Study:Mothers' Spanking of 3-Year-Old Children and Subsequent Risk of Children's Aggressive Behavior

[Swede]

Not at all surprising.

Results Frequent use of CP (ie, mother's use of spanking more than twice in the previous month) when the child was 3 years of age was associated with increased risk for higher levels of child aggression when the child was 5 years of age (adjusted odds ratio: 1.49 <95% confidence interval: 1.2–1.8>; P < .0001), even with controlling for the child's level of aggression at age 3 and the aforementioned potential confounding factors and key demographic features.

Conclusions Despite American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations to the contrary, most parents in the United States approve of and have used CP as a form of child discipline. The current findings suggest that even minor forms of CP, such as spanking, increase risk for increased child aggressive behavior. Importantly, these findings cannot be attributed to possible confounding effects of a host of other maternal parenting risk factors.

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/peds.2009-2678v1?maxtoshow=&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=spanking&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&resourcetype=HWCIT

[demosincebirth]

1. Give me a break!

[Happyhippychick]

2. No not surprising. Will fight to the end of my days to see CP outlawed.

[ejpoeta]

3. from my own personal experience as a mother... i found that by spanking

you are condoning using hitting as an acceptable way to solve problems. i do not spank my kids. it is tempting, but i find incentives and the threat of losing privileges works best.

[JDPriestly]

4. I absolutely believe that this is true.

Children should not be spanked. Period.

[LakeSamish706]

5. Time outs work wonders and are far more meaningful than spanking.

With spanking, all you are doing is teaching kids that its ok to hit.

[TexasObserver]

6. It is also likely that parents who use such punishments lack the best parenting skills.

Anyone who knows anything about child development knows it is self defeating to hit children. It teaches them to hit others, and that's what they do. They hit friends. They hit siblings. And when they're older, they hit their parents, and then they start a whole new cycle of bad parenting with their own kids.

[redqueen]

7. It's good that physicians now have hard data to refer to

when telling parents that hitting their children is a bad idea.

The sad thing is that any of this even has to be explained. Cause fucking DUH.

[customerserviceguy]

8. Correlation does not equal causation

Perhaps the children with more aggressive personalities got smacked more as toddlers, just because of their aggressiveness? I doubt you would have found these 'results' back in the day when spanking was routinely used by parents, before the current generation of parents got shamed out of it.

[Johonny]

10. seems unlikely

sense they say they controlled for aggression. Aggressive kids at age 3 were more aggressive at age 5 if spanked than aggressive kids at age 3 that didn't get spanked. Of course these studies are hard because "aggressive" is sort of an objective criteria. Also there is a wide range of hitting a kid. The direct cause is unknown. It's not clear if the kids are more aggressive because they seek aggression as a solution to problems or because the other kids have learned that aggression is not a solution or both... It's interesting but hardly conclusive to the why.

[redqueen]

11. Read the article first, next time. (nt)

[yodermon]

9. DUH. Children Imitate. It's how they learn. GIGO.