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Sept. 3, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:05
3400 Why Spanking Does Not Work | Elizabeth Gershoff and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio, back for our third interview with great friend of the show and great friend of children everywhere, Elizabeth Gershaw.
She is a developmental psychologist in addition to being a faculty research associate and associate professor of human development and family sciences at the University of Texas in Austin.
She recently published a revolutionary study called Spanking and Child Outcomes, Old Controversies and New Meta-Analysis.
Dr.
Gershaw, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Sure.
So, across the world, as you point out in the article, which we will link to below most children, 80%.
Now, I've got to tell you, that seems a little low to me, just in terms of some of the other evidence.
But let's say, parents say 80% of children are spanked or otherwise physically punished by their parents.
And it has, for thousands of years, been considered the best way to produce high-quality children.
The data Seems to, well, push back a little bit against the common prejudices, as it so often does.
So I wonder if you could give people an overview of what you found.
Sure.
So this is a follow-up to a meta-analysis I did years ago that we talked about in previous podcasts.
And this analysis, we wanted to address some of the questions that have been remaining about the data on spanking.
How strong is it?
Can we say that it's just spanking that has these negative outcomes for kids?
Or is it just spanking that's really harsh?
So one of the criticisms of my first meta-analysis was that I included things like hitting children with objects.
And I did that because in the United States, a quarter of parents use objects to hit children.
And so that's pretty common.
I would say that with that kind of frequency, that's part of just normal physical punishment.
But a lot of people agree that that could be harmful to children, that could injure them.
So we thought, okay, we'll find studies that didn't use that, that used just spanking as most people would recognize it, so hitting a child on the behind.
And then we looked at 50 years of research and looked to see what associations were between spanking and a variety of children's outcomes.
And we found that across all these studies, every study that was statistically significant found a link between spanking and a negative outcome for children.
We found that spanking was not linked with immediate compliance, which is, of course, parents' main goal when they're disciplining their children.
So it does not make their behavior better.
It's not linked with what we call kind of pro-social moral behavior.
And it's actually linked with more aggression, more antisocial behavior, so actually more of what parents are trying to prevent.
And then we found that it's linked with several unintended consequences, that the more children are spanked, the more mental health problems they have, the worse their relationship with their parents, and then unfortunately the more likely they are to be physically abused by their parents.
So that's kind of the sum of what we found.
Well, and the question which has arisen, or I guess the perspectives that a lot of parents take, is number one, you know, of course, the two examples you always hear are reaching for the boiling part of water on the stove and running into the street and so on.
So there's this idea that it's kind of like a sort of one of those invisible dog collars, you know, to try and discourage children from pursuing particular activities.
And also, there is, of course, the goal that it is going to internalize moral standards.
Now, surely, as parents, what we want to do is to have our children Not run around the world waiting for the big giant hand from the sky to hit them on the butt, but to internalize moral standards so that they can be self-sufficient with their own conscience.
So with regards to keeping children safe and with regards to the transfer of moral standards to internal guides, what does the data say?
Well, it shows that spanking is not doing that.
Spanking is not linked with moral internalization.
So you're right that the main goal parents have or should have when they're disciplining their children is that they will internalize the reasons for behaving appropriately so that when we're not there, they'll make the choices we want them to make.
And spanking does not teach that.
All teaching, all spanking teaches is that children should actually avoid their parents because they don't want to get hurt.
And so that's actually bad for multiple reasons.
One, it's not teaching children why they behave in the first place.
But it also means that children are going to not be around.
They're going to try to avoid their parents so the parents won't be able to discipline them and it becomes this kind of cycle.
So it's having basically the opposite effect from what parents are intending.
One of the pushbacks that I'm sure you've heard of from time to time is this idea that if you say, well, spanking is significantly associated with lower cognitive abilities, lower self-esteem, and so on, more aggression, a lot of people say, well, you know, the problem is, you see, That the children who have lower cognitive abilities and who are more aggressive and so on, they end up being spanked more, but that's the way that God made them.
