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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:51
Parenting Without Punishment - Dr Elizabeth Gershoff Interviewed
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
I hope you're doing very well.
I have Elizabeth Gershoff.
She is a developmental psychologist who studies how parenting generally, and discipline in particular, affect children's development.
She is interested in how parenting affects children differently within contexts of poverty and low income, neighborhoods, schools, and culture.
She is also interested in associations between children's exposure to various forms of violence from parents, communities, and terrorism, and their mental health and risk behaviors.
Dr. Girshoff is a PI on an NICHD grant examining the dynamic effects of income and material hardship on parents and children over time.
She is co-investigator on a CDC funded project examining the long-term effectiveness of a school-based violence prevention program and co-investigator on an NIMH funded project identifying the developmental outcomes for children with comorbid depression and conduct disorder.
Her research combines longitudinal and hierarchical methods for understanding the dynamic and multilayered context of children's lives.
Her recently published work has appeared in Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Psychology, Public Policy and Law, Applied Developmental Science and Psychological Bulletin.
And I really do appreciate you taking your time.
I realize how busy you are and that we only have 92 seconds before your next commitment.
So I really do appreciate the time.
So you've written some very powerful work that I hugely admire and I recognize that the The discipline of psychology and psychiatry in particular as a whole seems to be a little bit tentative around this question of physical punishment.
So I wonder if we could just start off by defining how you define punishment in your typical research approach.
So primarily I am focused on parents use of spanking which is just most people do it as a swat on the child's behind with an open hand.
So that's a very specific definition.
Sometimes I use the term physical punishment, which is a broader category that can include things like a parent using an object to hit a child.
So a paddle, a wooden spoon, things like that.
And that can also include things like making a child wash their mouth out with soap when they say a bad word.
There's various things parents do as physical punishments.
There's another term called corporal punishment, which is the same thing as physical punishment.
Physical and corporal are the same.
The term corporal punishment tends to be used more often in Europe.
Canada, I think some.
In the U.S., we primarily use physical punishment when talking about parents' use of it.
Although, interestingly enough, when we talk about physical punishment in schools, which we still have here in the U.S., it is called corporal punishment.
In schools here in the U.S., it's usually a paddle that's used to administer the physical punishment.
It's not usually a hand of a principal.
They usually use an object to hit the children.
So I think that's a definition.
So there is a difference, which I think whenever I've debated this with people, I tend to get into this slippery, foggy land where people will conflate a punishment with restraint.
I was wondering if you could differentiate between the two.
Right.
That's a very important distinction.
So a restraint is to keep a child from hurting themselves or hurting other people.
So if a child is about to run into the street, which is an example I get a lot as an example of when a child might be paddled or spanked, instead of hitting that child, you grab the child and hold them so they don't run into the street and hurt themselves.
So that is a restraint that's meant to protect a child.
If a child is about to hurt somebody else, if they're about to hit somebody, you could also restrain them to keep them from hurting somebody else.
So the point is to stop any kind of pain.
The restraint is not comfortable, but it's not meant to be a punishment in and of itself.
It is meant to protect the child and other people from pain.
And it's also not something that is morally specific to children.
I mean, if I'm walking down the street and I see some blind guy with headphones on about to walk in front of a bus, I'm going to pull him back.
That's not the same as assaulting him or hitting him.
Oh, right.
Exactly.
It's all about protecting that person, whoever they might be.
And so it is fundamentally different, I think, than physical punishment, which is You know, it's not necessary at all to protect the child from themselves or from some dangerous situation.
It's kind of a gratuitous pain that now the parent has delivered on top of whatever has just happened to the child.
Right.
And there seems to be, again, I find it quite frustrating when talking about this topic, I doubt with you, but with other people, where spanking is a word that seems to me invented to avoid using the word hitting.
But the problem is, of course, that spanking is specifically designed to cause enough pain to create corrections in behavior.
So people say, well, it's just a little swat on the butt with their clothes on.
But that's not spanking in the way that I understand it, because it has to be painful enough to elicit a change in behavior.
So it has to be frightening and painful enough that I'm not sure why we wouldn't use the word hitting.
That is a contradiction that I can't quite get my head around either.
What we know from animal studies of punishment is that it's the pain that's the punisher.
