All Episodes
Previous Next
June 11, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:27
2719 Study: Children Assaulted 936 Times Per Year!

Stefan Molyneux speaks with Dr. George Holden about "The First Real-Time Study of Parents Spanking Their Kids" and what can be done to stop it.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
I'm extremely pleased to have Dr.
George Holden with us.
He is a parenting expert, a professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, author of the book Parenting, A Dynamic Perspective, and a study which I recently referenced on this show, Eavesdropping on the Family, a pilot investigation of corporal punishment in the home.
Thank you, Dr.
Holden, so much for taking the time today.
Sure, my pleasure.
So this was, if I understand it correctly, a bit of a surprise for you, this study.
You were originally trying to study something else and then it kind of changed course, right?
Right.
We wanted to study actually what really goes on in the home, but we had a focus and our focus was on parental yelling because almost all parents Report that they yell at their kids, but there's been very little attention given to the quality of the yelling.
So we want to get a glimpse into that by having moms record their home interactions with a little digital audio arm recorder that we had given to moms.
And in the course of that, listening to those recordings, we came across these spanking and slapping incidents.
So we decided to focus on those.
And a surprising amount, if I understand this correctly, because I think the parents report that they hit 18 times a year.
I think your calculation was a little different.
Well, yeah.
The 18 times a year was based on a different study.
But the 18 times a year is sort of a general reference that a lot of People assume is accurate.
And what we were finding was that those, at least for the parents who are spanking and slapping, that estimate is probably way, way off, that parents are doing it a lot more than had previously been thought.
Right.
To the point of 18 times a week or 900 and change a year, which is really an astounding figure.
At any level, to be hit 900 times a year by somebody five times your size is quite a formative set of experiences, I would assume.
Absolutely.
That's not everyone.
That's a high-end experience.
Spankers or slappers who may be doing it that much or perhaps even more.
But it is, I think, a significant experience that these children are having.
And I would call it a micro-trauma that they're actually experiencing and repeatedly experiencing.
And it's likely that these micro-traumas can have long-term effects on brain development and certainly on their behavior and their And their orientation toward others.
Okay, so let's talk for a moment about the theory versus the practice of corporal punishment because there was a significant deviation or set of deviations from the theory versus the practice.
I wonder if you could outline some of the theories behind corporal punishment and then ways in which these moms were not pursuing that theory.
Well, there isn't any one single theory about How to go about using corporal punishment.
To my knowledge, there's about five or six authors out there who have published in this domain recommending how one should spank.
What we did is we looked through those five or six different authors and came up with what seemed to be fairly consistent across the authors' recommendations about how to spank.
Now, we actually didn't ask the parents whether they were aware of the guidelines or how to go about doing it.
Instead, we just analyzed our data along the lines of those recommendations or those guidelines.
And they were things like, do it infrequently.
Do it as a last resort.
Do it for a severe misbehavior, not a minor misbehavior.
Do it when you're calm.
Hit just once or twice.
And they suggested that if you do it, it's going to be effective.
And so they encouraged parents to do it.
So that's what we were looking at.
We evaluated those sort of five recommendations and then the effectiveness of it with our data set, which is, admittedly, it's a small data set.
We recruited 35 moms.
And we had some technical difficulties with two, so we had 33 moms, and we heard spanking with 14 of the families out of the 33.
So it's not a large sample, but I think it really reveals what is going on in a lot of homes.
And we can't argue that it's representative of all homes, but I think It gives us a little snapshot about what's going on, and what we've found is parents aren't spanking at all along the guidelines of what's been recommended.
They're spanking frequently, they're spanking for trivial misbehaviors, they're spanking 30 seconds after the misbehavior occurred, not as a last resort, but rather as a second resort.
Typically, moms and we had a couple of dads say, you know, stop it, cut it out.
And then when the kid didn't do it, they ended up slapping or spanking the kid.
So it occurred very early in the disciplinary interaction.
About half the time, parents were clearly heated, angry.
With the child, as you might expect.
And the one clear guideline they followed is, as far as we could tell, they did only spank, in most cases, once or twice.
Though there were a couple of exceptions.
In one case, one mom hit the child 11 times in a row.
Oh, that was the one for fighting with his sister, right?
I think so, yes, right.
There's nothing like using aggression to teach children how bad aggression is.
