Spare the rod, spoil the child

[John V]

It's not simplistic. It's fact. Spanking is harmful to fucking children. The people who deny this are being as ignorant in ignoring the evidence as people are when they deny evidence for evolution.

Findings Give Some Support To Advocates of Spanking

The studies cited by opponents of corporal punishment, Dr. Baumrind contended, often do not adequately distinguish the effects of spanking, as practiced by nonabusive parents, from the impact of severe physical punishment and abuse. Nor do they consider other factors that might account for problems later in life, like whether parents are rejecting or whether defiant or aggressive children might be more likely to be spanked in the first place.

Dr. Baumrind described findings from her own research, an analysis of data from a long-term study of more than 100 families, indicating that mild to moderate spanking had no detrimental effects when such confounding influences were separated out. When the parents who delivered severe punishment -- for example, frequently spanking with a paddle or striking a child in the face -- were removed from the analysis, Dr. Baumrind and her colleague, Dr. Elizabeth Owens, found that few harmful effects linked with spanking were left. And the few that remained could be explained by other aspects of the parent-child relationship.

''When parents are loving and firm and communicate well with the child,'' Dr. Baumrind said, ''the children are exceptionally competent and well adjusted, whether or not their parents spanked them as preschoolers.''

The study drew upon data from the Family Socialization and Developmental Competence Project, which followed families in the Berkeley, Calif., area over 12 years, from the time their children were preschoolers until they were adolescents.

Dr. Baumrind argued that, without compelling evidence that spanking is harmful, parents should be free to rear their children in accordance with their own values and traditions.