When a mouse is zapped with electricity or something, they stop what they're doing because they just experienced pain.
That same fundamental Um, that's the same fundamental behind why a child stops doing what they're doing when they're hurt by the parent who's spanking them.
And so it's that pain that's the punisher.
And so it's very bizarre to me when parents say, Oh, I don't hit him hard enough to hurt him.
So then if you're not, if you're not doing the punishment, then why are you doing it?
Um, I think then it becomes more of a power issues.
The parent wants to show that they're more powerful than the child, that they could hurt them, I guess.
Although I would argue that even a small tap is painful and it is a violation of that person, that child's right to physical protection and to protection from violence in particular.
Right.
And there's no adult defense called, I didn't hit that hard.
I mean, there are obviously different degrees of hitting, but there's no adult.
And I think this great challenge we have in extending full personhood to children is is a fundamental challenge.
I would say the most fundamental challenge we have to move forward as a species, but that may be hyperbolic, but that's my approach. - No, actually, I agree.
I fundamentally agree. - Now, in America, whenever you talk about Western culture, in general, you have to say, Western culture, blah, blah, blah, except America, because America has this exceptionalism in terms of religiosity, it has this exceptionalism in terms of the rights of children, because America has this exceptionalism in terms of religiosity, it has this exceptionalism So I was wondering if you could talk about, there is this slow erosion of an acceptance of physical punishment in children.
This really occurred, the founding of the Republic in the 1960s, it was really, really high, and it seems to have eroded a little bit Over the past few decades.
Could you talk a bit about that and why you think it might be happening?
It has been happening over the last few decades.
We've seen it in a couple different avenues.
For one, more and more states in the United States have stopped allowing physical punishment in schools.
So that's one step.
Is that now the majority of states do not allow it.
And that I think has come from people beginning to realize maybe we don't want other people hitting our kids.
But they haven't come quite around to we don't want to hit our own kids.
But that said, in the last several decades, there's been a lot more research about other alternatives to physical punishment in disciplining children, and there's been burgeoning literature on parenting in parenting advice books.
If you go to any bookstore, you will see a huge section on parenting advice.
All kinds of, you know, Parenting for Dummies, you know, for example, those kinds of books.
And then books written from experts.
And they give, consistently they give examples of how to discipline without hitting children.
And so, the more these books come out and the more parents who read them, they realize, hmm, I don't have to hit them to discipline them.
There's other things that I can and should do instead.
And once people have something to substitute for physical punishment, then it will slowly go out of our repertoire of things to do.
I think the problem has been up till then and now parents have not been always clear what to do instead and they were raised that way and it's hard to change those intergenerational patterns and especially if you don't have something to substitute in its place.
So now that we have a conversation nationally and internationally about using things like timeout and positive discipline, we can use those things to substitute for physical punishment.
I think that's very true.
I also think that For parents who have used physical punishment, it's not only hard to change intergenerationally, but within a family.
I was just in New York this last weekend.
I was talking at a conference and I was doing my usual nagging of parents to not spank their children and one of the comments that I got back and I get back quite consistently is, Well, you know, I mean, I've already laid the tracks in this direction so far.
Turning this around is going to be really tough because you kind of have to say, look, I've made a mistake or I've done something wrong or I want to do something different.
You have to almost apologize and commit to difference and then stick to it.
For a lot of parents who have a sort of I'm bigger, therefore I'm right approach, that's, I think, a tough supertanker to turn around.
It's true.
I have a couple things to say that one is I do get that message as well from parents say, well, I need it as a last resort.
Otherwise they'll never, you know, they'll never do what I say.
And I think that it is okay to say, I think parents sometimes have to admit they made a mistake and that is okay.
And that actually can strengthen the relationship with the child who says, Oh, my parents make mistakes too.
And it can really build a lot of trust because you said, okay, look, I made a mistake.
I'm trusting you.
I'm going to tell you this and we're going to go around this other path.
Now, it does not mean that, that the parent's going to be lenient.
I think.
People have this misconception that if you don't spank or hit your children, then you don't discipline them at all and they'll be running around in the streets, which is of course ridiculous.
There are so many parents who don't spank do lots of other things to keep their children behaved and teach them right from wrong.
And so parents who don't spank have to do all those things.
