To Spank Or Not To Spank? University of Texas Researchers Say Don't Do It.

AUSTIN, TX -- To spank or not to spank -- it's a perennial debate among parents, pitting the "spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child" crowd from those averse to corporal punishment in preference of "time out" or other tactics of discipline.

Now, University of Texas at Austin have co-produced a study analyzing 50 years of research on spanking. The verdict: The more children are spanked, the more likely they are to defy parents and experience overall anti-social behavior, aggression and other issues.

UT-Austin researchers teamed up with their counterparts at the University of Michigan in a meta-analysis of half-a-century's worth of research on spanking, officials said Monday in announcing the findings. The study, published in this month’s Journal of Family Psychology, looks at five decades of research involving over 160,000 children.

Researchers said the study represents the most complete analysis to date of the outcomes associated with spanking. It's also yields greater specificity into the effects of spanking alone than previous papers on the subject, which included other types of physical punishment in their analyses.

The upshot: Children who are regularly spanked are more likely to defy their parents, experience increased anti-social behavior, aggression, mental health problems and cognitive difficulties, according to researchers.

“Our analysis focuses on what most Americans would recognize as spanking and not on potentially abusive behaviors,” Elizabeth Gershoff, an associate professor of human development and family sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. said.

Gershoff noted the research indicates spanking leads to unintended consequences at odds with the goal of disclipline: “We found that spanking was associated with unintended detrimental outcomes and was not associated with more immediate or long-term compliance, which are parents’ intended outcomes when they discipline their children.”

Across the board among subjects studied, links to health and mental issues and spanking were found. Gershoff and co-author Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work, found that spanking "...was significantly linked with 13 of the 17 outcomes they examined, all in the direction of detrimental outcomes."

For the purposes of the study, spanking was defined as an open-handed strike on a child's buttocks or extremities.

“The upshot of the study is that spanking increases the likelihood of a wide variety of undesired outcomes for children," Grogan-Kaylor said. "Spanking thus does the opposite of what parents usually want it to do."

Researchers identified some long-term effects among adults who were spanked as children as part of their research. Among the findings: The more they were spanked, the more likely they were to exhibit anti-social behavior and to experience mental health issues.

The study also found a generational attitude toward spanking as punishment. The adults-spanked-as-children subjects also were more likely to support physical punishment for their own children, highlighting how stances on corporal punishment are passed from generation to generation.

The overall finding -- essentially positing that spanking is bad for people -- is not new. Researchers looked at a wide range of spanking studies, virtually all of them associating spanking with negative outcomes. Studies using the most robust methodologies -- such as those utilizing longitudinal samples or experimental designs -- were included in the analysis.

Despite such prevailing knowledge about the ills of spanking, researchers noted that most people spank their kids. As many as 80 percent of parents around the world spank their children, according to a recent UNICEF report.

Gershoff noted the difficulty in reconciling the prevalence of spanking with the overwhelming data showing a lack of evidence as to its positive effects. What's more, the researcher noted both spanking and physical abuse were associated with near equal measures as having the same detrimental child outcomes.

“We as a society think of spanking and physical abuse as distinct behaviors,” she said. “Yet our research shows that spanking is linked with the same negative child outcomes as abuse, just to a slightly lesser degree.”

Gershoff also noted the study's results are consistent with a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that called for “...public engagement and education campaigns and legislative approaches to reduce corporal punishment,” including spanking, as a means of reducing physical child abuse.

“We hope that our study can help educate parents about the potential harms of spanking and prompt them to try positive and non-punitive forms of discipline," Gershoff said.