The author of one major literature review opposes all spanking, whereas five other recent literature reviews have made less absolute conclusions. Some American pediatricians oppose all use of corporal punishment, whereas others think there are situations where nonabusive spanking should remain a disciplinary option for parents. How and when disciplinary tactics are used may be more important than which type of tactic is used.Īlthough physical punishment is used by as many as 94% of parents in some countries, a growing number of countries have banned its use. counterproductive implementations of disciplinary tactics. Improved research methods are needed to discriminate between effective vs. These results are consistent with residual confounding, a statistical artifact that makes all corrective actions by parents and psychologists appear to increase children's antisocial behavior due to child effects on parents.

All of these effects became non-significant after controlling for latent comprehensive measures of externalizing behavior problems.

A similar pattern of adverse effects was shown for grounding and psychotherapy and partially for the other two disciplinary tactics. The apparently adverse effect of spanking on antisocial behavior was replicated using the original trichotomous covariate for initial antisocial behavior. To account for covarying use of disciplinary tactics, the analyses were redone first for the 73% who had reported using at least one discipline tactic and second by controlling for usage of other disciplinary tactics and psychotherapy. All analyses were repeated for grounding, privilege removal, and sending children to their room, and for psychotherapy. The comprehensiveness and reliability of the covariate measure of initial antisocial behavior were varied to test for residual confounding. on spanking and antisocial behavior using a sample of 785 children who were 6 to 9 years old in the 1988 cohort of the American National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. This study re-analyzed a study by Straus et al.

This study re-analyzes the strongest causal evidence against customary spanking and uses these same methods to determine whether alternative disciplinary tactics are more effective in reducing antisocial behavior. Further, the small effects in those studies could be artifactual due to residual confounding, reflecting child effects on the frequency of all disciplinary tactics. None of those studies have investigated alternative disciplinary tactics that parents could use instead of spanking, however. The strongest causal evidence that customary spanking increases antisocial behavior is based on prospective studies that control statistically for initial antisocial differences.

Antisocial by Bradley Campbell