Scientific Evidence Is Easily Sidelined By Parental Beliefs & Displaced By Critical Anecdotes On The Internet

Near-scientific consensus that physical punishment has negative effects on children has led to interest in how to educate parents about its potential harms. Efforts to reduce parents’ use of physical punishment, often called spanking, with young children through on-line education are likely to succeed only if they directly address parents’ beliefs.

This is what we learned from an experiment we undertook to examine how parents who approve of physical punishment remain committed to spanking even after being shown scientific evidence linking the practice to many negative effects for children, including aggression and mental health issues. The study, of parents of 2- to 8-year-olds from 41 U.S. states, was published in the Journal of Family Psychology.

Discomfort Makes Parents Mistrust Science

In our study, parents were given written scientific evidence about spanking in the form of an on-line news article, which included quotes from an expert on physical punishment. They also received written opinions from lay commentators who advocated for physical punishment. Parents who approved of physical punishment rated experts as less trustworthy than lay commentators, thereby avoiding the psychological challenge and discomfort – often called cognitive dissonance — that occurs when beliefs contradict scientific evidence. They may do this by questioning the trustworthiness of the science and preferring alternative perspectives that fit their views.

“Parents do not discount all science related to parenting, just science that conflicts the views they hold.”

However, in our study, parents who approved of physical punishment were not anti-science in principle. Their distrust of science was specific to this topic. For example, parents had no trouble valuing messages from experts on a neutral topic — the importance of car seats for children — even when they had discounted the expert on physical punishment. These findings suggest that parents do not discount all science related to parenting, just science that conflicts the views they hold.

Photo: Average Joe. Creative Commons.

Findings Suggest More Workable Approaches

The Internet has become a leading source of information for parents around the world. Our study helps us understand why efforts to significantly reduce spanking by disseminating information on-line about the dangers of physically punishing children may prove difficult without directly addressing common misperceptions about physical punishment. First, the on-line world makes it very easy for users to avoid information that contradicts what they already believe. Second, it gives users competing lay and pseudo-scientific commentary that can confirm existing views in what are often referred to as echo chambers.

The good news is that parents who approve of physical punishment don’t distrust science per se — they are generally open to scientific findings, as the comparison involving child car seats showed. However, it is easy for parents to discount scientific findings when they can easily find others on-line who validate their support for practices such as physical punishment.

Paediatricians Can Be Influential

Given the challenges of on-line parent education, a more productive way to educate parents about the harms of physical punishment may be to do so through experts they already trust, such as their children’s pediatricians. Pediatricians are widely trusted by parents. In the United States and Canada, they are encouraged to offer anticipatory guidance – a type of proactive counselling on childrearing topics such as children wearing bicycle helmets and ensuring that guns are stored safely — even if parents don’t raise the issue. The risks of physical punishment should be a subject that is frequently discussed with parents, along with suggestions for disciplinary methods to use instead of physical punishment. Pediatricians say the best time to discuss this is when children are infants so parents can reflect on the options available long before their children misbehave. However, pediatricians are not always trained for the task and may need advice on how best to raise these issues and participate in these discussions.

Beliefs Underpin Parental Resistance To Science

At some level, most parents who physically punish their young children believe in the practice. Some use this kind of punishment because their parents used it on them and they believe it worked. Some see it is as a last resort, when parents feel they have no other option. They may feel they need spanking in their toolbox to drive their message home on occasion. Simply telling parents not to hit their children without providing a realistic and credible toolbox of alternatives is unlikely to win over converts. Experts may seem to be taking away parents’ last resort without offering them something they know will work in what can be a stressful situation. Also, if experts offer parents alternatives that seem too difficult or time consuming, parents may display solution aversion: When a solution is regarded as unworkable or too scary, people recoil from it and stick with what they know.

Tempting though it may be to simply rely on making scientific evidence about physical punishment widely available, to have a wider impact, we need more individualized approaches that address parents’ beliefs. Resistant parents are not intrinsically anti-science. But on the issue of spanking, they need workable options other than physical punishment. When the going gets tough, they need something they can really believe in.

