Democracy in America | Parents and spanking

Spare the rod

Spanking makes your children stupid

By The Economist | NEW YORK

GEORGE STEWART’S teacher in Jamaica used to wait by the school door with a switch to punish tardy pupils. His parents whipped him, too. Now he lives in the Bronx and refuses to hit his own children. “I don’t think beating works,” he says. “It instils in them a cruelty that they pass down, generation to generation.”

Ample evidence backs his view, say Richard Reeves and Emily Cuddy of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. Nearly 30 studies from various countries show that children who are regularly spanked become more aggressive themselves, as both children and adults. They are also more likely to be depressed or take drugs, even after correcting for other factors.

Smacking is effective in the short run: it stops children pulling their sisters’ hair. But in the long run it has all sorts of bad effects. A study in 20 American cities, published in the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2013, found that young children in homes with little or no spanking showed swifter cognitive development than their peers. Other studies find that children in physically punitive schools perform worse.

Still, 81% of American parents believe that spanking is sometimes necessary (see table). That is more than in many other rich countries, 20 of which have banned spanking even by parents. In America Republicans spank more than Democrats; southerners more than north-easterners; blacks more than whites; and born-again Christians more than everyone else.

American teachers are still allowed to whack children with a paddle (a wooden bat only a little shorter and thinner than a cricket bat) in 19 states, mostly in the South—a practice that is banned in over 100 other countries. More than 216,000 pupils were beaten at school during the 2008-09 school year, according to the Department of Education. Children who were poor, black, disabled and male disproportionately received the most blows.

When Adrian Peterson, a Minnesota Vikings’ football star, was arrested on charges of child abuse in September, after he allegedly wounded his son with a switch, several black commentators protested that such beatings were an essential rite of passage. A whipping from a loving parent keeps kids on the straight and narrow, they argued. “A father’s belt hurts a lot less [than] a cop’s bullet!” tweeted D. L. Hughley, a black comedian. Others look to the Bible: “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” Mr Stewart retorts that a better rod “could be the word of the Lord”.

Correction: The chart in an earlier version of this article indicated that Ethiopia allows corporal punishment in schools. It does not. Sorry

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