Spanking
kids can cause long-term harm: Canada study Spanking kids can cause long-term harm: Canada study
"Spanking children can cause long-term developmental damage and may even lower a child's IQ, according to a new Canadian analysis that seeks to shift the ethical debate over corporal punishment into the medical sphere..." Source
Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is
old he will not depart from it (Pr 22:6).
Recommended Reading:
Growing Kids God's Way
See:
How should Christians discipline their children? What does the Bible say? Does
the Bible teach that spanking is the best method of child discipline?
What does it mean to 'spare the rod, spoil the child'? Does the Bible teach that
spanking is the best method of child discipline?
What does it mean to train up a child in the way he should go? What does the
Bible say about raising children?
What does the Bible say to do with a rebellious child? What is the key to
overcoming a child's rebellious streak?
[From a Christian]
Article: Pro-Spanking Studies May Have Global Effect
Two recent analyses – one psychological, the other legal – may debunk lenient modern parenting the way the Climategate e-mail scandal has short circuited global warming alarmism.
A study entailing 2,600 interviews pertaining to corporal punishment, including the questioning of 179 teenagers about getting spanked and smacked by their parents, was conducted by Marjorie Gunnoe, professor of psychology at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Gunnoe’s findings, announced this week: "The claims made for not spanking children fail to hold up. They are not consistent with the data."
Those who were physically disciplined performed better than those who weren’t in a whole series of categories, including school grades, an optimistic outlook on life, the willingness to perform volunteer work, and the ambition to attend college, Gunnoe found. And they performed no worse than those who weren’t spanked in areas like early sexual activity, getting into fights, and becoming depressed. She found little difference between the sexes or races.
Another study published in the Akron Law Review last year examined criminal records and found that children raised where a legal ban on parental corporal punishment is in effect are much more likely to be involved in crime.
A key focus of the work of Jason M. Fuller of the University of Akron Law School was Sweden, which 30 years ago became the first nation to impose a complete ban on physical discipline and is in many respects "an ideal laboratory to study spanking bans," according to Fuller.
Since the spanking ban, child abuse rates in Sweden have exploded over 500 percent, according to police reports. Even just one year after the ban took effect, and after a massive government public education campaign, Fuller found that "not only were Swedish parents resorting to pushing, grabbing, and shoving more than U.S. parents, but they were also beating their children twice as often."
After a decade of the ban, "rates of physical child abuse in Sweden had risen to three times the U.S. rate" and "from 1979 to 1994, Swedish children under seven endured an almost six-fold increase in physical abuse," Fuller’s analysis revealed.
"Enlightened" parenting also seems to have produced increased violence later. "Swedish teen violence skyrocketed in the early 1990s, when children that had grown up entirely under the spanking ban first became teenagers," Fuller noted. "Preadolescents and teenagers under fifteen started becoming even more violent toward their peers. By 1994, the number of youth criminal assaults had increased by six times the 1984 rate."
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