression because you say you don't have time, you have to, I think, cast your eyeballs down the road of time towards The teenage years and say, well, am I going to have time when the child is much bigger, much smarter, much stronger, much more independent to deal with the consequences of not laying in trust and rationality and mutual respect when they're younger?
Boy, you know, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
You don't think you have time now.
How on earth are you going to have time when they become teenagers and, you know, the bitter fruits start to grow?
Yes.
Now, given that we have a worldwide audience to this show, and as you point out in the book, rates of spanking vary fairly widely.
The U.S. is a little bit of an outlier in terms of the prevalence of spanking, although Canada, where I live, is actually pretty close behind.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the prevalence of spanking, particularly across various age groups, and how that's changed since the 1960s, where questions around spanking, I think, really first began to arise.
Well, in general, Anglophone countries are high in spanking.
It's part of the British tradition that these countries all inherited some wonderful aspects of it, some not so wonderful, like corporal punishment.
If you look at what used to go on in English schools, here's a big example.
But in general, the more Educated the nation, the higher the level of economic development, the less spanking.
Now, like everything else, things such as education, economic development, equality between men and women, they are associated.
But even in the most gender equal nations, even in the most democratic, most economically advanced, a lot of people spank.
Less than in other nations.
So that principle that these are all data about the probability of things happening rather than whether it will or won't applies to that also.
As you say, there are big differences we found between nations.
The most general thing is that the more violent the nation, the more kids are hit.
So, it's countries with low rates of violence of other kinds, such as homicide, tend to have low rates of spanking.
Sweden and the Netherlands are examples.
Well, and the cause and effect I've heard argued both ways, which is that if you spank your children less, and I think the data strongly supports this contention, that if you spank your children less, or of course, ideally, if you don't spank them at all, then you are going to lower incidence of criminal activity in the country.
And again, this is not to say that everyone who's spanked becomes a criminal, but it seems pretty constant that all who become criminals experience spanking or other forms of child abuse in their youth.
Yeah.
Well, that may seem plausible to you.
Most parents I talk to think the opposite.
If you don't spank, they're going to be monsters and, you know, hell will freeze over and social decay.
Exactly.
And when Sweden passed that law in 1979, there were newspaper editorials saying, well, Sweden's going to be a country with kids running wild.
So what's actually happened in Sweden?
Juvenile crime rate Juvenile drug abuse rates, all those sorts of things have gone down since 1979, not gone up.
So, unfortunately, you can't conclude what I would like to conclude from that.
Namely, that look at the benefits.
Sweden about spanking now kids are less likely to be delinquent, less likely to be drug addicted and so forth.
Well, unfortunately, those things have gone down in the rest of Europe, too, where they didn't abolish spanking.
But even though I can't conclude from it that this helps explain the decrease, I can conclude without any doubt whatsoever that the predictions of Sweden going to become a country with kids running wild did not happen.
Right.
Now some of the numbers are, to me, I'm a parent.
I don't spank.
I don't know any parents who spank.
So in sort of my philosophically cloistered and striving towards consistency in the non-aggression principle world, it's just not really prevalent or really present at all.
I will occasionally see a parent who spanks somewhere in the social milieu, at the library or gymnastics or something, at which point I will try to inform them of the negative consequences of what they're doing as gently and positively as possible.
But I think as you talk about in the book, with regards to toddlers, which I think is around 2 to 4, 2 to 5, correct me if I'm wrong, 90% of parents are still spanking.
Yes.
90% of parents are still spanking.
This is in the U.S. Sorry, in the U.S., yeah.
I mean, that is a staggering statistic to me.
Yeah.
How...
I think you said, like, parents who approve of it gone...
Like, in toddlerhood, it's gone from, like, 96% to 93% in, like, 40 or 50 years.
It seems like a very slow revolution compared to other revolutions in human morality, like equality of the genders and...
anti-slavery and so on.
