October 16, 2008
Alan E. Kazdin is a frustrated man, and it's America's parents who are frustrating him. These parents are, of all things, prone to use an occasional spanking in disciplining their children. Dr. Kazdin's great frustration is that these parents insist on doing what seems right to them, and thus they are ignoring or rejecting the fact that "science" shows that spankings don't work.
Dr. Kazdin is John M. Musser Professor of Psychology and Child Psychiatry at Yale University and director of the university's Parenting Center and Child Conduct Clinic. Writing at Slate.com, Kazdin argues that parents just don't get it -- "The typical parent, when whacking a misbehaving child, doesn't pause to wonder: 'What does science have to say about the efficacy of corporal punishment?'" No kidding. Is the parent supposed to go review the scientific data before dealing with a disobedient child? Just how out of touch can the folks at Yale be?
Slate.com is one of the most interesting digital magazines yet to appear. It leans predictably leftward, but offers some of the brightest reportage to be found anywhere in today's journalism. Nevertheless, Kazdin's article, "Spare the Rod: Why You Shouldn't Hit Your Kids," reads more like a parody of an article than as a serious article in a serious magazine.
After acknowledging that parents do not pause to ask the science question before "whacking a misbehaving child," Kazdin concedes that most American parents admit to spanking and that most children and adolescents (85%) report having been spanked.
"Parents cite children's aggression and failure to comply with a request as the most common reasons for hitting them," Kazdin reports. But, he insists, science shows that spanking just doesn't work over time. Though spanking may produce an immediate change in the child's behavior, children are "endowed with wonderful flexibility and ability to learn" and adapt to punishments faster "than parents can escalate it."
Of course, that same flexibility and ability to learn could well explain why spanking does work, but that would not fit Kazdin's line of argument, to say the least.
Professor Kazdin provides an indictment of spanking that includes the charge that parents generally can't stop themselves from "stepping up from a mild, generally harmless dose to an excessive and harmful one." He even suggests that spanking is addictive . . . like smoking cigarettes.
Here is some of the scientific research Professor Kazdin wants America's parents to take into account:
The negative effects on children include increased aggression and noncompliance—the very misbehaviors that most often inspire parents to hit in the first place—as well as poor academic achievement, poor quality of parent-child relationships, and increased risk of a mental-health problem (depression or anxiety, for instance). High levels of corporal punishment are also associated with problems that crop up later in life, including diminished ability to control one's impulses and poor physical-health outcomes (cancer, heart disease, chronic respiratory disease). Plus, there's the effect of increasing parents' aggression, and don't forget the consistent finding that physical punishment is a weak strategy for permanently changing behavior.
All of this is put forth without even a single footnote or citation. We are just to take Professor Kazdin's word for all this. He argues that "the science" shows this and shows that, but anyone who reads scientific reports knows that there is nothing so clearly defined as "the science" about just about anything. The "findings" Kazdin summarizes in the paragraph above appear to be matters of correlation anyway. When a report suggests that spanking (or anything else) is "associated with" a list of ills and bad outcomes, realize that "associated with" is a very thin argument. Non-spanking may be just as or even more "associated with" these same issues, under the right conditions and described by the right definitions.