That's the way they came out of the womb.
So they are more difficult, less compliant, more aggressive, maybe less intelligent.
That's why they get hit more.
In other words, it's correlation, not causation, to say that spanking is responsible for these outcomes.
Right.
And that is a very logical argument.
And it is true.
I and others have looked at that to see if children's aggression is eliciting more spanking from children over time.
And it does.
The more aggressive children are, the more parents spank them.
But there's still an effect of spanking on increased aggression over time.
So even taking into account how aggressive a child is to begin with, They increase in aggression over time the more they're spanked.
I've also done another analysis looking at the really high aggressive kids versus the really low aggressive kids and spanking predicts aggression across all those groups.
The low, medium and high aggression groups.
So we're not, there's no evidence that spanking is working for those kids or that Any negative links between spanking and aggression are accounted for by kids being aggressive in the first place.
So we use analyses to kind of take that into account, and there's just no support for the argument that spanking is good for those kids.
It's not working for any child, no matter how aggressive they are to begin with.
And I guess it may, in fact, extrapolate initial behaviors, perhaps a slight tendency towards aggression, which is met with spanking, which then increases aggression, which then you get this, I guess, negative spiral of doom, where more aggression leads to more spanking, leads to more aggression, leads to more spanking.
And as you pointed out before, if it worked, should it not remediate the behavior?
When it doesn't, it tends to exacerbate it, if I understand the data correctly.
Yeah, unfortunately, it just leads to this kind of vicious cycle, and so parents have to keep using it and unfortunately escalate it, and that's when we might see it turn into physical abuse.
Parents think they have to keep doing it, and they have this belief that it works, even though there's actually no evidence to suggest that it works.
The goal of these meta-analyses is to show people with lots and lots of data, to show them with 160,000 children what these patterns look like.
Because in any individual family, you can't really see, when I discipline my child, here's how they turn out five years later.
You can't really see that in your life.
Try to guess, but you don't know for sure which one of the things that you did led to the child being how they are.
But with this data we can really look at that with spanking and find that spanking is not predicting any of the positive things we want to see in kids.
Now we don't have research on Lots of good things parents do.
Unfortunately, most of the research has been focused on spanking.
What we know works are things like being warm and responsive and having kind of a positive and trusting relationship between the parent and the child.
Creating that is super important for building a good relationship over time That the child will listen when the parents discipline them and know that the parent has their best interest at heart.
If the child distrusts the parent, then they're not going to listen to them and they're not going to internalize that discipline.
And so, you know, I'm hoping we can build a body of research now that we'll look at, okay, now we know spanking is not working.
Let's find the things that do work.
People are always asking me, what are the things that work?
And there's no single discipline technique that I can say this works all the time for all children in all situations.
The main thing we know works is having this positive parenting relationship with the child.
That kind of forms the basis of anything in the child's life and then the discipline just kind of fits in there.
And non-punitive, non-harsh discipline is definitely better.
But this positive parent-child relationship is really important.
Another pushback that I often get is when people, and if I could ban the word SWOT, I'm not much of a censor, but if I could ban the word SWOT from these discussions, I'd be very happy because people say, well, it's just a little bit of a SWOT and so on.
But the data seems to point to the fact that In terms of negative outcomes, spanking is more than halfway towards the negative outcomes associated with direct physical abuse, that they're on the same continuum.
That seems to be a very new and startling finding that, okay, so if physical abuse is three miles away down the bad road, while spanking is two or something like that, that it's not opposite to physical abuse, the outcomes of physical abuse, but along the same direction.
Right.
That is a really crucial thing that we found.
We've seen for years that there's been this link between spanking and physical abuse.
And people have said, well, but maybe the people who are abusing are also spanking.
You can't really tease them apart.
But we found several studies where we could actually tease that apart and look at just spanking and look at physical abuse in the same families.
And we found that, as you said, the effect, the relationship between spanking and negative outcomes was two-thirds the size, so two miles down the three-mile road.
of the effect of physical abuse and those same child outcomes.