It seems like a very slow kind of march towards extending full humanity to children, and particularly toddlers.
Yeah, it is.
But there's going to come a tipping point where it will accelerate.
I don't think that's going to happen very soon, but I'm confident it will happen.
And of course, there are now about There are almost 30 countries that have followed the Swedish example.
Unfortunately, most of them don't follow the Swedish example of doing something about it.
They pass the law.
But unlike in Sweden, where they had a big public education program and provided help for parents who were having problems With managing their children, that's not true in most countries.
So, in Sweden, for example, for two years every milk carton had on it, where kids could see it at breakfast.
Parents are not allowed to spank you.
And it was on TV and in schools and what have you.
No other country has done that.
They've made some efforts, Germany especially, but not as in Sweden.
So, I don't know how I got off on that.
Why don't you repeat that question?
I'm sorry.
Oh, sure.
No, honestly, if the show didn't have a tangent or two, nobody would know it was this show, because this show is built on a shaky foundation of tangents from top to bottom.
The slowness of the revolution.
I mean, if you look at the degree to which feminism has changed people's minds about some core issues over the past 50 years, and then you compare that to the public perception of spanking, it seems like a sea versus a rock in terms of changes.
And why do you think it's so slow for this particular type of ethical advancement to take root and flourish?
Yeah.
Well, first let me correct an overstatement in the book.
I emphasize that over 90% continue to spank, which is factually correct, not just in my research, but in other people's research.
But there have been big decreases, which are mentioned in the book, but not given sufficient emphasis.
For example, the rate of hitting teenagers has dropped from two-thirds to one-third since 1975.
So that's a big drop by half.
But still one-third of teenagers is still being hit by parents.
And the frequency with which parents do it several times a day used to be Very typical.
Any infringement, wacko.
And that's now rare.
It's still frequent, but it's gone way down.
So, two big changes have happened.
Parents are quitting sooner.
They're hitting kids for fewer years, and they're hitting them less often.
And those are big changes.
They're not the kind of change that I personally would like to see where parents never hit children, but they're steps in what I feel is going to eventually come about.
Of course, there will always be some parents who do, just like there's always some people who run a stop sign.
Well, but let me ask you this.
I mean, given the number of parents who now work outside the home compared to the 1970s, could or to what degree would reductions in spanking be explainable by spending less time with your kids?
Yes.
I think that is part of it.
Daycare varies by country, but in the United States, in most states, daycare providers are not permitted to spank patients.
Parents are, but not.
So you get the kids away from the parents, they're protected, ironically.
Of course, they also don't get the nurturance and level of support that they get from parents.
And fathers are participating in childcare more than they used to.
That helps reduce it.
Not that fathers are any less prone to hit than mothers.
But sharing the burden.
A lot of spanking is parents just get exasperated.
They've told the kid ten times.
So, you could do that once or twice, but if you're with a child all day, the likelihood of it ending and hitting is higher.
But if it's shared with the other parent, it reduces it.
So, daycare, shared parenting, these contribute to it, and the higher average level of education.
In most countries has increased tremendously.
I mean, the United States, for example, we've gone from, say, five or six percent with the university education to 30, 35 percent in just my lifetime.
And more educated people do less spanking for many reasons, in part because they do more More cognitive correction, more verbal, mental correction.
Right.
Now, you did mention, and I wanted to clarify this because of something I talked about before, so in the book you mentioned that I think it's something like 63% for women and 58% for men hitting children, but that is to some degree explainable by the fact that women tend to spend more time around children, and you point out, and I think quite importantly so, that male educators have a higher incidence of inflicting corporal punishment.
I half smiled, half sad, talking about British schools.
I went to a boarding school when I was six, and I was caned for infractions.
And it was a man who did it.
So you're talking about how male educators tend to inflict more corporal punishment.
Women have slightly higher rates, but of course women do spend more time around children, which partially explains this higher incidence.