So if a parent decides not to spank, they have to keep doing these other things and they may need to use other forms of
Reinforcement or encouragement or taking away privileges and other kinds of less harsh punishments in the meantime, but they Just taking away physical punishment I would think would actually strengthen the relationship between the parent and the child if the parent says the child look I don't want to hurt you anymore and I don't want you to be scared of me, and I don't want you to be Hurt by me, and so I've decided not to do that anymore if a parent had that conversation with the child the child is
Would be really amazed for one thing and would learn to trust and understand why the parent was doing what they did.
And the parent could explain, I didn't really know better.
I didn't know what else to do instead.
And I have done that with my own children.
I have not hit my children, but I have raised my voice on occasion.
And then I say to them, I apologize.
That was, that was not respectful to you.
I was angry and I'm sorry.
And I'm going to try not to do it again.
And then the kids go, okay.
And then they know that they can apologize and they can get, but it's a two way street.
And that's kind of the way life is.
Um, and so teaching the kids those skills by example, I think is really important.
So I guess the take home message is that parents need to understand that just that by not physically punishing, that does not mean that you're not disciplining.
Well, and I would argue that you're, I mean, what you're doing if you're not hitting them is you're teaching them rather than punishing them, which is how you train, I don't know, you wouldn't even be allowed to train a dog that way.
And so you're not teaching, you get the option to teach your children rather than just frighten them, which I think we all kind of want as parents.
I would hope so.
I would hope so.
Now, another thing that concerns me about spanking is that it is not class neutral.
It is not culture neutral.
It is not race neutral.
And so I wonder if you could talk about some of the risk factors that increase the likelihood that spanking is going to be used within a family.
Well, I wouldn't call them risk factors exactly, but I would say there are cultural differences in the use of physical punishment.
So in the United States, it's been well demonstrated that African Americans in particular are more likely to use physical punishment than whites, Hispanics, Asians in the United States.
Exactly why that is, we don't know.
It could come from a whole history of things.
Some of it is tied to religious beliefs.
People who hold very conservative Christian beliefs tend to be more in favor of very harsh punishments of children.
And you tend to see those more conservative Christian associations among particularly African Americans in the South and the United States.
Some people have tied it to a history of slavery, unfortunately, which is a really tragic association.
Whatever it might be, we do know that blacks in the United States are more likely to use it.
However, once you take into account those differences and how often people use it, research that I have done and others have done has shown that there's no difference in The effect spanking has over time, that across all of these groups.
So I recently did a study looking at a large national sample of 13,000 American children, white, black, Hispanic and Asian.
And what we found is that spanking predicted aggression over time across the groups equally.
There was no difference.
And so, what that says to me is that the experience of being hit has the same effect on kids no matter what color their skin.
And that is kind of my fundamental understanding of that, is that the way children process being hit, even by a parent, is going to be the same.
There's the same cognitive processes, the same emotional processes, and it doesn't matter what color the skin.
The child has.
There has been an argument that of something called cultural normativeness, which I don't know if you've heard that term thrown around, but in the research world, people talk about this cultural normativeness idea, which is that if a culture does something a lot, um, it's a very common part of practice in their culture.
Then the, any negative effects of it will be lessened because it's so common because the children basically expect it and accept it.
Right.
So if everybody spanks, then it's not as traumatic as if you're the only kid being spanked.
Exactly.
That is the argument.
But this research I just mentioned does not support that at all.
That it doesn't seem to have any effect.
That it's still bad.
And I've also done a study looking at six different countries around the world and again found that no matter how normative it is in the culture, spanking was still associated with more aggression and more anxiety.
in children across all six countries.
Right, so let's talk about that because the argument of course is that there seems to be this meme floating around and it seems to have been floating around since the dawn of time which is that kids these days they don't listen, they're not respectful, they're brats and the reason for that is that parents are too lenient and that seems to be one of the major trenches dug between the spanking no spanking front lines.
What does the data say about the effect of spanking on children's aggressiveness and sociability and behavior as a whole?
Well, there's two answers to that.
Number one, although spanking has gone down over time, the majority of children are still spanked at some point in their lives.
Upwards of 80-90% of children are spanked at some point in the United States.
And I would hazard to guess many similar proportions in Canada.
So, it's not right to say that Anything in child's behavior is linked to less spanking because the spanking is still happening a lot.