So they're not two different behaviors.
People like to argue, oh, spanking is one thing and physical abuse is another thing.
They're not.
They both involve hitting children.
They both involve hurting children.
And spanking is a little less bad, but there's no evidence that it's good for children anyways.
We're not seeing opposite outcomes at all.
We're just seeing a little less bad than physical abuse.
But it does make this argument that there is a continuum of violence against children.
Spanking is along that continuum.
And interviews with abusive parents have confirmed this.
They've found that In Canada, they did a study with all physical abuse cases, and around 80%, 75-85% of cases started out as, physical abuse cases started out as discipline.
So the parents meant to discipline the child, got carried away, hit the child too long or too hard, and physically appeased them.
Which is a really sad thing.
It means that parents who are abusing their children are not doing it because they're mentally ill people who hate children.
They're just very frustrated parents who are trying to do the right, they're trying to discipline their child, and they got carried away.
And that's a really tragic situation.
Oh, I mean, I agree with you that the vast majority of people who end up hurting their children do so with reasonably decent intentions.
You know, like, in order to help my child, I must get them to conform to this particular standard.
And if you have physical violence in your arsenal and you consider it a good or perhaps the only way to get the message across...
It seems inevitable that, you know, when people think something is good and necessary, they're going to do it.
It's why people brush their teeth.
It's why people, you know, this is what people do.
But the fact is that it is so prone to escalation because if your child defies spanking and, you know, children get bigger and stronger and we parents get older and weaker.
So at what point are you going to stop escalating?
Like if the threat of physical violence through spanking doesn't work, Where do you go from there?
And I think if you have this belief that the behavior needs to be corrected and physical aggression or violence is the way to go, where exactly do you stop?
And I think that's a very slippery slope for a lot of parents.
Unfortunately so, and I think parents who end up abusing their child, they realize that the hard way.
What they thought was discipline, they just lost control, and that's really tragic.
Now, there have been also some comments that have been made, and I'm sure we'll see some below this video, which goes along the lines of this.
You know, there's this idea at the moment that in campuses across the West, there's this hysteria, there's this fear of free speech, people need safe spaces and so on, and there's this general sense of endangerment through language.
And a lot of people say, ah, you know, well, you see, spanking has gone down, and now we have these precious snowflakes who can't handle disagreement and so on.
It doesn't make any sense to me because as a parent I negotiate with my child and we are of course free to disagree with each other and we find common ground.
So it seemed to me that non-coercive parenting would lead people to be better able to handle or settle disputes through language.
Have you heard anything like this and does your data overlap with any of these issues?
We didn't test these kinds of things exactly.
What I will say, my first retort to that argument is that most parents, at least in the United States, are still spanking.
I don't know what it is in Canada and other countries, but 80% of parents are still spanking.
So it's not true that children aren't being spanked.
If they're not being behaved well now and are precious and millennials or whatever we want to call them, it's not because they're not being spanked.
They were.
That argument doesn't really fly.
I think that spanking is just one behavior.
Any single parenting behavior is just one behavior.
The reason why a whole generation might be turning out a certain way is not because of one behavior.
I would argue the biggest effect on this current generation is something that we all have, which is the internet.
Why are we not talking about that?
Spanking is not the reason why these kids are turning out the way they are.
They have exposure to so many more things than any generation previous.
They see the world in a very different way than we did.
I don't think we can pin this on discipline in particular.
If a parent decides not to spank, that does not mean that they're not going to be a disciplinarian.
It does not mean that they won't be strict or hold children to high standards and require that they be respectful of other people.
My children will be the first to tell you that they do not live in a non-strict household.
Just because I don't speak does not mean that I am not strict.
Hold them to certain expectations and expect them to be nice to other people and to think about other people's feelings and the way their actions have effects on other people.
I'm trying to raise them to be good people who think about others and think about being responsible.
We do that by teaching them, by talking to them about why those values are important and then leading by example.
You know, if we behave those ways, that is one of the best ways that our children learn to behave well is by seeing how we act.