Well, an important part of this is, what are the cultural expectations of when it's okay, when you are required to hit?
I mean, you went to a boarding school where you came.
My wife and my mother We went to boarding schools where the sisters hit them with rulers all the time in their hands.
So that was part of the norms.
No one thought that was wrong.
It was part of moral education.
Yeah, spare the rod and spoil the child.
As the saying goes, there is this belief that...
I mean, it's an old belief, to some degree, I would assume, to do with religion, the idea that children are sort of born bad and have to be whipped into shape before some deity.
Because, of course, children are born...
I guess irreligious, right?
They don't really know the difference between any particular kind of religion and there is I think a state of nature and a curiosity and the blank slate with regards to culture.
The culture sort of needs to pound into children like a ring on a fist sometimes and I think that sometimes when you have cultures that are not exactly intuitive to children then those cultures can sometimes need to be more aggressive in bringing those norms into children's minds in a permanent way.
I mean, some religious groups emphasize original sin a lot, so you have to beat the devil out of them.
But even among secular people, toddlers don't have good control of their behavior.
So, many parents After a day with a child, two or three days, conclude, this kid's out to get me.
It is not a hard conclusion.
This time it's personal, right?
Yeah.
But it's just a function, not that the child is malevolent or wants to get the parent, but they don't have good control of their behavior and they want things.
They're still learning socially acceptable ways of getting their needs, their wants, satisfied.
Yeah, I mean, I'm a stay-at-home dad, and for about 18 months, it seemed like every time I was in the room with my daughter, my groin would get impacted in some horribly negative way with an elbow or a forehead.
And I said, okay, I get it.
You don't want siblings and all that.
But it took a while to sort of help her understand, you know, personal space and all not moving suddenly and so on.
And it was hard after a while to sort of say, what is she out to get me in this way?
I mean, you have to reason yourself out of that lived experience because if it was an adult, of course, you would take that very personally.
But with kids, there's just an excitement and rambunctiousness and a lack of control and a lack of sense of sort of space and where their bodies are and how strong they are and so on.
But yeah, I can certainly see how if you take the wrong fork in the road, you could end up taking that personally and feel a desire for retaliation or Just that feeling like, well, it can't happen anymore, and the only way to stop it is through some very strong imprinting, and that usually, for people, means a spanking.
Yeah.
It takes a long time, is a point to be emphasized.
A fellow Canadian, Richard Tremblay, has done some marvelous research in which he shows that the most violent year in human life is age two.
I mean, you would not want to be locked in a room with a six-foot two-year-old.
Because they haven't yet learned how to get their needs satisfied by other means.
It's a long, slow process.
And the important part of Tremblay's work is showing how important it is for parents to help kids acquire this ability.
It doesn't come naturally.
They have to learn it.
Oh, yeah.
No, I just went to a trampoline park with my daughter yesterday.
She just turned five.
And I gave her a piece of a treat.
And I said, Oh, I'd like to try a bite.
And, you know, she broke me off this like atomic minuscule little crumb corner, like the bare possible compliance with the concept of generosity.
And so I said, Oh, okay.
So now when I have a treat, I should give you a tiny little bit.
And she's like, No, no, I want, you know, I want half.
And it's like, Well, then, You know, there's a principle here, blah, blah, blah.
But so she, like all children, wants to maximize resource consumption and minimize effort.
And whatever, by hook or crook, she can do that.
It's kind of an amoral phase of life.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
That seems perfectly natural.
The children who didn't try and get more calories or treats or attention were the ones who usually didn't make it, the runs of the litter who usually didn't make it.
So there is that biological driver to acquire, acquire.
It's kind of amoral because it's really a survival mechanism we inherited from prehistory.
But people take this like children being bad or mean or selfish, like all these moral layers get put on biologically advantageous behavior.
Yes.
And to put it in those same biological principles also apply to things like sharing.
