The Science and Statistics Behind Spanking Suggests that

11-FULLER_FINAL_AFTERPROOF.DOC 2/17/2009 8:50 AM
2009] THE SCIENCE AND STATISTICS BEHIND SPANKING 285
and intimidate. 208 Also, physically abusive parents tend to engage in
unusually high levels of verbal abuse and inconsistent discipline. 209
Most parents, by contrast, draw a clear line between abuse and
reasonable physical discipline. 210 Accordingly, there’s a great divide
between parents that spank and parents that abuse; and there’s no
substantial in-between group (which there should be if spanking led to
abuse on a continuum). 211 In general, parents either spank responsibly,
or they cause injury. 212 These vastly different practices have vastly
different results—causing injury is harmful, whereas spanking is either
neutral or helpful, depending on the context. 213 Because of this
qualitative difference, most pediatricians reject the idea that spanking
inherently leads to abuse. 214
208. E.g., Baumrind, Ordinary Physical Punishment, supra note 128, at 585 (“Abusive parents
are more likely to be hyperreactive to negative stimuli and to have an extreme need to control their
children. Their punishment is less contingent on the child’s behavior than on their own inner
state.”).
209. See, e.g., id. (“Thus, in a study of affluent, well-educated families, those parents whose
recourse to physical punishment was excessively severe and frequent also engaged in significantly
more negative interactions of other kinds including verbal abuse, being significantly less warm,
supportive and consistent, and themselves exhibiting more internalizing and externalizing problem
behavior.”); Baumrind, Causally Relevant Research, supra note 21, at 9 (saying Authoritarian-
Directive parents were more likely to use overly severe physical discipline).
210. See, e.g., U.N., League Table, supra note 7, at 28 (“For most parents, there is a clear line
between the kind of violence they would consider to be ‘reasonable chastisement’ and the kind of
violence which they would regard as ‘abuse.’”).
211. See, e.g., id. at 13 (saying studies in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. revealed that most
child abuse deaths contained “no evidence of a pattern of escalating violence”) (emphasis in
original); P. CAWSON, C. WATTAM, S. BROOKER & G. KELLY, CHILD MALTREATMENT IN THE
UNITED KINGDOM 97 (2000) (“There appeared to be a divide between the families where children
were hit with implements or often hit to a level which caused lasting pain, bruising or other injury,
and those where occasional slaps occurred which rarely or never had lasting effects. There was no
substantial bridging group in which smacking was regular but not severe, which we would have
expected to find if escalation were a common phenomenon.”); supra note 210 and accompanying
text.
212. See, e.g., id. (“In general it seems that parents either hit children rarely and lightly, or
they do it to cause serious hurt.”).
213. See, e.g., Dr. Leonard D. Eron, Theories of Aggression: From Drives to Cognitions, in
AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR, CURRENT PERSPECTIVES 3 (L.R. Huesmann ed., 1994) (After a decade of
longitudinally studying children beginning when the children were in third grade, Dr. Eron found no
association between punishment (including spanking) and later aggression. “[U]pon follow-up 10
years after the original data collection, we found that punishment of aggressive acts at the earlier
age was no longer related to current aggression, and instead, other variables like parental nurturance
and children’s identification with their parents were more important in predicting later
aggression.”).
214. E.g., Kristin White, Where Pediatricians Stand on Spanking, PEDIATRIC MGMT. 11 (Sept.
1993) (saying more than seventy percent of pediatricians reject the idea that spanking leads to
abuse).