And if we use violence, then that's what they're going to use.
Well, I want to get to that because it almost seems like people frame this false dichotomy of parenting almost like you're at war.
You know, at war you either win or you lose.
There's no win-win in war.
And of course, so it's either you dominate them or they run completely hog wild and they're like savages in the jungle and so on.
And I think it's been well shown, according to the literature that I've read, that children flourish best with clear guidelines, expected behaviors, and so on.
Totalitarianism, as has been pointed out, is not a system of strict laws but of no laws.
It's arbitrariness and so on.
And that arbitrary, capricious nature of aggressive parenting seems to have the most negative outcomes.
If children know in a peaceful way what is expected of them and what behaviors are good and what behaviors are not going to be accepted, they seem to flourish very well.
Just as if you play chess and you follow the rules, You're going to have a lot more fun.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, kids thrive on structure and on knowing what's expected of them.
I mean, being permissive is not the way to go either.
I mean, kids who have no structure and no supervision are going to get in lots of trouble and hurt themselves and not learn how to behave.
So there's a happy medium, and that's kind of what we should be aiming for is Just enough structure, but with lots of warmth, so children learn that they're always accepted and loved no matter what happens, but we want to hold them to high expectations, and we're going to try to teach them and guide them in their behavior.
Parenting, I think one of the reasons people spank, which they don't really talk about, is that it's easy.
It's quick, it's easy, it's done.
And people are like, okay, I've done my job.
I've spanked them.
Parenting is not that easy.
You just can't do one thing and think that's going to fix everything.
It takes a lot of time.
It takes patience.
It takes repeatedly giving the same message over and over, which can be really annoying as a parent, but that's our job.
Our job is to always be there and say, no, you still can't write on the wall.
Even if you use a pencil, you still can't write on the wall.
You just have to keep giving the same messages.
But slowly, that does sink in.
But I think a point that you made earlier is a good one, that parenting is a negotiation.
And even from early ages, we can do this with kids.
And it doesn't mean that we're giving up power by negotiating with them and saying, well, what do you think is the appropriate punishment here?
And it doesn't mean that you have to go with exactly what they say, but if you give them some investment in what's going to happen to them, then they understand that there's consequences to their behaviors.
And so giving children practice with making choices, both, you know, before a discipline is necessary.
So, you know, do they want to wear certain kind of clothes?
So you can give them choices.
So they start to learn how to make choices that are really safe and have no consequence.
So that when bigger choices come along, they've practiced that.
They know how to do that.
They know to come to us when they need advice.
So they kind of learn how to negotiate their environment.
They know how to learn how to negotiate with us.
And then in the adult world, we solve problems through negotiation.
We don't solve problems through hitting each other.
We don't hit our coworkers when we disagree with them.
We have to sit down and negotiate with them.
And so isn't it better if they learn those skills now and we're not giving them examples of using violence when we don't want them to do that as adults?
Parenting becomes exponentially more challenging when the world keeps changing.
You know, when all we did was photocopy prior generations, you could pretty much just teach what you were taught and everything would be fine.
But we're trying to design or help grow kids for a knowledge economy, negotiation-based, lots of competition and so on.
And let's talk a little bit about the cycle of violence.
Because, as the study points out, there is...
A risk of repeating physical aggression against children if you yourself are spanked.
And also there's a risk of being subjected to physical abuse in other relationships, in spousal or boyfriend-girlfriend relationships and so on.
I can't imagine that there's many parents out there who think that's a great outcome, that what they're doing is going to raise their children's risk of being physically abused in an adult relationship.
What does the data say about that?
Well, data we have shows a couple of things.
One is that the more we were spanked as children ourselves, the more likely we are to want to spank our own children and to think spanking is a good thing.
Which sets up this weird cycle of perpetuation of spanking throughout generations.
We do it because it was done to us and done to our parents and done to our grandparents.
Is that really a good reason to keep doing something?
We learn lots of things about how children grow in the last several years of research.