How people can process that cognitive dissonance in the moment is amazing.
Well, my take is that parents aren't doing enough processing of their behavior and if they Did what I call metaparenting, which is reflecting on your parenting behavior, and thought about, observed how the child's reacting, thought about, yes, the spanking does work for the immediate, but if I wait a few minutes, my kid's misbehaving again.
So clearly it's not working.
If they thought about these things, I think they'd think, hmm, I need to try something else.
This is not working.
But most parents don't do that.
They just hit.
And the incident is over, so they think, hmm, must have worked.
So yeah, our other finding was that in most cases, children were misbehaving within 10 minutes after the spanking.
Some were doing the same behavior, some were doing other behaviors, but clearly it was not an effective tool for promoting good behavior from a child.
Right.
Now, the statistics that I've heard, and they're kind of all over the map, but they're certainly at the high end of the percentages.
70%, 80%, 85% of American parents say that they still spank their children.
You had a little less than 50%.
Do you think that parents may have modified their behavior because they were being recorded?
I know some of them were hitting that very night that they put the recorder on, so probably not.
Do you have any reason or do you have any knowledge about why it might have been lower than the average?
Well, yeah, the reason probably was because we just had a small sample of behavior.
That if we had a larger sample, like we had four to six nights of recordings, if we had two weeks of recordings or three weeks, It's likely that we would have heard more incidents across different families.
So I think that's really the issue.
In this particular case, I have no doubt that spanking does occur in at least 70 percent to 90 percent of samples in the United States.
It's just, particularly in the South, it's just accepted as a standard disciplinary technique and not enough parents question it.
Well, I guess it can be frustrating.
It must be even more.
You've been studying this for 30 years and I've been for, you know, I guess six or seven years a minor public figure attempting to get experts like yourself in front of parents to help them to sort of understand that it doesn't work, that it can have a negative effect on IQ points, that it can provoke oppositional defiant disorders, that it degrades the quality of social interactions both peer and to authority.
And, you know, you name it.
I mean, there's almost nothing other than, you know, eyes exploding that spanking can promote in terms of negative behavior.
I've had Dr.
Elizabeth Gershaw.
I've had Alison Gopnik on to try and talk about this stuff.
It really seems like this is a hard, a hard message to get.
Across to parents.
And again, you've been working at it a lot longer than I have been.
If I sort of look at the revolution in domestic violence that occurred from the late 1950s to the 1960s, it was relatively quick, which doesn't mean, of course, that it was eliminated.
It just means that the message got out very quickly.
But with this, I mean, I remember reading books when I was younger, the...
Sensible, Spock's book in the post-war period, book of Sensible Baby and Child Care or something like that, where he was against spanking and the correlation between spanking and negative outcomes for children and its lack of efficacy in even promoting what the parents say they want, which is compliance and obedience and better behavior.
This stuff has been known for decades.
It seems really hard to get this message across to parents.
Why do you think that is?
Um...
Lots of reasons, I think, are going on.
I think in the U.S., part of the issue is, given it's been historically such a prominent disciplinary technique in most families, that parents accept it without questioning, because they don't want to...
They don't want to suspect that their parents were not doing the best job that they could have done.
And then, given that they've been using it, they also don't want to question their own parenting and think that perhaps they have been engaged in a practice that isn't really beneficial for their child.
So there's some of that issue going on.
I think there's another issue is, in the United States, we don't really have in our collective dialogue the idea of children's rights.
And in many countries where children's rights are more prominent, they will address the issue of children's right not to be hit.
But in the United States, we don't talk about children's rights, only the rights of the unborn or adults' rights or parents' rights.
So there's sort of, I think, a blockage there that also kind of inhibits more dialogue and more discussion about what is best for children, because we're just thinking about what's best for parents in terms of parents having the right to raise their children in whatever way they want.
So there's some of that issue.
There's also some Problem of lack of, even though this may be surprising to you, there still is a communication gap that we still hear parents have not been informed that corporal punishment is associated with negative effects.
And we need to do a better job getting the message out that there is this massive research literature showing these associations and showing that spanking is not effective.
But parents, some certainly have, but many still have not heard that message.
So that's part of what I'm involved in.
I'm associated with this group called the U.S. Alliance to End the Hitting of Children.
