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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:57
The Science of Spanking! A Conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Gershoff
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio, back for her second exclusive engagement.
We have Dr. Elizabeth Gershoff from Austin, Texas, from the University of Texas at Austin.
Thank you so much for daring to return.
Now, since we last talked, we have like crazy new listeners.
We're doing like a million and a half video views a month.
So for a lot of listeners, they've not heard the story of your expertise and your focus and where the research currently stands in the realm of spanking.
So I wonder if you could give us a brief intro to that.
Sure!
So I've been studying spanking's effects on children, parents spanking of children, for about 15 years, and there have been hundreds of studies that have been done by many people, not just me, on the effects of spanking on children, and have looked longitudinally, have looked at a whole range of outcomes, and I've done twice now what's called a meta-analysis, which means I take all the research that's out there and summarize it, taking into account how big the studies are and things like that.
And found looking at all these various outcomes, spanking is always associated with negative outcomes.
And so the more kids are spanked, the more aggressive they are, the more likely they are to get into delinquent behaviors, the more likely they are to have mental health problems as children and as adults, the more likely they are to experience abuse from their parents, which is a really sad outcome.
And this is, again, across studies across the country, across the world, various sizes and ethnicities and things like that.
And in my first meta-analysis, I found that the more kids were spanked, the more compliant they were in the immediate situation.
But I re-analyzed that data recently and found that actually that wasn't true.
Once I took into account other studies, that actually is not true.
That the more kids are spanked, they're not more likely to be compliant.
People for a while thought, well, there's at least one positive outcome.
They stop what they're doing right away.
But even that doesn't seem to be true either.
So spanking doesn't get kids to do what we want them to do, and it doesn't give them any benefit in the long term as far as positive behavior.
Now, one of the criticisms of the analyses, at least that I receive when I post this information, is that the argument often is that spanking results in lower IQ, a couple of percentage points lower IQ, and the argument that comes back is often, but kids who have a lower IQ or kids who are more defiant are the ones who get spanked.
In other words, it's the children's temperament that causes the spanking, and the temperament is what drives them through to negative behavior.
So what work has been done to try and figure out, you know, the holy grail of social sciences, which is to make sure that correlation is not confused with causation?
Right.
And so the other way of looking at that is the chicken and egg problem.
Is it spanking causing aggression or aggressive kids eliciting more spanking from their parents?
And so several people have looked at that.
The way to do that is to look over time and to really look at, okay, how aggressive are kids to begin with?
And then we look at how much parents spank them and then look in the future to see does their behavior change from where it was at the beginning?
And so I and many other people have done studies to look at that.
Um, and I did a study looking at that with, uh, 11,000 American children.
Uh, and found that the amount of spanking kids got when they were in kindergarten predicted increases in aggression over and above where they started in kindergarten, increases in aggression by the time they were in third grade.
So, three years later.
But what we also found was that kids' aggression also predicted more spanking.
So we saw both.
And actually the effects were almost the same in a study I did.
So we saw this kind of cycle that when parents spank, their kids get more aggressive.
Aggressive kids elicit more spanking.
So you get what we call a coercive cycle.
They kind of keep egging each other on into the cycle that kind of never ends.
And they both are aggressive to each other.
And it's a hard cycle to stop.
So I found that, but many other people have replicated that finding.
So it seems fairly clear that it is the spanking that comes first.
And also something that I was quite shocked to realize when I began to look into the facts about spanking is the degree to which infants are spanked.
Now it's pretty hard to make the case that, you know, my baby was giving me attitude, man.
She was rolling her eyes.
She wasn't listening.
I could see the defiance in that spit bubble that came up.
So given the amount of spanking that occurs, In infancy, how could people possibly think that somehow it's a child's behavior that's illicit again?
Right.
Well, and I think most people don't, luckily most people don't start when they're infants.
In those cases, it's very clear that the kids aren't aggressive.
Like a baby who's crawling is not aggressive.
A baby who's just sitting and being a baby is not being aggressive.
So there's no aggression to start with.
The spanking always comes first in those cases.
Many parents don't spank until their kids are one and a half or two, when aggression has already developed.
And so in those cases, it's not quite as clear.
And so all we can do is kind of measure how aggressive the kids are.
We won't ever know where it started.
You have to start at birth and kind of measure them.
But again, it's hard to measure aggression.
Unfortunately, the aggression and the spanking kind of both happen around the same time.
Hard to know.
It's hard to tease apart which came first, but you're right.
When people spank is when they're infants, and sometimes it's like 20% of parents are spanking infants, which is just, and infants is anybody, any baby under one.
But that's just, it's really kind of horrifying to think about.
But in those cases, it's really clear that spanking is really leading to aggression.
Right, right, okay.