I mean, it didn't take much for your daughter to learn about sharing, because the research evidence, even with tiny toddlers, is that it's probably built into the human evolutionary system.
But learning about a tiny bit versus equal sharing, that's something that has to be learned.
Yeah.
Now, I wonder if we could dip into some of the risk factors that you talk about in the book.
I actually did a show recently where I pointed out, and you mentioned this in chapter one of the book, The Primordial Violence, about the degree to which hitting within the African-American, within the black community in the U.S., is still considered to be pretty normal.
And in 2009, Barack Obama made jokes to the, I think, the centennial anniversary of the NAACP about how, you know, boy, back in the day, wasn't it great when you would just whoop other people's kids if they did something fishy or whatever, and everyone was sort of cheering and so on.
I think you try saying that about women, you know, back in the day when you could physically chastise your wife when she looked at another man or something.
Yay, cheer.
And so you do talk about some of the risk factors for the African-American.
I've read somewhere that fundamentalist religious people can tend to have a higher incidence, family size, particularly the number of kids.
I wonder if you could talk about some of the areas where spanking seems to be more prevalent, because again, I really want people to get this message to the most at-need communities.
Well, there are quite a number of things that increase the probability of spanking.
One of them, the most important is are you part of a group, a sector of society which says this is the right thing to do?
That's probably the single most important thing and it's certainly one of the main reasons why Corporal punishment, spanking, and other forms of corporal punishment are so much higher.
Well, are higher.
They're actually not that much higher.
They're higher among African Americans in the U.S. because their neighborhoods and their neighborhoods and their communities, people expect that.
And if you don't, you get criticized, often very indirectly, You know, don't you really care for your child?
Why don't you pay attention when he misbehaves?
Spanking is caring, yeah.
Yeah.
So, a good part about spanking is, you know, if it were a question of spanking or not paying attention to misbehavior, then I'd say spank every time.
It's the lesser of two evils, right?
Yeah.
I mean, kids need constant correction, constant guidance, constant help.
And the way African-Americans tend to look at it is that this is synonymous with guidance and control and help.
Well, that guidance and control and help is needed, just not by violent means.
So, the general principle is, are there cultural beliefs, cultural norms, that this is necessary and desirable?
And when there are, it's not only that parents do it by themselves, but they get criticized if they don't follow the cultural rules, and so they fall into line.
This happened with a niece of mine, living in a small, working-class part of a mill town in New Hampshire.
She was not spanking her child.
But her neighbors gave her a lot of trouble about it.
So another is, what's the level of violence in the surrounding neighborhood, community, nation?
The more violent the community, the nation, the more likely parents are to spank.
An extreme example that's in the book is that People who approved of the U.S. using what are euphemistically called, I've forgotten the phrase, but strange methods of interrogation.
Enhanced interrogation techniques, I think is the phrase.
Yeah, what people like me would call torture.
They are much more likely to spank.
This is a nationally representative U.S. sample that just by lucky for my research coincidence happened to have questions on both incidents.
It wasn't designed that way, but two different sponsors paid for questions in the same survey, and I was able to cross-tabulate them.
So, the level of violence I'm sorry to interrupt, but the thought just struck me like I could really see how the parallels would happen because torture is often portrayed as it's, you know, a necessary but unpleasant thing you have to do for the sake of a greater good to avert a far worse catastrophe than torture.
And the same justifications, obviously, with less seriousness.
uh...
or less catastrophic results are portrayed with spanking.
That it's an unpleasant duty that parents have to do to avoid an even larger catastrophe, which is the kid ending up in prison or going off the rails.
I could certainly see how people who grew up with the experience of spanking would find it easier to justify because of the parallel thought processes, something like torture for the sake of self-protection or protection of the country.
And that also applies to individual For example, in the United States, for the last 40 or more years, about 70% of all homicides We're committed not as part of robberies or things like that that make newspaper headlines.
They're committed as part of a fight between people.