And part of our job, as we see it, is to educate the country that there are this, that corporal punishment is associated with these negative problems and there's better ways to rear our children.
So for the parents, and we still haven't really talked about the yelling, which is also pretty significant.
And I know that in the study, you asked for parents who admitted to yelling at their children and you didn't find many who weren't on that side.
We haven't even really talked about that, but I would like to see, you know, just calm, peaceful negotiation with children.
I'm a stay-at-home dad, and I found that to be just a fantastic way of interacting.
With kids, because they are so powerless.
And to me, where you have the most powerless members of society, you need to approach them the most gently and the most solicitously, rather than, you know, exercising power over the powerlessness, which among adults we recognize is not great.
We're still working on that with kids.
So for parents who want to not be aggressive, and I know you've got a whole book about this, but I wonder if you could sum up some of the options that are available for parents who want to be more reasonable with their children and not provoke these kinds of problems.
Yeah, sure.
Well, part of the problem is parents fail to recognize that one of the problems that children have is their immature brains and that their prefrontal cortex has not yet developed so that they can control their behavior to act like an adult.
But parents often forget this and kind of are expecting immediate compliance and expecting children to remember What the parent had just told them a few minutes ago when they don't really have the cognitive ability and the neurological capacity to do some of this.
So part of the message is for parents to recognize that their children are these developing organisms and that their brains are immature and they need many more years to develop so that they will be adult-like.
In the process of waiting for those brains to develop, You don't want to do things that could potentially damage your kid or result in unintended negative consequences, which spanking can.
So you need to avoid situations that put you in that conflict, if you can.
So that sort of one recommendation is to structure the environment, structure the situation, So that you're not in a situation that may result in the child misbehaving or doing something where you have to try to discipline them because they don't have the wherewithal at this point to be able to resist temptations like candy or cookies or something, or potentially dangerous things.
So you need to, A, structure the situation.
If you can't do that, then you need You also need to keep in mind, do you have appropriate expectations for the child?
And these obviously need to change with the child's age, but are you expecting appropriate behavior for the particular age of the child?
With the young And depending on that, the types of responses you can use vary as a function of the child's age and the circumstances.
For example, with a young toddler or infant or toddler, you can divert their attention very easily from the tempting object to a positive interaction.
As the child gets older, then Diversion often won't work, so you have to begin to do things like focus on what motivates the child, what do they care about, and then remove what they care about.
In most cases, what they most care about is adult attention, parent attention and love and warmth.
And if you express to the child why his or her behavior is not acceptable and what your problem is, And that you will have to stop engaging with the child for the moment because the child's behavior is not acceptable.
So basically putting the child in a short timeout, then I think that's very effective for preschoolers.
As you get older, that doesn't work.
Then you have to, again, focus on what motivates the child, whether it's watching TV or using a computer or electronic or peer interactions.
And then control those things by parents giving firm guidance and setting boundaries, setting limits, and disciplining the child, but in a positive, constructive way, not in a punitive or negative way.
Yeah, I've certainly found also that the most powerful parenting tool that I have available to me is the mirror.
Because, you know, if I say to my daughter, I don't think you're paying attention, and I've been on my cell phone half the morning, which is rare, but whatever, right?
Then am I modeling the behavior that I'm criticizing?
So, of course, in your study, the parents who are saying to their children, you're being inappropriately aggressive while launching...
Physical attacks on them within 30 seconds of the conflict beginning.
It's like look in the mirror time rather than look at your kid.
And you're right about, of course, the brain development.
I don't ask my daughter to get something from the top shelf because she's five.
Physically, she hasn't grown high enough to get there.
And it's the same thing with the brain itself.
So yeah, if you look into your mirror and figure out what are you modeling for the kid, is anything coming back that you're modeling, in which case you need to alter your own behavior and not focus on the kid.
And yeah, recognize that they're still short mentally and can't get to the top shelf.
Absolutely.
Yep.
We all need to reflect more on our own behavior.
Look in the mirror, as you say.
We expect our children to be calm, controlled individuals, but then we get so worked up about their behavior and we start yelling at them.
And we model, as you point out, the very behaviors we don't want to see them develop.
So parents really need to take a time out themselves, take a step back and look at their behavior and think about, why was I getting so worked up about this issue?
Is it really that important?
Do I really need to have a battle over this little thing?
Because the long-term goals are what are important.