Now, it seems that researchers like you are progressively taking more and more toys away from adults, which I think is, of course, excessively cruel, because you're saying, well, look, spanking is problematic.
The work that you and others have done have really focused on yelling, because, you know, parents have these, like, backup plans.
It's like, oh, fine, okay, I'm not allowed to spank.
Well, I'll just raise my voice.
And then people say, well, you know, that, you know, can have many, even sometimes worse effects.
Then spanking, say, fine, okay, well, I'm going to use timeouts.
And I know that the research is somewhat ambivalent or at least ambiguous about the effects of timeouts.
I don't use them myself as a parent.
I was originally going to, but the research convinced me otherwise.
I use mostly duct tape and herons now in a way that I really can't explain.
So what are the issues around yelling and timeouts from the research standpoint?
Okay, so there's a lot going on there.
Yelling is definitely not effective.
It's something that all of us do, but it's not And I think my colleagues and I like to think there's a difference between raising your voice and yelling.
And I think the research has conflated two different kinds of yelling.
So there's the kind of yelling where you raise your voice to be heard and to make sure that the child is listening to me versus yelling at a child and saying, you're stupid.
I hate you.
I wish you were never born.
Like that's a very different kind of yelling, which is emotionally denigrating the child.
And I think those two kinds of yelling get put together.
Obviously the emotionally denigrating kind is very terrible for children that will Emotionally ruin them.
Raising, nobody likes to have somebody raise their voice to them but it's something that happens kind of in various circumstances in our lives and people understand that to mean that person is very serious.
If you're about to walk out into the street in front of a bus and somebody yells at you, you know it's because they're trying to get your attention and it's for a good thing.
And so there are times when we accept yelling.
And so I think yelling If not used excessively, if it's used to emphasize and just to kind of get attention, that's okay.
It's that kind of yelling that's really making the child feel bad, which we want to avoid.
And the first one is winter, right?
I mean, hopefully your kid isn't spending three times a day wandering into traffic.
You might want to look at the fence or something like that.
So it's very rare, right?
Right.
And with most things, if it's done in moderation, then people will pay attention when it happens.
Like if you're constantly running the air raid siren, then people stop going underground after a while, right?
Exactly.
Or my son is a goalie on his soccer team, and he was yelling at his team a lot.
And I said, you know, have you heard this?
You know the story of the boy who cried wolf?
After a while, people stopped listening to him because he was yelling all the time.
And so, I think we need to listen to that too, that if we yelled at our kids all the time, that that just becomes this background noise that they don't hear.
But if we reserve it for very particular situations when we really want to express emotion, then it works.
It gets their attention for sure.
And so that's what I'd say about yelling for timeout.
The research has been very mixed.
There hasn't been really good research on it.
Some of the studies that were done in the 80s were done with kids who had really pretty bad conduct problems.
And those studies and some of those studies combined timeout with spanking and found the timeout actually was More effective than doing nothing, but they weren't trying many other methods.
They weren't trying reasoning and they weren't trying distraction.
They weren't trying other things that we would like parents to do.
So I don't think it was a really fair comparison.
I mean, most parents don't do nothing if their child does something wrong.
And so the problem with explaining what kind of discipline works is there's no one kind of discipline that works all the time for any child or for any situation.
And so Mostly what we can say is certain philosophies kind of drive positive and effective parenting.
And so things like what we just said is, you know, keeping your, raising your voice only in extreme situations, focusing on the positive, talking, rewarding children for positive behavior so that they'll do those more instead of the negative behaviors.
Um, you know, and I'm not opposed to punishments in general.
I think that, um, Punishments can work.
They're most effective if you give children warning ahead of time and say, okay.
Or sometimes you will frame it as a choice.
So you can say to your kid, once you get your room cleaned up, we can go to the movies.
If the room doesn't get cleaned up, there's no movies.
And so it's a punishment, but it becomes the child's choice because they decided not to clean up the room.
And so then it's almost like a natural consequence.
Well, not a natural consequence, but it's a consequence that the child was aware of.
It's still a painful thing for the child to not get to go to the movies, but they actually had a role in choosing that.
And so by framing it that way, we're helping them understand when you make choices like deciding not to listen to your parents or clean your room, bad things will happen, or you don't get to do the good things.
And so there's philosophies like that, that if we keep those in mind when we're parenting, they're much more effective.
It's not really particular discipline techniques.
It's more kind of these philosophies of parenting that are effective.
Yeah, and I think that most of the parents who are yelling and hitting appear to the children, I think not unreasonably so, as kind of out of control.
It seems like a very extreme thing to be doing, to be shrieking and waving fists around and so on, and I think for kids it's very hard to subjugate themselves to people who feel out of control.
It's like getting into a cab driven by a guy who's blindfolded.