Someone else made a pass at my wife, insulted me, dissed me, things like that.
And it escalated to A physical fight and a certain proportion of those end up as homicides.
So that, for more than 40 years, almost three-quarters of all homicides in the United States have been carried out to correct the misbehavior Of what the offender sees going on in the person that he or she has killed.
And where does that come from?
Well, from many sources, but I argue in the primordial violence, it starts in infancy.
And ironically, it starts because parents just don't walk up to a child and hit them.
Child has to be doing something wrong.
So, if that's the circumstance, if it's done to correct misbehavior and it's morally correct, that's a lesson that's with people lifelong.
And some people even carry it to the extreme of ending that ends up in murder.
Perhaps one of the most outrageous cases was two guys who rented an apartment together.
One was a smoker and the other was not.
And they agreed, no smoking in the apartment.
Guess what?
So they had an argument about that.
Not going to happen again.
Happened again.
This time they got into a bigger argument, turned into a physical fight.
One guy had a gun, grabbed it, and we had a homicide, correcting the smoker.
Misbehavior, the smoking violation of the co-tenant.
Those circumstances are unusual, but that's the typical homicide.
And where does it get started?
In infancy, with parents correcting the misbehavior.
Most violence in the world is carried out for what the offenders think of as a morally correct purpose.
That applies not just to parents, not just to two guys renting an apartment together, but also to nations.
Right, right.
Something that you write about, which I've seen quite a bit, I just read a little paragraph here from the book.
This is from page 10.
So, some of your associates did a review of the books available for child educators, child psychologists, child psychiatrists.
And one thing you mentioned here, which I'd like to chat about a bit, you say the risks associated with spanking are also given little attention or ignored in child psychiatry textbooks.
And in discussion...
I mean, as you point out, two-thirds of confirmed physical abuse events with children start out as spanking and escalate from there.
So special topic issues of the two leading journals on child abuse do not mention the research showing The two-volume compendium on violence against women and children It has nothing on spanking as a risk factor for child abuse or anything else.
And there's more examples of just how absent from the professional literature is discussions of spanking.
You know, I know that a lot of people who write these books and edit these books were spanked and probably are spankers themselves.
But still, I mean, do you not have a professional duty to put one of the greatest risk factors front and center in books about this topic?
You do.
But that professional duty runs up against people's deeply held beliefs.
They just find it difficult to accept the evidence.
They say, you know, all of them can say, I was spanked and I'm okay.
I've spanked my kids and one of them's a doctor, another's an engineer.
And so they regard it as kind of On the contrary, if you get into a detailed discussion with people, indirectly that's what comes out.
They just find it hard and difficult, find it difficult to believe.
As one colleague put it, he said, well, when you make an unbelievable claim You've got to have undoubtable evidence.
And I answered, well if that were the case, you would have an empty book.
Because there's almost nothing in the world where the evidence is without doubt.
That's our business as researchers, is to doubt everything.
But some things get doubted more than others.
And the ones that get doubted more than others are those that go contrary to a scientific theory that the researcher is committed to, or go contrary to their personal beliefs and values.
Well, yeah, of course.
I mean, the whole point of science is to challenge the obvious.
I mean, the fact that it's hard to accept.
I mean, I remember when I was a kid first learning about the general and special theory of relativity.
I mean, it made no sense.
How is it possible that you can't approach the speed of light without gaining mass and time slows down?
I mean, the whole point.
But I think with this topic in particular, There's such a fundamental moral...
And that theory was doubted for a generation by other scientists.
It wasn't.
Yeah, no, that's true.
As they say in science, you have to wait for the older generation to die off.
They almost never get converted to a new theory.
But I think in science, at least, the Einsteinian revolution was value neutral, as far as ethics go.
You know, what happens when you approach the speed of light doesn't have any fundamental moral...
It's just a kind of mind-blowing thing that goes on.