What we also know is that people often link it to juvenile crime.
You know, there's kids running around the streets and being delinquent and all these awful things.
Well, it turns out that there was a peak in juvenile crime that's been widely demonstrated in around 1994 and then since then has gone down precipitously and kind of flattened out in recent years.
So we have not seen At least in the very extreme of child problem behaviors, juvenile crime has not gone up over time and in fact has gone down in the last 20 years.
So there's no evidence on that end.
What we do know is that the more children are spanked, the more likely they are to be aggressive over time, to be delinquent over time, to have problematic behaviors with their parents, to have mental health problems.
We now know there are some links with lower cognitive performance.
We know that these kids experience less self-esteem.
There's a whole host of negative problems that are associated with more spanking.
I think why people don't see that is because a lot of these behaviors happen over time and what a parent sees in the moment is they hit their child, they stop what they're doing.
Which is not that much of a surprise because I would stop what I was doing if somebody hit me.
It's shocking, it's surprising, it gets your attention.
But it doesn't teach children how to behave better over time and it gives them no reason to behave better over time.
If children are not taught lessons about empathy and sharing and thinking about other people's feelings.
And why it makes sense to share your belongings and behave appropriately if they don't get any of those lessons There's no reason they don't understand why they should control their behavior because as humans we all have instincts and you know things that self-regulation problems that need to be kind of you need to learn how to control these instincts and impulses that we have and so children need help learning those things and they need to be given reasons why and
And so spanking doesn't teach any of that.
All it teaches is if someone's bigger and stronger, they can hurt you and get you to stop what you're doing and control your behavior.
It teaches you that sometimes people will hurt you in life, even when you least expect it, even people that you love, which is a very problematic lesson.
And it also teaches that Well, I guess those are kind of the main, I guess I'll stop at those two main.
Well, I would add that it creates a sort of hunter and hunted relationship between parent and child in that the child realizes that the problem is not the behavior, but getting caught.
So it creates a sort of subterranean spy based child hideout place where you'll just do it in the next room rather than where the parent is.
It doesn't teach anything useful.
Exactly.
It just becomes kind of a big brother thing.
If mom is watching, then I will behave.
And if she's not, or if I'm at school and she can't see me, then I'm going to do whatever I want.
And that's clearly not what parents want.
I mean, that's just the opposite of discipline.
Discipline is self-regulation and behaving appropriately.
And we want kids to do that no matter what situation they're in and whether or not the parent is there watching.
And that is something that takes some of the Empirical testability that many parents claim.
They say, well, I spank my child because my child misbehaves.
But if they look at the long view, statistically, the likelihood seems to be that the child is going to end up exhibiting more of the behaviors that got them spanked in the first place.
And so if parents were empirically testing the theory as they went forward, they would at least question it.
But it seems like they so often tend to double down and say, well, I need to hit more, I need to yell more, because then you end up with this just, you know, wacky, wacky screech fest that is just the opposite, I think, of any kind of positive relationship.
And I have to ask, if you have to keep doing it, it's probably not working.
Right.
Um, you know, if your child is still aggressing and yelling, then that's probably not working.
You probably should try something else.
Um, and the irony is that parents often hit when the child has aggressed against somebody else.
And that is just, it's one of these sad ironies in parenting, but you hear parents say they whack their child and say, you know, this is what it feels like to hurt somebody, to hit, you know, to hit somebody and you know, don't hit your brother.
And you know, there's very mixed messages of you're not supposed to hit, but I can hit.
Oh, I don't know if it's anecdotal or true, but the story of the sister who hits her brother and when the mother says, why?
He says, well, I'm playing mommy.
I mean, it's tragic, but I think there's truth in that anecdote.
Now, what is meant by unintended negative side effects, which I think is in your literature and other literature that I've read in this topic, which parents may not have the training to see?
So parents' main goals when they're disciplining are to improve behavior in the short term and the long term.
And usually that means kind of more obedience or compliance, but also behaving appropriately.
So we want children to be pro-social.
We want them to share.
We want them to do what they're told, be polite.
You know, all the goals parents have for appropriate behavior for their children.
Those are the goals of discipline, regardless of whether it's physical punishment or whether it's some other kind of discipline.