You don't feel particularly safe and I think there's a lot of resistance that is pitched against parents who seem to the children to be out of control.
I think that's true.
I think that can be very scary for kids.
Kids really like structure and they like predictability.
And parents who are yelling and screaming and acting kind of irrationally are not predictable and that's very unnerving for kids.
And it's hard for them to know how to behave because they don't know, they don't know, they can't predict how their parents are going to react when they do a certain thing and so then they don't know what to do.
And that's really hard for kids.
Well, there's a real paradox as well, of course, is that if the parents are using verbal or physical aggression, then if the child mirrors, which is what children generally do, like we imprint like those baby ducks on orange balloons, right?
We imprint on our parents' behavior, which is why culture replicates itself around the world.
But if you do what your parents do, then you're in even more trouble, and that gets extra confusing for kids, I think.
Right, exactly.
And that's the real problem with aggression and spanking, is that spanking is what we call modeled aggression.
And so kids imitate that.
We get that from social learning theory, a theory that's been around in psychology for a long time, is that when parents are spanking, they are modeling hitting.
And so kids see that and they see that aggression is something that you can do if you have more power and if you want something, you can hit somebody to get it.
And that's not the lesson we want kids to learn.
But kids learn by seeing what their parents do more than what they say.
And so they generalize that and then they start hitting other kids because they see that that works and they want to get something from another child.
And that can be very problematic.
And as you say, if they do it back to the parent, then all hell breaks loose and then the parent will hit them even more, which is even sadder.
And you often hear parents hitting the child and saying, don't hit your brother.
And then you're like, what is the message there?
I can't tell you the number of times I've heard or seen that.
And you just think you're not getting it.
You're doing exactly what you don't want them to do.
You wish you could just film the parent, play it back and say, now that you're not in the heat of the moment, does this make any sense to you?
Now, the IQ thing I think is very interesting, because of course IQ is one of these characteristics that is supposed to be pretty fixed, you know, genetically, all the way through your life, it seems to be a pretty fixed constant.
So the idea that IQ can be negatively impacted, and not insignificantly, by spanking, I find particularly fascinating.
One of the arguments I've heard, probably, maybe it's true, maybe it's not, one of the arguments I've heard is that because you're hitting, you're not negotiating.
And because you're not negotiating, you are not stimulating, you know, language, reasoning, empathy centers, and so on, and therefore you're not helping the child to develop in the, you know, optimal way, I guess you could say.
Do you think that by spanking we're not exercising those other muscles which are really so essential for adult success?
Yeah, I think this is a case of replacement.
I can't think of a reason why spanking would directly lead to lower IQ.
I don't think there's a very direct line.
I think there's something else going on there.
High levels of spanking are a marker for other kinds of negative parenting.
So the parents who are spanking a lot are not spending a lot of time reading to their children and being involved in the kids' school or reasoning with their kids and spending time to explain why their behavior was wrong, what they should do instead.
If they're not taking the time to do those things and they're just spanking instead because that's quick, then that's a problem.
That could mean that kids are going to have a harder time understanding cause and effect and compromise and things like that, which could lead to IQ.
Again, that's one of those things in the literature that I don't entirely understand, and I think it might just be that the parents who are spanking are not doing these other things that we know are good for kids.
I don't think it's that you hit a child and their IQ drops.
I don't think it's a very direct relationship.
It's not like football.
I think science still doesn't understand it.
Yeah, and I think it is fascinating, of course, the fact that we don't know why is all the more reason why we shouldn't spank, because we don't even know why it happens, we just know that there is a correlation.
Now, one of my heroes in the movement or in this sort of child empathy approach is Alison Gopnik, who was on the show talking about how early children can reason.
And, of course, one of the things you hear from parents who spank is, well, what am I supposed to do?
Reason with a three-year-old?
To which my answer is, Yes, you're supposed to reason with a three-year-old.
They're probably better at it than you are.
At least because, you know, you have all these concerns going on in your life.
You've got taxes, mortgage, bills, you know, conflicts, work.
Kids have, you know, the family.
That's the one thing that, you know, the candy bar they want.
You know, they're like lasers and you're all this diffuse moonlight as a parent.
So, at what age can you really start to reason with your kids?
For my daughter, it seemed to be very early.
I don't know if that's unusual, but it did seem to be quite early.
When can you start this process of reasoning?
And I want people to know that so that they know what they're displacing through spanking.
Well, so Dr. Gopnik would be a better person to answer that question, but I tend to tell people that, and I think you can start, you should always start talking to your child in the reasoning kind of language from birth.
Just get in the habit.
I mean, I talked to my children when they were babies, as if they could understand what I was saying, like, oh, this happens and this happens, and understanding cause and effect.
And they drop their cup off the high chair and say, oh, look, it fell down.
