My 99th Debate: Kids and Corporal Punishment

Benefits to the childI agree that this debate is about benefits to the child. I disagree, though, that it can be separated so clearly from benefits to the parents because the child and the family are so interlinked. Consider a frazzled mother in the kitchen trying to put together dinner for the family, and on the phone to her boss at work, and the children start messing about with knives. So she slaps them and takes the knives away. Mostly she does it so that they don't bother her while she tries to cook dinner. It's a short-term solution. She doesn't have time to chat to them about the danger of knives. On the other hand, the benefits to the children are obvious too - that don't cut themselves on that occasion, their mother can sort things out with her boss and continue to get paid, which helps them all maintain their lifestyle, and she can get dinner on the table so they can eat.It comes back to my original point, that we can assume that parents are acting on the whole in their children's best interests (allowing for exceptions). The exact way they do that may be complicated and parents go about it in different ways. Around the world, most parents use corporal punishment occasionally, and more parents than that endorse it as appropriate. For me, that's enough to accept that corporal punishment benefits children in the absence of convincing evidence to the contrary. Con has presented plenty of argument to the contrary, but none of it is convincing, as I will explain now.Establishing cause (1)There are two ways to establish cause. The first and best way is by doing an experimental study. An experimental study has a very particular design where subjects are randomly assigned to the treatment conditions. Without this part, the study is only observational and causality cannot be inferred from the results.For example, suppose I noticed a link between high school grades and yacht ownership. Families that own yachts tend to produce children who get high grades in high school. I could come up with all kinds of theories - yacht owners spend more time outside in the fresh air, practicing navigation and coordinating in a yacht team all develop thinking skills, etc. It's nonsense though. Far more likely is that yacht owners are rich, they can afford tutors, computers, resources for their children. They probably have household staff so those students aren't bothered by chores. They have high expectations and a sense of entitlement. In other words, there is probably ZERO causal relationship between owning a yacht and getting high grades in high school despite the correlation.Experimental studies on corporal punishment are impossible. Causality will never be established in this way because no ethics committee will ever allow children to be randomly assigned to a corporal punishment condition for experimental purposes, and any parents who would volunteer for such a study would be unusual and therefore could not be assumed to represent the population as a whole.That means that we know straight up that THERE ARE NO STUDIES OF CORPORAL PUNISHMENT that have established a causal relationship between corporal punishment and outcomes. Gerschoff, in the meta-analysis that Con cited, makes this clear: "the meta-analyses described here do not afford causal conclusions but allow understanding only of whether corporal punishment and child constructs are associated. In addition... researchers must rely on parent reports of corporal punishment rather than on observations." (1) pg. 540As I showed in the previous round, use of corporal punishment and attitudes towards it vary dramatically by culture. Black Americans are six times more likely to endorse it than white Americans. Chinese parents are 10x more likely to use it than Swedish parents. When we are comparing groups of parents on whether or not they use corporal punishment, then, we are comparing cultures. Parents who report that they do not use corporal punishment are more likely to be college-educated westerners, for example, than those who do not. Any "outcome" measures, then, are merely recording differences between cultures. There is no reason at all to attribute those differences to corporal punishment rather than anything else - say - skin color, social influence or language spoken at home. Establishing cause (2)We can never do an experimental study on corporal punishment - that doesn't mean that we can never make comments about the effects of it. If we have a clear and convincing model or mechanism for the way corporal punishment works on behavior and thinking, then we can believe in the causality in that way. Such models are subject to error and bias, though, so we need to be careful about what we believe. Two ChildrenImagine two Christian families where the parents insist on saying grace before eating. In Family A, the children are spanked if they forget; in Family B, there is a lengthy discussion about God and gratitude, and the next time the children are warmly praised when they remember to say grace.Two totally different messages. Child A learns about authority and power. He learns that authority sets the rules and that infractions will be punished if detected. He learns that there are three ways to escape punishment: 1. obey authority; 2. avoid authority; 3. be the authority.Child B learns about God and gratitude. She learns that by not saying grace she is somehow letting herself down by being ungodly and ungrateful. It is not obvious to Child B where power and authority lies, unless it's somewhere in the moral ether.This is what Con's sources are talking about: Child B has internalized the morality, while Child A has not. Child A has a much more pragmatic view of authority - he may be aggressive and defiant in attempts to contest it. Child B does not contest authority in the same way, because of that internalized morality. A Guest ArrivesEach child brings home a friend from school for dinner who sits down and starts eating without waiting for grace! How will the children respond?Child A would notie that the guest "got away" with not saying grace, and that guests have special status to avoid punishment. An interesting loophole to the rule.Child B would notice their guest behaving in an ungodly and ungrateful way. They would feel that the guest was letting herself down by behaving so wrongly. Even if Child B's parents had explained the rule about Not Everyone Living like Us, if Child B has really internalized the morality of saying grace, she can't help but lose a bit of respect for her guest.Benefits to the childIt really isn't obvious whether Child A or Child B benefits more. The internalized morality can lead to judgemental thinking which could damage relationships. On the other hand, a cynicism about authority could lead to defiant, aggressive behavior which could be problematic too.I think it depends on context. Suppose the children lived in a society with an oppressive ruling class, or in a chaotic, violent society or a society limited by class or racial distinctions. In such societies (most societies, perhaps), a pragmatic approach to power and authority could benefit children hugely as they grow into adults, which would mean that child A would benefit more than child B. Language, Culture, PropagandaWesterners are unusual in the way they tend to put their children to sleep in separate room from the parents. People in most other cultures are horrified by this and studies have linked it to bad outcomes such as anxiety and even increased infant mortality. (2,3,4) UNICEF acknowledges that co-sleeping is good for children, but if you search on its website, there are only TWO references to this issue, while there are 720 for corporal punishment (6). This report about funding for UNICEF shows that only 9% of funding for the organization is unearmarked - that is, the vast majority for funding is given for a particular purpose. It's very likely that more funding is provided for the issue of corporal punishment (consistent with Western internalized morality) than for co-sleeping (inconsistent with Western internalized morality). (7)Would you rather be slapped on the leg or shut in your room? I'd prefer to be slapped, and so would most American college students. (8) "Time out" sounds so nice, but it could legitimately be called "isolation punishment". Conversely, "corporal punishment" could be called "kinaesthetic feedback" without falsehood. Even the language we use about this issue is judgmental.RacismWhenever you see fund-raising marketing for developing country charities, there's always pictures of adorable, non-white babies looking adorable and vulnerable. We want to save the children!The thing is, everyone wants to save the children. Even their own families do. Instinct towards protecting and nurturing children is a universal quality in the human race. We wouldn't have survived otherwise. Intelligence is also universal (at the cultural/population level). The evidence isn't nearly strong enough to counterbalance this.(1) www.endcorporalpunishment.org/pages/pdfs/Gershoff-2002.pdf (2) http://www.incultureparent.com...(3) http://www.naturalchild.org...(4) http://libaware.economads.com...(5) http://www.unicef.org...(6) http://www.unicef.org...;(7) http://www.unicef.org...;(8) http://www.bloomberg.com...;