And so those are kind of what parents intend, and they intend increases in those things and decreases in things they don't like, such as kids talking back and hitting other people or hitting them.
One thing to look at is, okay, well, does it do the things the parents want?
And so those are the intended consequences.
So what we find is that no, in fact, spanking kids does not make them more compliant in the short or long term.
It does not make them better behave.
It does not make them more pro-social or empathic or anything like that, or have socially competent behavior.
So it's not doing the things parents want.
Those are the intended consequences.
But if we look at the unintended consequences, it's a whole host of things that parents would never think.
are related to physical punishment, such as cognitive development.
I think it's been linked with lower IQ scores, even.
But things like mental health.
I'm sure no parent spanks their child and thinks it's going to have an effect on their mental health.
They don't think that they're making their mental health better or worse.
They just don't even think about it.
So an unintended consequence is that the more children are spanked, the more likely they are to be depressed, anxious, suicidal, things like that.
It doesn't mean of course that all children are depressed, anxious, or suicidal.
It just means that the more often they are spanked, the more likely they are to have those outcomes.
So those are the unintended consequences that we're thinking about is effects on the relationship with the parent, effects on the child's mental health in the short term and the long term.
And another big unintended consequence is child abuse.
There have been many studies linking parents' frequency of using physical punishment with the likelihood that they use abusive techniques against their children that will cause lasting injury and harm.
And so that is, that's an unintended consequence that parents will always say, Oh, I would never do that.
But unfortunately, when parents spank, they are opening that door of possibly hurting their child.
If you never hit your child, there's never a chance that you're going to abuse them.
But if you ever hit your child and you ever hit your child, when you're angry or really out of control, you risk the chance of really hurting and abusing your child.
Yeah, it's hard for people to see that because they think that you're in control of a child when you're spanking, but I mean, if you're hitting a child, particularly with an implement, I mean, they turn, they twist at just the wrong time, you hit an eye, you hit some other sensitive body part, and suddenly you're in a situation of, you know, unintended, extremely negative consequences, which can have a lifelong effect for the child and your family.
Exactly.
And that gets to the slippery slope between physical punishment and physical abuse, and I, after many years of thinking about this, I really believe that there's definitely a connection between them and that it is a, there is a slippery slope that if you spank, you're more likely to do these things.
And they are the same behavior in most instances that a parent hitting a child once we call If they hit them 30 times, we might call that physical abuse.
If they hit them with a wooden paddle, we might say, okay, that's spanking.
If they hit them with a 2x4, we might call that abuse.
It's all in a matter of degree.
And I have come to the conclusion that any hitting is wrong.
And so, I think it's all hitting and it's just a matter of the euphemisms we use to talk about it.
And the euphemisms are there for a reason, because I think there is a level of discomfort with hitting kids that people do fudge the terms.
And the argument I also hear, of course, is that children, I mean, sort of run something like this.
Children are cognitively deficient.
Therefore, you can't reason with them.
Therefore, the only corrective behavior that's available to you as a parent is hitting.
And I mean, I don't believe that's true.
Actually, I had Alison Gopnik on the show a while back talking about how amazingly you can reason with children.
And I've certainly found that to be the case with my own daughter.
But even if we were to accept that to be true, we would never accept that in any other field.
We'd never say in some old age home where some elderly person has Alzheimer's.
That we can spank that person because they have a cognitive deficiency or for children who are developmentally handicapped that we can spank them because they have an extra cognitive deficiency.
So in no other area of life do we accept that a cognitive deficiency, which of course childhood is to some degree, makes it okay to hit.
But it's just in this special area of children and that to me is astounding from a moral standpoint.
Yeah, I have a hard time arguing with that because I don't even know where to start.
There are so many reasons why that is just wrong.
And it's also true that you can't hit animals.
I mean, you can go to jail for beating an animal.
And that's the same kind of argument.
I mean, it's just kind of ridiculous.
To me, if you were to say that children, and it's true, children do have reduced abilities to reason and understand reasoning when they're young.
But that means that you as a parent need to do a better job of protecting that child.
Below age two or two-and-a-half, there's not much call for discipline as we think about it.
There's no reason to punish a child who's younger than two-and-a-half, I would say.
They're still developing.
They're still understanding cause and effect.
They're not doing things intentionally.