That was gravity or something.
You know, whatever you want to say to kind of explain things.
These things start to, you know, not that you expect them to learn these things, but they slowly sink in.
And I think from one year old on, they start to understand things.
They cannot always verbalize them back to you, but children have a much bigger receptive vocabulary, meaning they can understand more than they can produce their productive vocabulary.
Well, like all of us, when we learn a language, we listen and understand more than we can speak.
Exactly.
And so kids are like that.
And so just because they can't say it back to you doesn't mean that they don't hear it.
It doesn't mean that they don't understand it.
And so I think that as early as you feel comfortable, you should start talking to your kids as if they understand reasoning.
And like, I'm doing this because I'm putting on your sweater because it's cold outside.
Making these kind of connections so they start to understand this.
But that doesn't mean that they are culpable for behaviors in a way that should be punishable.
So I kind of feel like kids shouldn't really be disciplined in the way that we think about it until they're two and a half, three.
I think until then, a lot of what they're doing is trial and error and experimenting.
They don't really know.
They don't Understand that when they push the cup off the high chair, it's going to mean milk is going to go all over the place.
And they don't do it to be mean.
They do it because it's interesting or fun or they just want to see what will happen.
It's not that they know, oh, if I do this, I'm going to get my mom really mad.
And I think that's where parents sometimes internalize those things and think, oh, they're doing this to get back at me.
And so they start disciplining their kids at very early ages.
And I think that's unfortunately why babies get spanked, is parents think, oh, they're doing this because they're trying to make me mad, which is just silly.
Babies don't do that.
Between one and two, kids start to understand cause and effect and understand that their actions are affecting other people.
But I still don't think it's appropriate to discipline a one-year-old.
Between two and three is when things start to be more, they're doing things in a more meaningful way and they can talk more and they can understand a little bit more about cause and effect.
And so discipline makes a little more sense.
So that's kind of a long answer to your question.
But I think that, I guess I think it's never too early to start using reasoning language, but not to expect it to really start sinking in until probably one and a half.
Yeah, I mean, certainly for myself as a parent, to be off the beaten track of scientific objectivity, I've sort of found that it's all about the preparation.
Everything is about the preparation.
I try never ever to impose a rule in the moment that has not been Discussed at length and agreed to beforehand.
The preparation is everything.
Expected behaviors, you know, we're going here, you need to be a little quieter, we're going here, there's going to be other kids, here's how we'd like you to behave and here's why.
And also make sure that I have consistently displayed the behavior that I wish to elicit in my daughter.
That's very important because if she's agreed to it, I found You know, she's better at keeping her word than almost every adult that I know.
If you can extract a promise, then you can usually use that as leverage to get the kind of right behavior.
But it's all about the preparation.
And trying to parent in the moment is like trying to put wings on a plane when it's leaving the ground.
You know, it's a little bit late for that.
And I really find that a lot of parents try and parent in the moment, which is almost always reactive and generally tends to escalate more towards aggression.
Right.
And because I think parenting in the moment makes kids feel like these rules are coming out of thin air.
These capricious rules, like, well now I can't do this.
Why?
Because my mom says so.
But that kind of preparation ahead of time, it's hard for parents.
I mean, it's hard to anticipate all the things kids are going to come up with.
But we do our best.
And one of my colleagues did a study years ago of parents in the supermarket.
and followed them around and kind of looked and said what they said to their parents, the kids before going to the store versus after.
And the parents that were most effective were the ones who prepared the kids ahead of time and said, okay, when we go into the store, if you're good, you're going to get to pick out one kind of cereal.
And they would do that.
And if the kid behaved well, they could pick out one kind of cereal.
They weren't going to look at every kind of cereal.
And they avoided the candy aisle.
And so they prepared the kids, but then they also avoided situations which were going to be harmful.
That they knew the kids were going to fight with them over.
They tried to avoid those.
Versus a parent who says, if you don't behave, we're going to have to leave.
And then the kid keeps throwing a tantrum, and then the parent is in the situation of, well, now I have to leave, I guess, because I said I was going to, but I have a grocery cart full of groceries.
You don't want to make that kind of rule in the moment because you don't really want to follow through with that.
But that's the kind of rules we make up in the moment because we're not thinking straight.
But if we could think ahead of time and get the kids ready, that's the best way to be.
We can't always do that, but the more we can do that, the better.
Right, right.
Now, what about the etiology of tantrums?
This is something that I hear a lot about from parents, which is, my son freaks out, he's turning blue, he's kicking, he's on the ground.
Has there been much Any research or anything that you know about which can help parents to avoid these kinds of situations?
Expecting them to deal really well in the moment is kind of a lot to ask, but is there stuff that can be laid in that can help prevent what is, in many ways, a lot of parents' worst particularly public kind of nightmare?
