Taboo: Spanking Smackdown

The uproar over a California assemblywoman's announcement that she wants to make it illegal for parents to spank their own toddlers raises an interesting question: how many parents actually spank their kids? We may have to beat them to get the truth. A new study of more than 2,000 parents in the journal Clinical Pediatrics found fewer than 9 percent explicitly admit to spanking their kids ages 2 to 11--while at the same time, 40 percent say they were spanked as a child and use the same discipline techniques as their parents. "People don't want to admit it, even in an anonymous, confidential questionnaire," says Dr. Shari Barkin, lead author of the study and chief of general pediatrics at Vanderbilt University's Children's Hospital. This is a big change in social attitudes froma few decades ago: national surveys in 1975 and 1985 found that more than 90 percent of parents spanked their 3-year-olds. In 1988, two thirds of mothers with kids under 6 said they routinely hit their child three times a week. By the 1990s, however, it was widely agreed in the medical community that corporal punishment doesn't work, is less effective than other discipline techniques and has potentially harmful side effects. (Interestingly, a third of parents in the new study say their discipline approach is ineffective.)

So are fewer people actually spanking, or are they just less willing to admit it? Dr. Robert Murray, who studied the issue of corporal punishment in schools for the American Academy of Pediatrics, says both are true, and the stigma surrounding spanking is a good thing. "When there was a social norm of spanking, it shielded abuse," he says. Maybe if parents are scared to admit to spanking, he says, they'll think twice about actually doing it.

The study casts light on the difficulty of obtaining reliable data through self-reporting. Sex and illegal behavior such as shoplifting or drug use can't be studied by direct observation, which can bias the behavior itself. "Confidential, anonymous surveys end up usually being the best way to get at [that kind of] data," says Barkin. But there's still no punishment for telling a lie--to researchers, anyway.