And if they are, they just need to be It needs to be demonstrated to them.
They need to be kind of rewarded for doing positive things.
They're just kind of exploring And there's no reason to punish children that are that young in the first place So I would say I that argument.
I don't really understand at all But so I'm with you that I think that's kind of a ridiculous argument, but I would say to people Okay, that might be true.
So instead just focus your energy on If a child keeps going for the electrical socket, then you either have to put something in front of the electrical socket so they don't get there, or you have to change the child's environment some other way.
That's the parent's job.
Parenting is not easy, and it means that we have to always be thinking ahead and thinking like a child.
What are they going to try to get into?
What are they going to try?
What do I need to put up out of their reach?
You know, those are the kinds of parenting that we need to be doing that prevent kids from getting in situations where they could hurt themselves, which are the kind of situations people often hit.
A guy on one of my videos that I did against banking was saying, well, my sister grabbed matches, lit them and set fire to the living room and she got spanked.
What was I supposed to do?
I say, well, don't you want to make sure they're safe first?
And that's where that restraint comes in.
- Well, leaving matches around with kids.
I mean, it's the parents' failure.
You don't punish the child for what the parent has failed to do correctly. - Exactly, and that's the same thing I say when people say, "Oh, my child ran into the street.
"What was I supposed to do?" I said, "Well, don't you wanna make sure "they're safe first?" And that's where that restraint comes in, and then you can explain everything with the tone of your voice and the expression on your face.
I'm sure that child learned not to set fire to the house because they lost all their furniture, the parents were distraught, they might have had to move out of their house, I mean, all of those consequences are what taught the child.
Clearly the parents failed in not teaching the kid ahead of time that you never play with matches and you don't touch matches and if you find them you tell an adult.
There were many failures in that circumstance.
Yeah, my experience just by the by is that the greater the power disparity in a relationship, the lighter touch you need.
So you can sort of rough and tumble among equals but I remember when I was a software executive and I wanted to bring an employee into my office I would say, listen, can I borrow you for just a moment, rather than get in my office now, which could always terrify, you know, people.
So the greater the power disparity, the lighter touch is needed because children are vastly aware, enormously aware of the amount of power and size and strength and independence adults have.
So you just need such a light touch because you have so much power.
Whereas people, I think, get the sense that if you have more power, you need a heavier touch.
And that seems to me quite the opposite of what is true.
Right.
I think what people don't appreciate, and it's similar into that circumstance you mentioned, is that the kids want to please the parents.
It's a tiny little tone change that is enough to get my daughter to stop what she's doing.
to please the parents and makes the kids happy.
And I don't think parents exploit that enough.
Know that you don't have to yell and scream.
You can just give them that look and they will know that you're disappointed and that sometimes is enough.
It's a tiny little tone change that is enough to get my daughter to stop what she's doing.
As long as you haven't broken the circuits by applying too much electricity beforehand, just a little light touch.
Now, I would like to end with a slight rant.
Now, I know this is supposed to be an interview for you, but let me give you a very short rant, and I'd like to get your comments on it.
This rant does not include you, who I think has done massive and admirable work in this area.
Okay.
So, you might want to get comfortable.
Okay.
So, before I became a dad, and even before any of that was a possibility, I heard about six million different dangers to children.
You know, I mean, if my daughter walked into a store where BPA had been stored in the last year, her eyeballs were going to explode.
It was just going to be all of these things that I heard about, you know, matches and it all became, you know, lighters and childproof your home and every single conceivable danger to a child I was aware of just through popular exposure to the media.
Except when it came to looking at things like child abuse and corporal punishment or physical punishment and so on, which is by far the largest single factor that children face in society.
I mean if you could get rid of spanking or get rid of BPA it wouldn't be a coin toss as to which you would start with.
And it seems to me that the psychology and social worker and sort of child-centric professions have this information in the same way that doctors I guess early figured out links between smoking and cancer and so on.
They have this information but it doesn't seem like this information is getting out and why is the APA not taking Front page ads, you know, on every major newspaper saying, look, these are the facts.
We can't just wait for this slow cultural change for us to get down to the sort of Sweden in 1979 levels of banning corporal punishment to children.
Why is there not more drive and more energy and more effort from people who have the information to get it front and center in a society that claims that it really wants to know a lot about that which is hazardous to children?