So there's two things.
One thing is to know that tantruming kind of is a developmental phase.
So that there's particular ages where it's just more likely than not.
So between one and a half and three and a half is where you're going to have most of the tantrums.
So if you have a child that age, you can expect that's going to happen at some point for most kids.
And that's fairly normative.
It doesn't mean there's something wrong with your child.
It doesn't mean there's something wrong with you.
That's in part because they have trouble regulating their emotions and they don't know how to express their frustration yet.
Sometimes because they don't have the words.
And if they don't have the words, then they have to do it emotionally or physically.
And so helping them get the words to do that and ways to express their frustration that are not involving kicking and hitting other people is best.
The other thing that we can do is anticipate the situations that are going to elicit those kind of tantrums, and so if you're going to go to the grocery store, or you're going to go to the doctor's office, and you know you're going to have to wait, bring toys.
Bring books.
Bring snacks.
It amazes me how many times I see parents, places that don't have, like on an airplane, and they have no toys for their children, and I just think, What do you think the kids are going to do for five hours?
I was kind of the opposite.
I had a bag full of snacks and I kind of went overkill.
My husband always laughed at me, but I just I didn't want to be unprepared.
I wanted to always have something.
And my kids were always very well prepared and behaved on the plane.
And so I think we have to anticipate those things again.
As we said before, being a good parent is being prepared, thinking ahead, helping the kids along because they don't know what to do when they're bored.
You have to give them something to do.
So a lot of times tantruming is because they want attention.
They're either bored or you're not paying enough attention to them.
So give them things to do.
Give them attention when they're doing positive things.
So, they're building a stack of blocks.
Look at that great stack of blocks!
Or they're sharing, or they're petting the dog very nicely, or anything.
You give them praise for the things they're doing that are positive, you're going to increase the likelihood that they do those positive things instead of throwing a tantrum to get your attention.
We can't always avoid the tantrums, but if we can, we can minimize them by trying to anticipate, you know, not making kids go into situations that are not appropriate for them.
So not expecting a two-year-old to sit for two hours in a movie.
They just can't.
You know, don't bring them to situations that they're just physically not able to do.
So all those things can kind of help mitigate the number of tantrums we have to experience.
Yeah, I also find for myself, like a checklist is really important, right?
So if my daughter is, you know, whatever you call it, misbehaving or whatever, that's usually a checklist.
You know, are we close?
Have I been distracted?
Is she looking for attention?
Is she hungry?
Is she cold?
Is she tired?
You know, has she eaten mostly not the best stuff for her?
Like, there's lots of things I think that you need to go through as a parent which are just some base biological and relational markers that can really help you sort of understand because they don't know.
And a lot of adults don't even know.
I'm cranky because I'm tired or whatever.
I didn't sleep that well last night.
I think there's a lot of checklists that can go through that can really help make parents more empathy because the whole point of parenting is don't take it personally.
You know, I mean, I think that's what you were saying earlier with the babies.
Just because they're cranky or whiny or negative or don't want to do stuff, it's not because they want to bring you down because they don't like you being happy or something.
There's a whole lot of checklists.
What have you sort of found, as a parent and educator, what have you found the checklist that can be most helpful in those situations?
I mean, I think the same things you just mentioned.
I mean, it's just the biological things.
Are they tired?
Are they hungry?
Have they gotten enough positive attention?
Are they intellectually being stimulated?
Maybe they're just bored.
And we hear that a lot as parents as our kids get older.
Mom, I'm bored.
And that can be very frustrating for us parents.
But they do get bored and so how do we figure out ways to keep them active and engaged in things that are productive instead of getting into trouble and writing on the walls or doing something else because they have nothing else.
They feel like they have nothing else to do.
So again, parenting is a very active thing.
We have to always be thinking about what our kids are doing and what they need.
And sometimes it's the biological stuff like eating and Drinking and sleeping.
And sometimes it's the intellectual stuff.
You have to remember they need that stuff too.
And they need emotional stuff.
They need hugs and positive reinforcement.
And if they're not getting those things too, they can act out because they're feeling unloved and they're feeling unappreciated.
And so they'll act out to get those things.
So we have to kind of remember, oh yeah, Just giving them a hug can do a huge wonder of things.
Giving a little pat on the head.
It can be just great for giving a kid that like, oh yeah, my parents there for me.
And you know, they might be busy cooking dinner, but they know that I'm here and they want to give me a little bit of positive attention and that I can go a really long way.
Now, the last time we talked, we dipped into a sort of challenging area where we were talking about the degree to which the psychological profession was not exactly being the fireworks and lighthouse broadcasting station for the challenges of spanking.
How's that been going?
Is there any kind of turning that tanker around, so to speak?
