FEW NEWS ITEMS ARE SURER TO GAIN approving attention from the media elite than social-science studies that challenge traditional childrearing practices. So it was that on August 15, newspapers nationwide trumpeted the findings of one Murray A. Straus, sociologist at the University of New Hampshire and sworn enemy of corporal punishment.
The stories summarized Straus’s forthcoming article in the American Medical Association’s Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, co-authored by David B. Sugarman and Jean Giles Sims. Seeking to one-up the standard critics of spanking, Straus contends that the practice not only fails to improve a child’s conduct, but makes things worse. He found that children ages 6 to 9 whose mothers spanked them were more likely than their non- spanked counterparts to engage in antisocial behavior like bullying, lying, and cheating.
Some methodological flaws in this analysis are glaring. In choosing to track only 6-to-9-year-olds, Straus skews his study away from the group most likely to acquire the wisdom of the ages by occasionally having their rumps reddened namely, younger children. Parents who are still spanking their children as late as 9 are likely to be inept parents — or to come from the very socioeconomic classes that, for reasons including family structure, disproportionately rear antisocial juveniles.
Excluding from the spanked group children whose fathers administered the swats further tips the sample away from intact families. Straus’s victims of corporal punishment might well have been even more antisocial if denied whatever spankings they received from their overwhelmed mothers.
This methodological shortcoming proved too obvious even for the publisher to ignore. In a companion article that followed Straus’s analysis, Marjorie Lindner Cunnoe and Carrie Lea Mariner criticized Straus’s failure to control properly for “family structure and other demographic variables.” Their own study, controlling for such factors, found “no evidence” to support Straus’s ” universal anti-spanking stance.”
Equally blatant, Straus’s findings are not even news. Straus has been saying the same thing with various co-authors since 1991. And he is straightforward about his aims. He is determined to launch a crusade to stamp out corporal punishment, to the point of cooking up specious social science for the cause.
Consider his 1993 broadside against corporal punishment in the journal Youth & Society. Straus declares spanking an “assault” on children comparable to domestic violence against women. He also makes this priceless contribution to the Murphy Brown debate: “Children living with both parents are usually thought of as having an advantage over children in single- parent households. Although this is correct in many ways, the results of this study show that having two parents increases the probability of an adolescent being hit.” In short, “two parents may mean double jeopardy for adolescents in the United States.”
Such bold formulations pop up frequently in Straus’s anti-spanking opus, the 1994 book Beating the Devil Out of Them: Corporal Punishment in American Families. “Good science tends to be a labor of love,” Straus writes at the beginning of his preface. “Unfortunately, my love is mostly unrequited.” He complains that few agree with his position that spanking is per sechild abuse, although he cites a 1986 survey of 3I widely read parental-advice books showing that 70 percent either discouraged corporal punishment or did not mention it.
“A labor of love is not dispassionate,” Straus continues. “Therefore, it is appropriate to confront the old false belief that deep value commitments are incompatible with objective science.” He would like to return to a time, before the Age of Reason, when science was the handmaiden of a sacred cause — theology then, political correctness now. Allying his “humanitarian values” with his “commitment to the scientific method,” he unabashedly seeks to snuff out the “ancient evil” of spanking. For “ending corporal punishment,” he writes, “is one of the most important steps to achieving a less violent world. ” The family, for its part, is the “cradle of violence.”
Corporal punishment causes so many social ills, Straus hardly knows where to begin. He settles on the old “violence begets violence” chestnut. Corporal punishment, he asserts, leads to a higher murder rate. Both spring from a ” culture of violence.” “Children learn from corporal punishment the script to follow for almost all violence.” And widespread corporal punishment produces public support for troglodytic social policies, such as “capital punishment of murderers, prison terms for drug use, punitively low welfare payments, or bombing raids to punish countries that support terrorists.”
Straus’s catalogue of woes linked to corporal punishment includes a kinky chapter alleging a connection between spanking and sadomasochism. Sexuality, he says, is rooted in human “lovemaps.” These are the mental templates that determine what a person finds erotic and pleasurable. Spanking can “vandalize” these lovemaps and make one prone to sadomasochism. Straus offers little solace to parents who spank with noble intentions: “Our research so far suggests that when corporal punishment is combined with love, masochism is the result.” Straus quotes the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association, which brands masochistic sex “not part of normative arousal- activity patterns,” though he sidesteps the question of why this behavior is worse than other forms of consensual deviance now deemed a civil right by many on the left.
Straus argues that corporal punishment leads to increased risk of depression, lower economic status, and even “lack of internalized moral standards.” The condescension is palpable when Straus takes up the strong support for corporal punishment among black Americans: A Gallup poll this year found that 83 percent of blacks favor spanking children. Straus mentions the defense of corporal punishment offered by black social scientists Elijah Anderson and Charles Willie but makes no attempt to do justice to their work, merely quoting one as saying, “I was whupped, and I’m OK.” He brushes these scholars’ views aside with the a historical assertion that corporal punishment — a nearly universal human custom — became “part of black culture in response to slavery and oppression.” He further opines that “the continuation of that aspect of black culture interferes with progress towards equality.”
Anderson and Willie are not the only experts defending corporal punishment. In his 1993 review of four major longitudinal studies of the relationship between spanking and antisocial aggression, Robert E. Larzelere found an average correlation of “about .00.” His own study in 1991 found that corporal punishment, when combined with reasoning, was a more effective method of discipline than reasoning alone.
Social science, of course, is unlikely to settle the debate over corporal punishment. Attacks on this venerable practice are heating up. States from Washington to Pennsylvania have or are considering restrictions on parental spanking. Religious conservatives have counterattacked by proposing parental- rights amendments to state constitutions to preserve, among other things, the prerogative to spank. Such amendments are not the result of paranoia, as their opponents charge. The Scandinavian countries and Austria have already outlawed corporal punishment of children. And our activist judiciary poses a constant threat to coin such a “right” for children. While two-thirds of Americans told Gallup this year that they approve of spanking — and 90 percent of parents admit spanking their toddlers on occasion — the number of Americans supportive of the practice has fallen, from 94 percent in 1968 to 65 percent today.
Straus and the parenting experts who reflexively denounce spanking on Oprah have found a receptive audience. Today’s harried young parents are reluctant to let the business of proper discipline ruin their “quality time” with their children. Even so, half-baked social science cannot erase our innate knowledge that sometimes nothing less than corporal punishment commands the awe and attention of rebellious children, especially boys. With out-of-control juveniles increasingly fueling our social problems, the last thing we need is to remove from parents’ store of punishments one that has checked children successfully through the ages.
Andrew Peyton Thomas is deputy counsel to the governor of Arizona.