But I think in this issue in particular, it's the moral issue, I think, that is so fundamental.
I mean, if children are, as I would argue, the beings in society that we should protect first and foremost, the beings most in need of protection for a variety of helplessness, dependence, lack of economic independence, lack of choice, In the family, at least a woman who gets beaten by her husband, it's a crime, but at least she got to date and choose the husband.
Children who get born into families, no choice whatsoever, and they can't leave.
And so they should be the people in society that we should protect first and foremost.
And yet, They are protected least in almost all societies around the world.
As you point out in the states, it's still legal to hit children with implements, for heaven's sake.
I mean, it's just astonishing.
And in the US, in many states, you can hit children in school.
And there is, I think, a fundamental moral dimension that makes this so much harder.
I think that's one factor.
And another factor, of course, is that children can't, because of their dependent position, they really can't speak for themselves.
You know, immature brains, dependent positions, lack of economic independence, lack of choice in family relations.
When women wanted equality, yay, you know, good stuff.
Women could speak for themselves.
They could read, they could write, they could make pamphlets, they could become academics, they could become journalists and so on.
Children don't really have a way of getting their voice out into the world unless, you know, self-interested and moral parties, you know, go into childhood and are their voice.
Which, of course, when 90% of people in America are still spanking, becomes kind of hard because it requires an empathy, I think, that spanking scrubs out of the brain.
So I think those would be some reasons why it might be so slow, but I think that this moral dimension probably is the strongest.
It's very hard to look in the mirror and say, you may be with reasonably good intentions, but with a lack of knowledge, I really risked harming my children permanently.
Well, you're bringing up the women's movement.
It's very important because it illustrates what's lacking to bring about that change.
Namely, you don't have masses of children demonstrating in Washington.
Masses of children...
Talking with legislators and getting new rules passed, bringing lawsuits.
So there isn't a social movement like the women's movement.
And the women's movement came about because this was a moral revolution.
We just changed our standards of what a good society is like, from a good society being one in which father knows best, to being a good society in which parents share decisions, share activities, and children too.
So that's a changing moral standard which was brought in And everyone should have a right to vote and so forth.
This was brought about by an active political movement.
And there aren't the people out there.
Children can't do that.
So that is part of the explanation of why we've had the wonderful progress that the women's movement has brought about, but haven't had that for children.
We need children's liberation as well as women's liberation.
Right.
Well, I think also one of the things that happened in the 50s, and in particular the 60s, was there was, you know, the carrot and the stick with the women's movement.
So the carrot was, you know, we'll all be happier if women are equal.
And the stick was, if you continue to be a jerky, dominating, reactionary, controlling, or possibly even violent husband, you know, I'm going to kick you to the curb and march out on my own.
It rose about 300% in the 1970s.
Voluntarism is like the last resort.
If you're still not going to change, I'm not going to be your wife anymore.
Kids don't have that choice.
They can't say, if you spank me, I'm going to go pick me out some other parents at Walmart and take my chances with them.
That possibility of voluntarism doesn't really occur.
Sorry, go ahead.
Well, women used to be in that position, too.
They couldn't just say, if you don't treat me right, I'm going to leave, because the economic circumstances Didn't permit it.
Women were tied economically to a male breadwinner, just as children are now.
But when the economic circumstances changed, this was a big part of the women's movement.
By far, not the only thing, but an important part, that women had more opportunities to get a fair deal.
Yeah, certainly labor-saving devices in the home and less physically exhausting and or dangerous work certainly permitted women to achieve some economic independence and make those choices.
But again, these things are not possible.
So I think it really has to come from Obviously, it has to come from outside children.
Children don't vote.
They don't have any economic independence.
And it just seems to not be quite enough people there yet who are championing the cause of children to create some kind of moral revolution.
I think this is really the...
The last biggest one that has to do with humanity is extending personhood and protection of law to children as a group.
I think our society will fundamentally change based on that.
