In this episode, we talk about why we don t spank our kids, why we think spanking is bad parenting, and why it might not be as bad as the research says it is. We also talk about our experience with spanking as a parent and how it has changed the way we parent.
00:00:00.000A really big study came out in 2023 that basically went through all the old research and showed that, yes, I was right to think it was sus.
00:00:10.460Now, you would assume at the very least they would be correcting for child behavior, right, in these giant samples.
00:00:20.980And they just used a giant sample size to push under the table that they weren't correcting.
00:00:27.800If you can't understand why this would be so insane and why this would obviously show that spanking had all of these deleterious outcomes, consider our family.
00:00:37.800We do not do any form of corporal punishment with our daughter because she just doesn't misbehave in the way our boys misbehave.
00:00:45.280In these studies, she would be in the category of non-spanking and my sons would be in the category of spanking.
00:00:53.500And then they would be like, look, spanking is causing more bad behavior.
00:01:00.280Teen, the APA Task Force on Physical Punishment of Children recommended a resolution opposing all physical punishment.
00:01:06.500Although the task force cited five meta-analyses, they relied almost entirely on Gorshoff and Gorgon-Kahler's 2016 evidence against physical punishment,
00:01:15.940which came exclusively from unadjusted correlations.
00:01:21.400Exclusively from unadjusted correlations.
00:01:23.880The task force ignored two stronger meta-analyses that went beyond correlations.
00:01:28.620These other meta-analyses concluded that harmful effects of physical punishment were, quote-unquote, trivial.
00:01:33.920However, the randomized trials find spanking has a slightly positive effect.