End of rant.
And please tell me where I'm astray.
I will try to understand why that hasn't happened.
I think there is, among the people that know, the American Psychological Association is APA that you mentioned, American Academy of Pediatrics, organizations like that that know from research that physical punishment is bad for children.
They, it is a very political issue for one thing, and they don't want to be brave.
I will just say that.
They don't want to be the ones to kind of go to the forefront and say, this is it, we're done.
Now, American Academy of Pediatrics has put out a few statements saying that, A Guide to Effective Discipline is the name of one of their policy statements, saying parents should avoid spanking.
They don't say they should never spank, but they do say, they do cite all the literature saying spanking is bad and say parents should not spank and instead should do these other things.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has also, they have something called anticipatory guidance, which means that when pediatricians meet with families and their children, they are supposed to ask them several questions to find out about things.
And it's basically bicycle helmets, gun safety, and discipline.
They talk about the gun safety and the bicycle helmets, but I've never been asked about discipline by my pediatricians that I've had over the years.
The pediatricians are very reluctant to start that conversation.
One, I feel like they don't think that they are experts, even though parents see them as experts, and parents would do whatever the pediatrician said.
They want that advice.
But pediatricians feel like our domain is the physical health and not that.
We don't do social health.
The other problem is that pediatricians, if they suspect child abuse, they're obligated to report it.
Oh, so they may not want to ask because that leads them down a legal rabbit hole?
Right.
And then that means that that family will lose trust in them, they may not come back for needed medical care, and the pediatrician might decide in their head that that mental calculus, they don't want to do that.
They'd rather the family comes in and gets health care for their kids rather than not coming in.
And I can understand that.
It just means that we, as a country, we're just not brave enough to do that.
I actually wrote a report.
The American Psychological Association commissioned a task force to look at the effects of physical punishment and to create a report which we thought was going to be published by APA and it would be a statement by APA.
And I was on this commission, I wrote the report, and nothing has ever happened to me.
It's not been published.
No, no, no.
Sorry.
And it's because there are some psychologists who are in favor of spanking.
I don't quite know why.
But you would include those in the report, as you know, early on in the smoking debate.
And I mean, there were people who thought, I'm sure that smoking cigarettes helped you run marathons, but you just include all of that in the spectrum of the report and let people make their own minds up.
And I think that we, in the United States at least, we still, our government at the time, right now in Congress, is very much run by conservatives.
And As we know, they're not in support of children's rights, which is why, for the last 20 years, no one has put forward a bill to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The President of the United States does not have a commission on children in the executive branch.
We don't emphasize children as much as we think we do in the United States, unfortunately.
And I think it's going to take Some agency in the government to be more, to be braver and just say, OK, we're going to do this.
And the analogy that I like to think about is car seats, which now are, you know, you have to have car seats.
Your child has to be in a car seat to a certain age.
Every state has a different law about, you know, what age the child has to be in a certain car seat.
But everywhere across the country, the child has to be in a car seat.
When I was a child, there was no such law.
I was the oldest of five kids.
We were bouncing all around the back of the station wagon.
You know, there was no law at all.
And slowly over time, these laws have passed and people have accepted, okay, I guess it's okay for the government to tell me that it's safer for children to be in these car seats because, oh look, they're dying if they're in a car accident and they're not in a seatbelt or a car seat.
And that kind of, that understanding developed with the whole understanding of seatbelts over time.
And now we say, okay, it's okay for us to have seatbelts.
And I don't think anything worse of my parents for not putting me in a seat belt or a car seat because that was not That was they didn't it sounds terrible to say but they didn't know any better Whereas now we do know better both about car seats and about spanking We do know that spanking is bad for kids and we do know that it can lead to abuse and lots of negative consequences but that knowledge has not translated into the kind of regulations that I think we're going to need and Well, let me just counter that.
I want to be respectful of your time.
But to me, if you're having trouble Getting things done governmentally, which I would assume is almost always the case, you can go other routes.
You're straight to the media, press releases, conferences.
You can just keep buying ads.
You can just keep pushing this information out so that parents have that information without necessarily there having to be a ban on corporal punishment.
If that makes any sense.
Yes, definitely.
And there is a group of committed Americans who are trying to do that.
