My oh my Oh. I can just imagine the debates this new study will cause all over the known spank-o-verse. Scientists claim that spanking your kids dulls their ability to learn.
Spanking can get kids to behave in a hurry, but new research suggests it can do more harm than good to their noggins. The study, involving hundreds of U.S. children, showed the more a child was spanked the lower his or her IQ compared with others.
Straus and his colleague Mallie Paschall of the Pacific Institute for Research and
Evaluation in Maryland studied nationally representative samples of two
age groups: 806 children ages 2 to 4, and 704 ages 5 to 9. The
researchers tested the kids' IQs initially and then four years later.
Both groups of kids got smarter after four years. But the 2- to 4-year-olds who were
spanked scored 5 points lower on the IQ test than those not spanked. For children ages 5 to 9, the spanked ones scored on average 2.8 points lower than their unspanked counterparts.
Spanking Leads to Lower IQs, Study Says
Couple of comments. First, I took the AOL poll that accompanied the story and was intrigued to see that while 80% + of people said they'd been spanked as children, over 40% were either ambivalent about it or against the practice. Which means that a good number of people who were spanked grew up with conflicted feelings about their own experiences.
Personally, I am 100% against spanking children. I don't believe that brutal force over a child (or adolescent, for that matter) is a good thing in the long run, even if it does intimidate a child into obedience in the moment. Now, in fairness, I'll say right up front I'm not a parent. However I once was a child, and was smacked and beaten a bit by my mother. Nothing so formal as a spanking, but lots and lots of hitting. What did physical discipline do for me? For one, it made me feel like crap about myself. Honestly, I think it kept me from being a sadomasochist and accepting my own sexual identity for years because it instilled in me a horror of hitting other people. I remembered how I felt when my parents raised their hands to me: if I wasn't shocked and stunned by the suddenness and unfairness of them using their superior size to hurt me, then I was completely PISSED OFF. Perhaps some people grow up in households where parents are able to manage to make you feel that you "deserved" a spanking but as far as I was concerned, the physical abuse I got at home only told me that my parents were sociopathic incompetents who should never have had me in the first place. Oops. I guess my emotions are showing. But there it is. See above: it pissed me off.
For me, the argument against using violence is a universal: it does no creature any "good" unless it is your intention to produce a fearful adult. Violence may be an appropriate response to a direct threat to your life but violence-as-remedy-for-naughtiness is, IMHO, a pile of Victorian horseshit.
I've owned a lot of dogs. One of them was hell-on-a-biscuit and if ever a dog deserved to be thrashed it was him. None of us ever laid a hand on him. We worked the kindness angle. We punished with indifference, and sometimes we yelled (trust me, you couldn't refrain from yelling at this dog). But what would hitting teach him? To fear another human? To obey out of terror? To make him feel like a bad, unloved dog? He was a broken-down, miserable beast when we rescued him. As his guardians, it was our mission to show him a path to happiness and self-confidence, to teach him a new and better way to live, to let him know he was safe and protected in this cold world.
I think if the parents of human beings could maintain their focus on doing things that are REALLY in a child's best interest, if they could remember how much it upset them when their own parents expressed their disappointment or anger through violence, if they could stay PRESENT to their roles as teachers, guardians and protectors, not cops and prison guards, there might be a whole lot less spanking of children and a whole lot more functional a world.
As for spanking adults -- well, I hope everyone knows that I think any mutual consensual sex that makes you wetter or harder is a GREAT thing.
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