But it is going to have to be the effort of interested and compassionate and passionate adults that's going to bring it about.
It's not going to happen if people don't do it.
And this, I think, is one thing that's tough.
And the other thing, of course, is that talking to parents about And spanking can be quite tough.
I mean, as I mentioned before, I will try to talk to parents if I see them physically or even verbally aggressing against their children.
But it's tough because you're concerned, I think, as everyone is, that parents are then going to take it out on their kids later.
Like, you humiliated me.
You made this guy come up to me and, you know, nag me about whatever.
And I think that's another barrier that is tough as well.
You talk about how child psychiatrists and psychologists who themselves disapprove of spanking do consider it ethically necessary or ethically important to tell parents that spanking is sometimes necessary.
And that's very tough.
To say to a parent, you're doing significant wrong and harm is quite a challenging position to take with people, particularly in your family, but even professionally.
Well, and if a child psychologist or a pediatrician who tells a parent who's spanking or doing something that's wrong and harmful, the pediatrician and the psychologist is worried about losing credibility because the father or the mother can say, well, what are you talking about?
This kid's fine.
I came in here to see about an earache.
And you're giving me this leaflet about spanking.
So it's one of the reasons they're reluctant to do it, at least pediatricians that I've talked to.
Because the parents are so committed to the idea and also they have what seems to be the evidence That it works, it stops the misbehavior, this kid's doing fine, and somehow we have to get across the idea that Just as in the case of smoking, though you can't see the harmful effects, they're there.
But another approach, which is being used by some pediatricians, is to present the evidence that even though spanking does work, it doesn't work any better And other methods that are not violent or do work.
People don't realize that.
One experiment that I know about looked at, compared parent, child, when the child misbehaved, did the parent spank or did they just say, no, no, don't do that, or move the child to someplace else.
Now, the recidivism rate of whatever misbehavior it was for these two-year-olds was about 50% within the next hour and almost 100% that day.
But it was the same regardless of whether they spanked or didn't spank.
That's just the nature of two years.
Well, presenting that graphically in ways that are understandable to parents is another way of getting across the idea that Spanking is not necessary, and therefore, you should pay attention to the fact of the harmful side effects that you can't see.
All right.
Well, I mean, we could chat all day, but I want to be respectful of my listeners' time.
I certainly really, really appreciate the time, Dr.
Strauss.
We'll put a link to this.
Let me just hold it up again, make sure people can see it.
There's a very tragic picture here.
Of a child who's spanking her doll, presumably because the doll did something wrong.
So we'll put a link to the book below where people can buy it.
I hugely recommend it.
Facts are everything when it comes to these kinds of decisions.
If you won't believe the ethical argument of the initiation of force, at least believe the practical consequences of this behavior.
Where can people find other work that you've done on the web?
I know you have some YouTube interviews and speeches.
Do you have a place on the web where people can go to find updates about what you're doing?
Yes, I have a website.
And if you just use Google and type Murray Strauss Up will come a link to my website.
Unfortunately, most of the articles there, there are some exceptions, but they are technical articles full of statistical analyses and so forth.
Their main value is probably if you're having trouble sleeping at night.
Yeah, it's true.
I don't think math geeks hit their kids a lot anyway.
But I really do.
I mean, you have been, I think, at this almost longer than I've been alive, and I'm not exactly a spring chicken.
So I really wanted to thank you for providing the information to annoying loudmouth activists like me to be able to get the word out with more than the philosophical moral arguments, but with some tangible arguments.
to appeal to the consequentialists, to the utilitarians, to those who aren't particularly moved by first moral principles.
It has been an invaluable resource, and I really thank you for the immense time and effort that you've put into putting these studies together and writing all these books.
Well, thank you.
I'm glad you're appreciated and have provided an opportunity to let other people know about it.
Well, thank you very much.
I hope that we can chat again.
Bye.
▲
Export Selection