Is that getting any further in the profession?
No.
Oh dear.
That's too bad.
You can take time to think about it.
Yeah, so, where do I even start?
I published an article two months ago called, Spanking and Child Development, It's Time to Stop Hitting Our Children, or I think something similar to that.
And I kind of hoped it would be a call to the profession to say, look, spanking is hitting.
We don't allow anybody else in our society to be hit.
We need to call this for what it is and stop saying it's okay.
And I've gotten some positive feedback, but not a whole lot.
I was part of an effort a few years ago from the American Psychological Association to review all the research on spanking and come out with a statement from the association, APA.
And it was kind of derailed because there are a few researchers who vehemently deny the research and they kind of, it went off the rails.
And so we put it aside and it's a couple other people have started it again and so it's gonna, we're gonna start the effort again and try to write another report and have another task force and hopefully get APA to say spanking is not good for kids.
We already have several of our American organizations, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association have said Spanking is bad for kids.
Parents should do other things.
And so there is some agreement among professional organizations, but not as much as I would like.
So it's still an uphill battle.
I'm working right now on a paper about the effects of corporal punishment in schools, which we still allow here in the US, as in Canada.
And I find that incredibly appalling, particularly because the schools use these big, long, wooden paddles.
They're usually two feet long and four inches wide and a half inch thick.
They're just a big piece of wood.
And kids get really badly injured and fairly traumatized by this.
But it's done in 19 states in the U.S.
A quarter million kids are paddled every year.
And so we as a society in the U.S.
haven't dealt with that either.
But there are more professional organizations who have come out against paddling in schools, spanking in schools, but they're not willing to say, adopt parents yet.
You know, and as we have not, the U.S.
has not signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child, we are so far behind the bandwagon.
of children's rights in this whole argument and whether children have the right to be protected from violence, which I would say they do as human beings.
And that's what the human rights treaties that the UN has have argued.
Well, the most!
The most, sorry, the most vulnerable, the most dependent.
I mean, of all the people we should be protecting from violence, it should be children first and foremost.
But anyway, sorry, I won't have a whole rant and cover your screen with spittle or anything, but that just seems to be the first ones you would look at.
Right, right.
And they're the next generation, and they're so vulnerable, and we are so big and stronger than them.
It's troubling.
But those kind of arguments don't have a lot of sway here in the U.S.
They have more sway in Canada, but until we can get that convention ratified here, we don't have a lot of... that doesn't have a lot of help here.
So we're still, you know, there's advocates that are still trying, you know, in each of the states trying to get corporal punishment banned from schools first.
We kind of feel like there might be some movement on that because a lot of parents feel like, well, I can spank my kid, but I don't want anybody else spanking them.
And so I think that, I'm hoping in the next 10 years that will be gone from the United States schools.
The parenting one, I think it really is just a matter of education.
I don't think it's ever going to be banned here in the U.S.
I don't know that that's a really effective strategy.
There's now 33 countries, 34 actually, that have banned corporal punishment altogether.
Parents, teachers, no one can hit children.
And the U.S.
is not going to be one of those countries any time soon.
Well, of course.
I mean, the argument is that those countries have all been swallowed up in a sea of lava, social chaos, murder, mayhem, sharpshooters in bell towers.
I mean, look at the Scandinavian countries, living hell holes on earth because they got rid of spanking.
So, absolutely, there's no possibility that society can stand in any way, shape, or form unless we keep corporate... Sorry.
End of facetious rant.
That's right.
Listeners, that was facetious.
Someone's going to cut that part out and it's going to rewrite it so that this is what I said.
I just know that's going to happen.
But yeah, I mean, look at those countries.
They're doing fine.
With Sweden, what was it, the 70s or something like that, where this was all... And I had actually, when I was a kid, I mean, my mother's side of the family is all German, and my German relatives would all come over.
And I think partly as a result of the Second World War, I mean, my German friends were not allowed to play with guns.
Everybody spoke to them very reasonably.
I think they kind of got that the insane child-rearing practices that Alice Munro has...
Alice Miller.
Sorry, not the writer, the other writer.
Alice Miller talked about, in her books on poisonous pedagogy and the drama of the gifted child, that those really destructive child raising practices did have something to do with what went on in Germany in the 30s and 40s.
They were such gentle kids, such nice kids, and we were just these, of course, you know, British pow-pow-pow hellions, and I still remember, you know, they seemed very respectful, very polite, very nice kids, and they were really being raised in a very gentle manner.
Yeah, and I think Europe as a whole learned a lot from the World War II that we didn't quite learn.
And we have an unfortunate history of slavery as well, which is implicated in a lot of other things that happen, and the preponderance of spanking among African Americans, that's been tied in with slavery.
And yeah, I think we didn't quite learn those lessons.
