Is there a link between Physical Punishment of Children and Violence in Society?

Under the headline 'A smack today, but tearaway tomorrow', the Daily Mail (15.8.97) reported on a research project conducted by Dr Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire. We asked Professor H R Schaffer of Strathclyde University, who has himself recently surveyed the relevant literature, to provide an objective assessment of Dr Straus' study.

Opinions are one thing, facts another. Research is supposed to be in the business of supplying the latter, but when it comes to examining the research literature on the effects of physical punishment it turns out that the facts are nowhere as clearcut as one would like.

A new study recently published by Straus and his colleagues (1997), is a case in point. Straus, an American sociologist, is a well-known contributor to the literature on a possible link between physical punishment and subsequent ill-effects on children - a link that he himself has always argued for as plausible and indeed highly likely.

However, he acknowledges that past research has been plagued by various methodological problems, in particular the difficulty of demonstrating what is cause and what is effect: do punitive parents make children aggressive or do aggressive children make parents punitive? In this study he set out to put these problems right and thus present a more credible answer than past research.

Oversimplistic

The study is based on what is referred to as a national (USA) sample of 807 mothers with 6 to 9 year-old children, who were followed up over a two year period during which information was obtained about the mothers' (not the fathers'!) spanking and about the children's antisocial behaviour. To cut a long story short, Straus and his colleagues found the two to be causally related: when parents use physical punishment to reduce antisocial behaviour the long-term effects tend to be the opposite, i.e. children are more likely to behave in unacceptable ways. On that basis Straus suggests that if only we eliminated physical punishment the level of violence in society would be greatly reduced.

If only it were that simple! One problem lies in accepting this study as quite as definitive as its authors seem to regard it. There are various problems with it: for example, the fact that the women studied became mothers when they were only 14 to 21 years old - "hardly a representative slice of motherhood", as one commentator in Time magazine has put it. Also, all the information was obtained from the mothers - not from fathers, teachers or the children themselves, and to get data from the same source about the different factors whose relationship one wants to examine goes against established practice. Add to that the fact that interviews with the mothers were all conducted over the telephone and one has got good reason to question the reliability of the findings. In any case, advances in knowledge rarely depend on one specific study, but always need to be considered in the light of other reports.

I have just conducted a review of all the literature on the psychological effects of physical punishment (Schaffer 1998), and have been impressed by the inconsistencies of findings from one study to another. There are various reasons for this annoying state of affairs, the main one being methodological.

Methodology

Research findings are always a function of the methods employed to obtain them; different methods may well give rise to different results; and it takes a long time before we eventually sort out the reasons for the inconsistencies. Indeed, the report by Straus is followed in the same journal by another (Gunnoe and Mariner, 1997), which looks at over 1,000 children aged 4 to 11 and finds that spanking was associated with less aggressiveness in 4 to 7 year-olds but with more in the 8 to 11 year range.

In another report, Larzelere (1996) reviewed 35 different studies and found that 9 reported mainly beneficial outcomes for children of spanking, 12 reported detrimental outcomes, and the remaining 14 reported neutral outcomes. The best studies, methodologically speaking, were more likely to find beneficial outcomes.

In short, so far the results from research are inconclusive. We need more studies, and in the meantime there is no firm case to be made out for the passing of legislation forbidding parents physically to punish their children.

References

• Gunnoe M L & Mariner C L (1997) Toward a developmental-contextual model of the effects of parental spanking on children's aggression. Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, 151, pp768-775.
• Larzelere R E (1996) A review of parental use of nonabusive or customary physical punishment. Pediatrics, 98, pp824-828.
• Schaffer H R (1998 - in press) Making Decisions About Children (2nd edition) Oxford: Blackwell.
• Straus M A, Sugarman D B & Giles-Sims J (1997) Spanking by parents and subsequent antisocial behavior of children. Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, 151, pp761-767.

H R Schaffer is Professor of Psychology at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and has written extensively on various aspects of child development. His books include Mothering (1977), Making Decisions About Children (1991) and Social Development (1996). He is also Editor of the journal Social Development.

This article was originally published in the Families for Discipline newsletter, Issue 6, Spring 1998.

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