On Balance, Spanking is Detrimental

Why PRO is wrong I. Weak associations PRO gives us a few studies and metas which collected some vague statistics about "spanking", and certain life outcomes. All of them, when used for PRO's purposes, have the same problem: They establish correlation, but not causation. Don't believe me? The people who conducted the analyses agree. Dr. Elizabeth Gershoff, author of the largest meta-analysis on spanking so far (#5 in PRO's sources) says: "The primary limitation of these meta-analyses is their inability to causally link spanking with child outcomes. This is problematic because there is selection bias in who gets spanked"children with more behavior problems elicit more discipline generally and spanking in particular (Larzelere, Kuhn, & Johnson, 2004). Cross-sectional designs do not allow the temporal ordering of spanking and child outcomes that could help rule out the selection bias explanation. As noted above, randomized experiments of spanking are difficult if not ethically impossible to conduct, and thus this shortcoming of the literature will be difficult to correct through future studies." [1] Most of PRO's other studies (6/7. and 8) are purely correlational, so this problem applies to them too. Side note: PRO also misunderstood the implications of a small p-value. P-values have nothing to do with the likelihood that a correlation = causal association. A p-values is just a measure of confidence that the properties of a given sample set aren't due to chance. PRO cites some other studies too, but they aren't safe either. These (1, 2, and 3) use a longitudinal design instead of a cross-sectional one. In other words, instead of comparing totally different kids at the same time, they look at the same kids before and after a certain period of time. While this is supposed to show that spanking (and the Gershoff meta cites them as the best indication of that), they can't actually do this. As Dr. Robert Larzelere points out: "[the] medical field would not be impressed by the fact that patients who received chemotherapy last year are now more likely to still be battling cancer than people who had never had cancer. Medical doctors would ignore such longitudinal correlations unless the research (1) compared patients who had the same severity of cancer to start with, and (2) showed that another treatment was more effective than the selected chemotherapy" [7] Interestingly, when a meta-analysis [3] adjusted for the traits kids exhibited before spanking, the association between virtually vanishes. II. Bad definitions PRO's studies have another problem: They don't agree (with us and each other) about what counts as "spanking." All studies PRO cited suffer from this problem. Some of PRO's studies (#6 and 7 on his reference list) actually acknowledged this limitation in research: "Although the parents were asked about spanking, qualitative explorations by one of us (M.A.S.,unpublished data, 1980) indicate that parents do not usually restrict this term to mean hitting a child on the buttocks." [2, pg. 762] The only exceptions are found in 4 out of the 75 studies that Gershoff's meta [1](#5 in PRO's sources) looked at. Not surprisingly, those 4 also found that spanking is just as beneficial as all the other forms of discipline it was compared to, and that negative association were pretty marginal and explained by other factors. III. Worse conclusions This half-assed way of sifting through data leads us to some pretty weird conclusions. When researchers apply [4] the above methodologies to other forms of discipline (including time-outs and child psychotherapy), a superficial connection with bad outcomes appears too. If PRO wants us to assume he's right based on that, we'd have to believe those other things are just as bad too. Why I'm right All the concerns I brought before aren't just mine; they're articulated all the time by other researchers too. One of them (whom I cited earlier) is Dr. Larzelere [5], who conducted a meta-analysis [6] in 2005. This analysis took care to adjust for all the problems I've mentioned so far, and found the following: "Reviewing fifty years of research on child discipline, [Larzelere and Kuhn] identified 26 relevant studies on child outcomes of physical punishment. Their conclusion: Child outcomes of physical discipline depend on how it is applied. The outcomes of physical discipline compared unfavorably with alternative disciplinary tactics only when it was the primary disciplinary method or was too severe (such as beating up a child or striking the face or head). The outcomes of "customary" [that is, regular use] physical discipline were neither better nor worse than for any alternative tactic, except for one study favoring physical discipline for reducing drug abuse. They also identified an optimal type of physical discipline, called conditional spanking, which led to better child outcomes than 10 of 13 alternative disciplinary tactics and produced outcomes equivalent to those of the remaining three tactics." [8] So, when the research is properly conducted, we find that spanking is usually about as good as other forms of parental discipline, and can be one of the most effective if properly administered. Summary: PRO only establishes superficial correlations, and his studies don't distinguish spanking from inappropriate forms of discipline. Taking vague statistics like that at face value would also lead us to believe many forms of discipline are harmful, so that approach leads us to bizarre conclusions in addition to being ill-founded. Research made with these concerns in mind shows the exact opposite: Spanking is actually effective when not administered abusively, which is more often than not. vote CON Links: 1. https://mgtvwjhl.files.wordpress.com... 2. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org... 3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... 4. https://bmcpediatr.biomedcentral.com... 5. http://www.apa.org... 6. http://www.springerlink.com... 7. https://www.acpeds.org... 8. https://www.researchgate.net...