I mean, the United States has a really enormous culture of violence anyway.
I mean, it seems like everybody has a gun, and there's gun violence everywhere, and school shootings, and people don't seem to be concerned about it.
And so I think it's been so accepted that hitting children just is kind of fitting in with all that, which is really troubling.
It's going to take a really big sea change in a lot of attitudes, I think, about violence in the United States anyway.
But I'm still hopeful.
I'm hopeful that we can really convince people.
Remember, these are really little kids.
And one of the ways that I make that connection is a child abuse, that 66% of child abuse cases start out as spanking.
And those parents didn't intend to abuse their kids.
They weren't sick people who wanted to torture their kids.
They were parents who wanted to teach their kids discipline but got out of hand.
And they say that.
And that's really troubling.
And actually, in Canada, it's even higher.
I think it's above 80% of cases are of abuse started off as some kind of physical discipline.
If we could stop physical discipline from happening, then a lot of the physical abuse would go away.
And so that to me is a really powerful argument, but not everybody feels like that connection is as strong as I see it.
Well, yeah, and of course, I mean, what I generally get is people say, well, you're saying hitting and spanking, and then they sort of say, well, spanking is much more gentle and so on.
But of course, it has to be hard enough and painful enough and frightening enough to alter permanently behavior, because that is the goal.
So it really can't be a light little swat.
The other thing that I can imagine... But it has to cause pain.
Sorry, go ahead.
From the animal research, we know that it has to cause pain to be an effective punisher.
Otherwise, it's not a punisher.
It doesn't work.
Yeah, so when they say, like, a light swat on the behind, they're minimizing it, probably for reasons of conscience, but, you know, that's not spanking in any way, shape, or form.
And the other thing, too, I think with spanking, it is such a clearly anti-empathetic thing to do.
In other words, you're doing what the child least wants in the moment.
You know, this is all very frou-frou, and you couldn't look at it under a microscope, but I do think that it hardens the heart of a parent to apply that kind of punishment to a child.
You know, a crying child on your lap, you're hitting them in the butt or whatever.
I think you've got to really harden your heart to what your child wants in the moment.
I don't think you can just switch that on and switch that off.
And there may be, I think, for people who spank a lot, and there are lots of parents who spank a lot, I wonder if it doesn't create these layers of hard lacquer on the heart, where it becomes harder and harder to empathize, because you've been spending a lot of time, through punishment, not empathizing with your kid, or doing the opposite of what your kid wants.
I don't think you can just switch back into loving empathy after that.
Yeah, I think that's true.
About ten years ago, I did some interviews with parents who had stopped spanking, and we asked them, so why did you stop?
And most of them said, because I couldn't stand how it was hurting my kid.
And they firmly believed that it was a good discipline technique, but it just, they couldn't stand how much it was hurting their kid.
And so those parents' empathy went out, and they stopped doing it.
But then, I suspect you're probably right, there hasn't been any research on that, but I think that in order to keep doing that, you'd have to kind of harden yourself.
You know, you probably know the Stanford Prison Study, where they randomly put undergraduates to be prisoners or guards, and So they were randomly selected.
I mean, it wasn't that the mean people were meant to be guards, but the guards became really mean, really unnecessarily mean to the prisoners.
And they did things they weren't even told to do.
And I think that because they were in that role, they kind of lived up to it and lost their empathy entirely because they saw it as part of their role.
And so I wonder if parents are doing some of that, that they To rationalize the fact that they're hurting their kids, they have to say, well, this is the right thing to do.
And yes, separate themselves from that emotion and seeing how much it's hurting their kids physically and emotionally.
And then, yeah, that would just make it harder for them to empathize in other situations.
That's a really good idea.
There isn't any research that I know of on it, but...
Yeah, it's a shame, you know, psychological experiments used to be a lot more interesting and exciting before all these ethics commissions came in and stopped Philip Zambardo and Stanley Milgram and all from doing this.
That stuff was like, that was dinner party conversation, psychological researcher.
I mean, I, you know, I get that, you know, it's not ethical, but man, it sure was interesting.
So, okay, well, I guess what was the last question?
that I had.
I mean, one of the things that I mean, I'm very happy about with this show, and your contribution has helped with that, you know, by bringing some actual facts and expertise to the equation is, you know, based upon the math of the letters that I get to the emails that I get, like 10s of 1000s of parents have stopped spanking as a result of this show.
And of course, other people are doing similar kinds of work.
One of the things that I see that is really quite remarkable that I was not expecting is the degree to which family harmony begins to increase very rapidly.
And particularly if you stop when the kids are young, you know, And if you stop when they're 15, you know, but if you stop when they're three or four, I don't want to say it has no effect, but of course the healing or the reversal, because neuroplasticity and all of that, the brain is still whirring along.