And we held a conference this past June In Dallas, and it was actually an international conference called the Global Summit to End Corporal Punishment of Children and Promote Positive Discipline.
And we had people from 20 different countries and lots of Americans and we were all very committed, but it takes money.
To run a public ad campaign.
Like a public awareness campaign?
Yeah, a public awareness campaign.
So the ad council here in the US is who does most of these kind of very professionally done ad campaigns.
Millions and millions of dollars.
And, you know, my colleagues and I don't have millions of dollars to spend on that.
We just haven't had...
I guess that the movement to end corporal punishment is not quite as well organized in the U.S.
It's a very disparate country, but I look at countries like Kenya that have banned it.
Like, if Kenya can do it... Can we just catch up with Kenya?
And Venezuela!
Right.
I mean, my goodness, Venezuela!
At least the European countries have done it.
I mean, they lived under communism for 70 years.
Right!
Yeah.
Exactly.
I mean, we have no excuse.
I am not in any way trying to excuse it.
I try to explain it because I'm trying to understand it myself.
And it is, I mean, again, you don't have to have a ban on corporate punishment.
I mean, I don't know if BPA was banned or if parents just got scared of it, but if they have the information, then people who have this information that is desperately needed by parents wanting to do a better job, that again, I think you and I are in agreement, is the most important thing that we can do to promote a peaceful world.
I don't think it's entirely accidental that America and England have very high rates of child abuse and a propensity for getting involved in wars overseas.
I think that stuff is kind of related.
And so, you know, promoting the peace of the world, promoting the happiness of humankind, I think, is essential.
People have this information and it's just, it's really frustrating how hard it is to get this information out to people.
And, you know, to me, if it's, you know, if it can't be the government, let's find another way to raise the money and get the awareness out.
Because, you know, the parents who talk to me are like, I never knew.
You know, some parents get mad, but a lot of parents are incredibly happy to have found ways to be better parents, which I think is... I mean, you don't have kids to be a bad parent.
You don't take a job to be a bad employee.
And if they can do a better job with this information... Anyway, I don't want to rant your afternoon away, but I just... I'm completely in agreement, and there are folks trying to do that.
I tried to do that.
I wrote a report here in the U.S.
You're probably familiar with the joint statement in Canada on physical punishment.
And so I wrote a similar one in the U.S.
and we were hoping it was going to get lots of public attention.
The Canadian one did in Canada, but in the U.S.
we just didn't quite get, we got several big endorsements.
Including from the American Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics.
But it just didn't quite turn into the snowball of public discussion that I was hoping it would.
It's a third rail, you know, they talk about social security and politics.
I think that coercive parenting or aggressive parenting is kind of a third rail.
It's such a volatile topic and There are people who are incredibly sensitive about the way, and I think most parents are pretty defensive and sensitive about how they've chosen to raise their kids, and I think that people are like, well, cost benefits, you know, public outrage versus, you know, finding another topic to put on the front page.
Maybe it's something like that.
I don't know.
Right.
Well, so let's just finish off.
If people, the resources that you find good on the net for this kind of advocacy or getting this kind of information, obviously I'm going to put links to your publications and so on in the video and the audio.
Are there resources that you find very helpful in this area?
Probably the best resource is the organization called End Corporal Punishment of Children.
It's actually called the Global Initiative to End Corporal Punishment of Children.
The website is endcorporalpunishment.org.
And it is a clearinghouse of all international laws against corporal punishment, research, advocacy efforts.
It is a wonderful resource for people to both learn about why spanking is not a good idea from a research point of view, but also from a human rights point of view.
They've assembled all of the human rights documents from the UN that support the notion that children should not be spanked because it violates their human rights.
And then gives a status for every country in the world of where they are on protecting children from violence in schools and homes and other facilities that care for children.
So that's a wonderful resource.
Right.
Well, thank you so much.
And I also just want to thank you for the work that you're doing.
I think it's fantastic.
I can't imagine a better way to spend your life than getting this information out there and collating it.
I know it must be a grinding amount of work.
And I hugely appreciate it.
I also appreciate, I think, that your writing style is very accessible and enjoyable, and that helps a lot in terms of getting the message about.
And thank you again so much for taking the time today.
Great.
Nice to talk to you.
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