One example I like to give is that when I was a child, my parents' car didn't have seatbelts.
And we just bounced around in the back of the car.
Would I want to do that with my children?
No.
Just because my parents did it with me, I've learned, as a society, we have learned that seatbelts can really save lives.
And so I don't do what my parents did.
I don't have to condemn my parents.
I don't have to say, oh, you were bad parents.
Why did you do that to me?
That was what was the norm.
There wasn't even any seatbelts in the car.
They couldn't have put seatbelts on me.
I think what sometimes people have trouble with is letting go of the previous generation because it seems like we're condemning them or thinking that they don't love us or something like that.
I think we can acknowledge that they love us and meant well, but they made a mistake or they did something that What we now know is not great.
And we can kind of stop that generation and stop that cycle.
So that's one aspect of the cycle of violence.
The other aspect you mentioned is going forward into romantic relationships.
When children are young and they love their parents and believe their parents love them, if violence is part of that relationship, they will associate violence and love, violence and trust, or lack of trust, and kind of see that forward in relationships into the future.
We know from the research on attachment that children develop something called an internal working model of how relationships work, and so when children develop attachments with their parents, If they start to work in violence to how a relationship works, then they will seek that out when they're adults, unfortunately.
And they may seek that out as the aggressor.
They might be the one who's actually committing the violence, or they might be a victim.
Either way, it's because violence and love are kind of melded together in their minds, unfortunately.
And that's a really tragic consequence also.
And indeed, parents are not thinking about that when they're spanking.
They're just thinking, I want the kid to stop right now.
They're not thinking this is going to have long-term impacts on kids' lives and how they interact with other people and their mental health.
And so that's why it's so important to kind of get people talking about this and reconsidering it as early in children's lives as possible.
Yeah, I mean, I've made the point before that if you're not currently using a rotary phone, rotary dial phone, and for my younger listeners, I don't even know what that, it's just like it's a spinny wheel thing that you use to dial people.
It's connected to the wall.
Yeah, and yeah, remember those long, like you sort of try and have a long distance call and get yanked off your feet.
But if you're not using a rotary dial phone or a switchboard operator, but you have a cell phone, then you're perfectly willing to upgrade things as new information and new technology becomes available.
And this is just information that Which is a way of helping you make different decisions that, you know, a lot of this information wasn't available in the past.
And that's something that I wanted to mention as well.
Now, I don't know if you've...
I get this question a lot.
Like, I do a call-in show and parents call in and, you know, they've been convinced by the arguments that people like yourself and myself have put forward.
And they say, okay, well, I have been a spanker for many years and I wish...
To change it.
And how can I go about doing that?
We don't want this intergenerational change.
It's a little too slow.
We kind of want to transition people more in the here and now.
Do you have any suggestions or is there anything out there that you think is a good resource for helping parents to make the transition away from spanking and towards more peaceful and negotiation-based parenting styles?
Well...
There are lots of websites out there.
I can't rattle off a whole bunch now, but there are a bunch of resources that are trying to encourage parents to use positive discipline.
So if people search for positive discipline, that's kind of the catchphrase right now for discipline that doesn't involve punishment.
It involves kind of talking with children and leading by example and things like that.
Joan Durant from the University of Manitoba has created a positive discipline program with Save the Children that's been delivered around the world and has been shown to be effective.
There's lots of different...
I would encourage people to go to parenting classes in their communities.
In every community there are organizations that work on developing non-punitive parenting.
And I think that what parents will find is that they are doing most of the things that work well with kids.
It's going to be a matter of just taking out the spanking and the yelling and just doing more of the things that they probably do already.
They just didn't realize that those things were the things that were working and those are the things that teach.
The spanking and the yelling are the kind of unnecessary ways that we show our own anger.
The teaching part is actually the part we want to keep.
And most parents do that already.
And so I think parents will find it's not as hard as, I would think, it's not as hard as they are imagining.
It's not like they have to learn new tools, just they have to use the tools they already have more and to just drop a couple out of their kind of arsenal.