I think my daughter's brain is like 90% of its adult size at the moment, and sometimes it feels about 400% bigger than mine.
But it is remarkable the degree to which you can turn it around, particularly if the kids are younger.
It's not going to take years to turn it around if you make that commitment.
That's been what I've heard, but have you heard anything about that?
It is something that can be turned around quite quickly if you make the commitment.
I think it can be.
I mean, I think if you can get that out of your parenting repertoire pretty early on and build other positive connections with your kids, you can definitely reverse the damage.
I mean, I kind of feel like it's like smoking.
I mean, people who stop smoking can repair their lungs.
The lungs do grow back.
And I think that if you can get that violence out of the parent-child relationship, it can heal and kids can learn to trust their parents again and learn that the parents have their best interest at heart.
And that's the foundation for the best kind of discipline, is when the parent and child trust each other, and they have that kind of reciprocal relationship where they want to do good things for each other.
That's the thing that's hardest to teach, but that is the main core of discipline, is that kids want to behave well because they want to please their parents.
And parents want to do right by their kids because they love their kids.
Instead of a negative feedback loop, it becomes a very positive feedback loop.
I think if parents can get that violence out right away and all the double standards that go along with it, it can make it a much stronger parent-child relationship.
Again, I don't know research on it per se, but I think everything we know about what's the basis for positive parent-child relationships would say that if you get that out of there, it's just like if it was a husband and wife.
If you get violence out of the relationship, it's going to be a lot stronger.
If you have a friend who hits you and they stop hitting you, it's going to be much easier to be their friend.
And so the same thing with parents and kids.
I think it can only be a good thing.
Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine that it's a lot of fun yelling at people all day.
I can't imagine it's a lot of fun shaking your hand at terrified children all day.
I can't imagine it's a lot of fun trying to control other human beings, particularly other human beings with the attention span of a ferret on a double espresso.
It's just not fun, and it's a lot more fun in parenting.
I mean, I really, really appreciate and enjoy parenting.
I think a lot more than my own parents did, simply because I really have tried to work at Just negotiate and have fun and have that mutual respect and kind of get that, in a weird biological way, they are your prisoners.
And, you know, if you want your prisoners to love you, you have to be, we have to treat them the best.
There's this weird thing, which perhaps we can talk about in another show.
I could do a whole show on this, why we generally, why most people treat strangers better than they treat their own family and particularly their own children.
That's a huge mystery, you know?
Like, people who are super polite to the waiters and then turn on the kids and like, But anyway, if you sort of reverse that, the kids, they're not there by choice.
They didn't choose you as parents.
They didn't even choose to be born, and if you want their love, you have to treat them about, I think, the best of anyone in your life, because everyone else is there by choice and can leave at any time, and the less voluntarism there is in the relationship, the more virtue I think is needed to mine love from the depths.
Anyway, that's sort of a poetic way to end, but what are you working on next, and what's on the pipeline for you?
Well, again, this project looking at school corporal punishment here in the U.S.
and kind of the prevalence that it is across states and what effects it has on kids.
And one of the things that I'm looking at is what happens when states ban corporal punishment, because there's a fear that kids are going to become, the whole state is going to have juvenile delinquents on its hands.
And it turns out that's not true.
When the states ban it, they have no increase in juvenile crime.
It's the same pattern as all the states that still have the ban.
The legislatures that are afraid of banning it because of that reason, they have no reason to be afraid for that.
So I'm hoping that will contribute to the discussion that states still have corporal punishment in schools, contribute to the discussion about whether or not to ban it, and hopefully to ban it.
So that's kind of the next big project.
Fantastic.
Well, as always, I really, really enjoyed the conversation and thanks, of course, for all of the work that you're doing, handing it to idiot amateurs like me to wave in people's faces in hopefully not too self-righteous manner.
Best of luck with the new research.
I'll certainly keep my eyes peeled for it because I think that is a very fruitful area.
I'm not sure if Canada still has corporal punishment.
I certainly was around when I was a kid in England.
It never happened to me here in Canada.
I came across, I guess, when I was about 11 or 12.
So I don't know.
And I also know in Canada... It's still legal.
It is still legal.
It's just not particularly... So if you had a private school, you could do it, I guess.
But I don't think it's public policy anymore.
I'm not positive.
But it certainly never happened to me.
My wife, I think, had it when she was a little kid.
But she was here younger.
She grew up here and all that.
But yeah, best of luck.
Yeah, if we can get that out of the schools.
You know, one of the things I've always noticed is in the South there's more corporal punishment in schools and also lots more people want to go into the military.
Are the two related?
I don't know.
I guess research would tell.
Thanks a lot.
I really appreciate your time and we'll talk again soon.
Yeah, nice talking to you.
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