And the long-term goals are raising children to be happy, healthy, independent, respectful individuals, plus whatever other things you want.
But if we think about those long-term goals and then look at what we're getting so worked up about in the immediate context, I think Parents will often say, oh, I should let go of that.
That's really not that important.
And I need to focus on developing a good, warm relationship with my child, not a relationship where the child fears me because I may hit him or her if she doesn't do exactly what I say exactly when I say it.
We, in general, have developed a little misguided orientation to what a good parent is and that we need to reorient our focus and focus on what is now called positive parenting.
Positive parenting is the idea that you engage in good, cooperative relationships with your child.
If you Try to calmly elicit good behavior.
The child really wants to do what pleases you.
And the child then will, if you do it in a loving way, the child will often behave in the way that you want.
And this will promote a good relationship, open communication, and a child who's going to be loving and respectful in the long term.
We fully accept that love and aggression are incompatible in adult relationships.
You can't hit your wife until she really respects and loves you.
But we have this short circuit when it comes from adult to child.
You're not going to be motivated at work by somebody yelling at you.
You're going to deflate and be upset.
And so, I guess, except for the army, I guess, but in sort of a civilian life.
But we have this kind of weird disconnect.
And that which we fully understand would never work in an adult relationship.
Hitting, yelling, aggression, and so on.
We just have this complete opposite standard when it comes to kids.
And breaking that down and helping people to understand that children have the least voluntary relationships in society.
You know, I mean, I've used this analogy before that If the government assigned you a wife and she wasn't there by choice, you would have to treat her extra special in order to overcome the involuntary nature of her relationship to you.
And it's the same with kids.
They don't choose you as parents.
They're born into it.
And I think we have to treat them the very best to really overcome that involuntary nature of their relationship.
I try to parent, like, if my daughter could choose any father in the world, she would choose me.
Now, she doesn't have that choice, but I kind of want to parent As if she had that choice.
Because, you know, she can choose to associate with me or not when she grows up.
And I think it's almost like power corrupts and the fact that children aren't there by choice and can't leave, which I think should make people have the highest standards in those relationships, I think actually causes those standards in many cases to degrade.
Right.
Yeah.
And let's not forget, 150 years ago, men could hit their lives for misbehaving.
And it was accepted and very common in the United States that men would do this.
And they had to, of course, operate under the rule of the thumb, which meant they couldn't beat their wives with a stick larger than the diameter of their thumb.
But nevertheless, it was incredibly common.
And we don't yet, as you point out, we don't yet make the connection that we are still beating our children.
Sometimes with objects, sometimes sticks, but often just with the hand, which should be a love object, but we'd still beat them with the hand.
Even if it's a slapping, it's still an assault on the child that should not be practiced.
Right.
Actually, I accepted that rule of thumb thing.
You may want to Google that.
I think it may, in fact, be an urban myth.
But nonetheless, we certainly was more accepted to have marital violence in the past than it is now, and we hope to extend that onwards.
So what's next for these, you know, for me at least, eye-popping and incredibly valuable studies?
Are you going to work more with this kind of approach with recordings?
Are you going to do more with the data set that you have now?
What's up next for you?
Both.
We have...
We have hundreds of hours of recordings which take double or triple that long to try to code and then write up for studies.
So we have several years more of working with this dataset.
But in the meantime, I also want to expand the study, get a more representative sample, To get more samples of corporal punishment, to try to replicate what we found and expand it, try it out in different socioeconomic groups, and see to what extent we can generalize what we found.
We'll be trying some new methodology to see if we can speed up the process and make it automatic a bit more.
So we're going to be using some equipment that will automatically transcribe the words heard on the recordings, which won't necessarily spot the corporal punishment incidents, but then we can at least zoom into the Conflictual incidents and then listen for the spanking or slapping that often occurs around those.
So those are our plans right now to continue on with the data set but also expand with a new data set and larger sample.
Well, fantastic.
And we'll, of course, put links to your book and to your websites on the link to the show.
I really appreciate it.
I mean, having this kind of data, you know, we can make a moral case, but having this kind of data is enormously helpful for activists like me to be able to go out and help people to understand how things can be done better.
So I hugely appreciate the work that you're doing and really look forward to the next data set that you release.
Great.
My pleasure.
Thanks very much.
▲
Export Selection