Yeah, the sort of analogy that popped into my head is if you're watching a wonderful classical pianist and then every now and then they pound their forehead into the keys, or pound their fists into the keys like a kid, like a toddler with a xylophone, if you say, hey, you know, your music would be a little bit more pleasant if you didn't pound your head into the keys, you're not saying don't play piano, we're just saying don't play piano with the head pounding.
That would be a much more...
That is a lovely analogy.
I like that a lot.
I might use that again.
Please feel free to spread as well.
So I think that the summation, it was fair to say, is that there are a lot of Hidden costs, costs that take a long time or slowly escalate into significant problems associated with spanking.
And now the data shows clearly that you don't get the out of, well, you know, it's not physical abuse and therefore it's on the same, it's two-thirds of the way to physical abuse as far as the negative outcomes.
It's not not smoking, it's smoking less.
And not a lot less either.
You know, two-thirds of a pack a day isn't going to do you much better than a pack a day.
Right.
Lower cognitive ability, fear-based avoidance of parents, parents' loss of moral authority.
You know, if somebody's hitting you and people say, well, there's a swat on the butt, but you're five times their size, for heaven's sake.
Some 30-foot guy comes along and whacks you on the butt.
I mean, it's going to be terrifying.
And so this lower cognitive ability, lower self-esteem, increased problems, antisocial behavior, increased aggression, You think that spanking is trying to solve these problems.
The data seems to point to the fact that spanking is creating and exacerbating these problems.
But it's probably never too late to turn around, to have better information, to make amends, and to commit to something better.
And just before we close off, recently I was, of course, saddened.
Well, you know, it's hard to say.
I mean, he lived a ripe, good life, Dr.
Murray Strauss, who was on this show talking about...
His book, The Primordial Violence, Spanking Children's Psychological Development, Violence, and Crime, by Dr.
Murray A. Strauss, we will put the link to that below, and struck me as, you know, a man to emulate, you know, a noble man who worked very hard his whole life to bring great information to people to make better decisions as parents, and My argument from a moral, philosophical, and historical standpoint is that if we can treat children better, the future will be a glorious place.
And if we can't, well, quite the opposite may occur.
Now, I know that you had New Murray Strauss.
Is there anything that you wanted to add or any reminiscences you'd like to share on his passing?
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a loss for the field and for society in general.
I mean, he was such an advocate for children and was just unapologetic in wanting to protect children and was one of the first researchers who really came out and said, spanking is violence.
Like, let's just call it what it is.
Instead of using a euphemism, let's just call it what it is.
And that, I think, shook the field a lot to really think, wow, I guess, yeah, maybe it is violence.
It is hitting.
And he just kind of kept at that and published lots of research on He talked about family violence generally.
And so he really elevated the conversation and brought in data to show people, look, we have data.
We can show you that spanking is not good for kids.
Even if you don't agree morally with it, if you believe in data, here's the data.
And so he was really a moral force for the field.
He's a big loss.
He was a lovely man, and we all try to kind of keep his spirit alive by continuing this research and continuing his message that there's just no place for hitting children in any relationship, and it should be in any society.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a fairly decent principle that you should not do to your children what would land you in jail doing to a stranger on the street, as you mentioned.
So I really, really appreciate your time.
Of course, the meta-analysis, I love people who can show off their math skills and thus relegate me back to making merely syllogistical moral arguments.
But it's great to have the data behind this information.
And as you point out, you know, once Once the mind is stretched by a new idea, it never really regains its original shape.
And the idea that spanking is on the continuum of physical abuse, it is associated with massive negative outcomes, it's eminently avoidable, and you'll have a happier and better relationship with your children.
And we do all of us in the sort of slow, somewhat dismal, occasionally climb towards a better world.
We all have to confront things that we're doing that could be improved, and that is the essence of civilization.
The work that you're doing is fantastic.
You know, having the fistful of data to back up the moral arguments is beyond valuable and I really, really appreciate all of the work that you're doing in this field.
Well, thank you.
Thanks for having me.
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