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Critique of Anti-Spanking
Study
Robert E. Larzelere
This is a critique of the study by Straus, Sugarman, and
Giles-Sims (1997) Spanking by Parents and Subsequent Antisocial
Behavior of Children in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent
Medicine, and its implications for the broader topics of
nonabusive spanking and parental discipline by Robert E.
Larzelere.
THE GOOD NEWS (for anti-spanking advocates): This is the first
study that finds any detrimental child outcome of nonabusive or
customary physical punishment by parents using a design that would
not also tend to find detrimental outcomes of most alternative
discipline responses (or, for that matter, a wide variety of other
interventions, including marital therapy, psychotherapy, or cancer
treatment).
Larzelere's review of the literature (Pediatrics, 1996 (Oct.), pp.
824-828, 858) found that the strongest previous design with
"detrimental" child outcomes was a longitudinal association
without controlling for child misbehavior at Time 1. If managed
care were using the same reasoning, they would deny payments for
marital therapy because those who received marital therapy last
year were not now doing as well maritally (on the average) as
those who had no need of such therapy last year. This problem is
called the intervention selection bias (i.e., the tendency of any
intervention for an enduring problem to be positively associated
with subsequent problems associated with the original problem
being intervened for). The Straus et al. study is the first to
correct for that problem and find any detrimental effect on
children.
THE BAD NEWS: The only thing that Straus et al. (1997) have proven
is that spanking 6- to 9-year-olds at the rate of 156 times a year
has a small, but detrimental effect (accounting for 1.3% of
subsequent variation in anti-social behavior). Most children
spanked from 1 to 25 times annually were in their most-improved
group (because they weren't spanked in the particular week they
asked about in the survey; see their Figure 1). Yet media reports
are reporting the exaggerated claim that this study has proven
that even one spanking has detrimental outcomes. Instead, their
results are consistent with Larzelere's (1996) review, which
reported that spanking 6- to 9-year-olds once a week was more
detrimental than was less frequent spanking.
The evidence for spanking from 26 to 155 times annually is more
ambiguous. I would like to see a pairings comparison between the
subsequent levels of antisocial behavior comparing those spanked 0
vs. 1 and between those spanked 1 vs. 2 times per week. Straus has
not done that, but the only significance tests included the most
extreme high frequency group. If spanking is as detrimental as it
is being made out to be, it should be easy to get a statistically
significant difference between those spanked at the rate of 104
times annually vs. those spanked from 0 to 25 times annually.
Given a total variance accounted for of 1.3%, I don't think Straus
et al. can obtain that even with their overall sample size of over
800.
THE OTHER NEWS: The first review of child outcomes of nonabusive
or customary physical punishment was published by Larzelere in
Pediatrics in Oct. 1996). Dr. Diana Baumrind (Cal-Berkeley)
summarized the implications in the first sentence of her published
response: "a blanket injunction against spanking is not
scientifically supportable" (p. 828). The review found 8 studies
that, like Straus et al. (1997), distinguished parental effects on
children from the opposite causal direction. All 8 studies found
beneficial outcomes in children, generally of nonabusive spanking
of 2- to 6-year olds, when used as a back-up for time out or
reasoning.
Thus the evidence to date suggests that nonabusive spanking has
generally beneficial effects on children under the following
limited conditions at least:
Age: 2 to 6 years
How: 2 open-handed swats to the buttocks, leaving no bruise
How: Primarily as back-up for less aversive discipline responses
(e.g., reasoning and time out). Using it as a back-up should make
reasoning and time out more effective so that the spanking back-up
can be phased out.
Who: by loving parents
Eight of the 9 best studies support this, and the 9th (Straus et
al., 1997) has no evidence against it.
Immediately following the article by Straus et al. (1997) in the
latest issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine is
a study by Gunnoe and Mariner (1997). It improves upon the Straus
et al. study in several ways, and reconciles the differential
findings between their study and the other 8 best studies to date.
Improvements include a longer time until outcome variable (5
years), a more representative sample, and using different
informants (parent and child) for the spanking and the outcome
variable. They also add some analyses to account for the
differences in results between their study and Straus et
al.'s.
Basically they find that the effects of spanking vary from
significantly beneficial effects to significantly detrimental
effects according to four factors: Age, sex, race, and marital
status. At one extreme, spanking frequency increases the
subsequent level of antisocial aggression for 8- to 11-year-old
white sons of single mothers. At the other extreme, spanking
frequency decreases the subsequent level of antisocial aggression
for 4- to 7-year-old Black daughters in intact families. Other
combinations in between have SEM coefficients that vary from the
one extreme to the other, with the most beneficial coefficients
for Blacks and for younger children and mostly near-zero
coefficients for Whites. This illustrates why African-Americans
distrust social science.
This is now the third adequate study that has looked separately at
the outcomes of spanking in African-Americans compared with
European-Americans. The three are unanimous that the effects are
different by ethnic group and that the outcomes are generally
beneficial to African-American children with the exception of
those 6- to 9 year-olds spanked at the rate of 156 times a year
(Straus et al., 1997; and Deater-Deckard et al., 1997, Devel Psych
are the other two studies).
The effects of nonabusive spanking have to be considered in the
context of the effects of alternative discipline responses and the
broader parenting context. My research program for the last 11
years has sought to find alternatives that are more effective than
is spanking, especially for 2- and 3-year-olds. The effectiveness
of the most typically recommended alternatives depend on being
backed up by more aversive discipline tactics such as spanking.
For example, my presentation at APA (Aug. 1997) found that
reasoning alone (i.e., without accompanying punishment) works with
2- and 3-year-olds only for parents who back reasoning up with
punishment at least 1/10 of the time. That punishment could be
physical or, preferably, nonphysical (time out or withdrawal of
privileges). For the most noncompliant preschoolers, Mark Roberts'
series of studies have shown that time out's effectiveness depends
upon being backed up with either a 2-swat spank or a brief room
isolation, with one working better for some preschoolers and the
other better in come cases.
Another caution concerns the case of Sweden:
Since they outlawed parental spanking in 1979, child abuse has
increased at least 4-fold and teenage violence has increased at
least 6-fold. Being a less violent country than the USA, perhaps
they can handle a 6-fold increase in teenage violence. The United
States cannot. An SRCD paper by Palmerus and Scarr (1995)
suggested a possible reason: Swedish parents are less likely to
use reasoning and behavior modification techniques than are USA
parents, and they are more likely to use physical restraint and
coercive verbal techniques. This is consistent with my research
and Mark Roberts's in that the most positive use of a nonabusive
spanking with 2- to 6 year-olds is to back up less aversive
discipline tactics so that they become sufficient and effective by
themselves as the child gets older. Loss of the spank backup, as
in Sweden, may lead to less effective use and thus less use of the
very alternatives being recommended as preferable alternatives to
spanking.
As Gunnoe & Mariner (1997) and
Patterson have noted, there is a lot about parental discipline
that we do not understand adequately yet. I have written this
critique primarily as a caution against making too big of a leap
from the first good evidence that parental spanking leads to
detrimental child outcomes under some conditions.
Contact information for Robert E.
Larzelere
You may copy, download, and print
this article from this site so long as you include this web
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Copyright © 1997
Robert E. Larzelere, All Rights Reserved
http://people.biola.edu/faculty/paulp/
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