Is Spanking O.K.?

By Pamela Paul

The first time Donna Maria Coles Johnson spanked her daughter, they both cried. Johnson remembers that afternoon two years ago as if it were yesterday. They had just come home from church, and Vanessa, then 2, refused to take off her dress before nap time. "She gave me this look like she was the mother," Johnson, 43, recalls. "I'm fast-forwarding 16 years in my mind, hearing her say, 'Well, I'm taking the car anyway.'" Without a word, Johnson picked Vanessa up, took her into the bathroom and gave her six slaps on the thigh. After explaining the reason for the spanking, Johnson consoled her little girl. But that night, with Vanessa's leg still pink, Johnson broke down in tears. "I knew I was responsible for training her to deal with authority, but I also knew my child was hurting."

Few parenting topics inflame emotions the way spanking does. Parents who do it argue that occasional spanking is an important disciplinary tool. Parents who don't do it say hitting a child teaches that violence is O.K. On playgrounds and in mommy groups, parents eye each other warily. New York City mom Mila Tuttle, who doesn't spank her 2-year-old, recalls seeing a child hit his mother at a cafe and the mother swatting back, telling him "Don't do that--it's disrespectful." A man at the next table stood up and started screaming that the woman was a child abuser. "It was shocking," Tuttle says. "I think you can spank and still be a good parent."

Can you? A slim majority of Americans seem to think so: according to a 2002 Public Agenda poll, 57% of parents acknowledge spanking their kids. Psychologists and other academics are similarly divided, with each camp accusing the other of twisting data to suit an agenda. Opponents say corporal punishment can lead to aggression, poor mental health, even sadomasochistic tendencies and criminal behavior. Sally Moon, 42, a stay-at-home mother in Portland, Maine, agrees. Even when her daughter Teagan, 2, bites, Moon puts her in time-out and reasons with her. Says Moon: "I strongly believe children shouldn't be hit for any reason."

Neither the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) nor the American Psychological Association (APA) has come out fully against the practice. In 1998 the former issued a statement that said, in part, "Spanking is only effective when used in selective, infrequent situations." An APA statement permits similar wiggle room: "There is difference of opinion within the psychology community about spanking. But there is general concern that if and when spanking might lead to more severe forms of corporal punishment, parents should avoid [it]."

Plenty of experts believe that spanking is not always wrong. John Rosemond, executive director of the Center for Affirmative Parenting in Gastonia, N.C., and author of several books on discipline, notes that 50 years ago almost all children were spanked. Yet by all accounts, children are more aggressive and prone to violence today, and at earlier ages, than they were back then. Rosemond isn't advising parents to break out the whip. He simply points out that existing research on spanking is unpersuasive. "There is no evidence gathered by anyone who doesn't have an ideological ax to grind that suggests spanking per se is psychologically harmful," he says.

Many studies, for example, fail to distinguish among degrees of spanking (a swat on the bottom is very different from 10 lashes with a switch). Furthermore, the problems some kids who are spanked have in later life might have to do more with their personalities--the behaviors that got them spanked in the first place--than with the punishment. New research indicates that when it is not lumped together with serious, abusive forms of corporal punishment, spanking doesn't look so bad. In a longitudinal study of 168 white, middle-class families, Diana Baumrind and Elizabeth Owens, psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, found that occasional mild spanking does not harm a child's social and emotional development.

Similarly, after reviewing 38 studies of spanking, Robert Larzelere, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, concluded that in children under 7, nonabusive spanking reduced misbehavior without harmful effects. Not only does spanking work, Larzelere says, but it also reinforces milder forms of discipline, so that children are more apt to respond without spanking the next time.

For Neil Gussman's three children, it took a maximum of three spankings for them not to need spanking anymore. "If they have that experience early, they don't want to repeat it," says the communications manager and former tank commander. Gussman, 52, recalls having little respect for his mother, who used negotiation as her primary disciplinary tool, but plenty for his father, who spanked him once--memorably. Gussman was 5 when he played in a forbidden swamp near his home in Stoneham, Mass. "I had scared him half to death," says Gussman of his father, an ex-boxer. "He spanked me right then and there."

In fact, parents often spank out of fear, not anger. Kristy Hagar, a child neuropsychologist at the Children's Medical Center in Dallas, has spanked her daughters occasionally, when, for example, her toddler charged into oncoming traffic. Direct defiance is also seen as a valid reason for physical discipline. But there are limits on spankable offenses: spanking should never be used to punish petty misbehavior or as a result of a parent's anger.

One of the touchiest aspects of the spanking debate is that some groups tend to spank more than others, out of habit, cultural tradition or common parenting practice. Men, low-income parents, Southerners, evangelical Christians, Latinos and African Americans are more supportive of spanking. African-American parents say their children need to be especially under control in a prejudiced society. "I think black people have a lower tolerance for children looking disrespectful," says Pam Jackson, an economist and single mother in Washington. Wilma Ann Anderson, publisher of Mahogany Baby, an online magazine for black parents, and a mother of four, agrees. When a white woman goes out with four children, Anderson says, she instantly commands respect. "When I go out with my four kids, I feel like if they misbehave, people think I'm a welfare mom."

But some African Americans are disturbed by the culture of discipline. "I started analyzing whether by spanking, I want my children to fear or respect me," says Anderson. "My parents taught respect by fear. And there's a historical aspect to this--slaves were taught via physical reprimand and that was passed down." Complicating the matter are studies that show that what some still call a good whuppin' may not be so psychologically harmful in black families. But critics reply that saying it's O.K. for black children but not white kids to be spanked reinforces societal racism.

The clearest indication that there's no simple answer to the spanking dilemma, though, is that some professionals who work with parents to prevent child abuse and teach appropriate discipline methods also acknowledge spanking their kids--albeit sparingly. Right or wrong, for most parents, spanking remains a private matter.

Says Cheri Weeks, a child psychologist and a mother of three in Los Angeles: "I know that my parents have always been supportive, and these were the same people who spanked me when I was growing up. My parents' motto and my motto is that I need to discipline my children so that the world doesn't have to."