The post Ending The Practice Of Spanking Young Children May Require More Individualized, Belief-Based Dialogue With Parents appeared first on Child and Family Blog.

Many parents continue to think that spanking children makes them better behaved. A pioneering study shows that this belief is misguided and that maternal warmth, unlike spanking, is the way to create positive child behaviors.

Hitting young children on the bottom doesn’t make them better behaved in the long term. Spanking or smacking has no impact on the positive qualities that most parents value in children, such as friendliness, openness, kindness, sympathy and understanding of others. Instead, mothers’ warmth, including hugging, is associated with an increase in these qualities, sometimes called “social competence”.

Children’s social competence was not linked to hitting by parents, according to our long-term study of 3,279 urban US families with young children. This is important because many parents continue to use such physical punishment in the belief that it will have a positive impact on their children’s long-term behavior.

“The best bet for parents is to model the behaviour that they want to see in their children…If you want your children to be warm, friendly and sociable, then be warm, friendly and kind towards them. Spanking teaches children that hitting is acceptable: most parents don’t want their children to be aggressive and key to that goal, alongside other positive outcomes, is not hitting them.”

Recent studies with national samples of parents have found that over three-quarters of children are spanked at least once, and most are spanked more often. The practice peaks at about age 3. Many parents believe that the physical pain of spanking, when accompanied by a message about behaving well, will discipline children into being “nicer” and having more socially desirable behaviors.

Parents misguided about spanking children

However, our study demonstrates that parents are misguided if they believe that spanking makes their children better behaved. We found no positive association between mothers’ use of spanking and children’s future social competence. Our results are consistent with numerous earlier studies that have found considerable and long-lasting negative outcomes associated with spanking children. These include higher levels of aggression, poorer mental health, lower cognitive ability, more negative relationships with parents, and a higher risk of delinquency and criminality. Spanking is also linked with a higher risk of physical abuse. The fact that we found no demonstrable positive effects, when combined with this well-established evidence about negative impacts, undermines the widely held view that spanking is either a necessary or effective way to promote desirable child behavior.

Parental warmth leads to better-behaved children

How can parents promote kindness in their children? Our study suggests that the best bet is for parents to model the behavior that they want to see in their children. We found that the more parents expressed affection toward children (including hugging them), and engaged in positive reinforcement with, their children, the more friendly, kind, and open their children became.

Our study produced important evidence that maternal warmth—which includes affection, positive reinforcement and responding verbally to children—is associated with positive behaviors in children over time. We found that parental warmth, unlike hitting, is linked to improved social competence in children: friendliness, openness, and kindness and sympathy for others. In short, if you want your children to be warm, friendly and sociable, then be warm and kind towards them. Spanking teaches children that hitting is acceptable: most parents don’t want their children to be aggressive and key to that goal, alongside other positive outcomes, is not hitting them.

Two unrelated systems influence child behaviors

Intriguingly, we also found that maternal warmth is unrelated to child aggression; and, in prior work, we’ve shown that parental warmth didn’t moderate the increased child aggression associated with hitting a child. We found that children who were spanked were more aggressive even when their mothers were high in warmth. Our study suggests that two systems are operating to affect child behaviors, and they are not related to each other: hitting children is linked to aggression but not to social competence; parental warmth is linked to social competence but not to aggression.

We know of no prior studies that have specifically examined both spanking and warmth as predictors of “good behavior” by children or that have compared their impact on positive qualities in child behavior.

Our findings suggest that we need to change common and harsh parenting practices and beliefs regarding spanking among large numbers of people around the world. Changing these practices in such sizeable populations could lead to considerable benefits at relatively low cost, if the change were taken up widely.

Our results also suggest that professionals who work with children should discourage parents from spanking young children, because it doesn’t improve their behavior, and it is linked to many adverse outcomes. Instead, they should encourage parents to be warm and responsive to their children, as there are significant benefits linked to hugging children.

The post Spanking children does not make them ‘nicer’, but hugging does appeared first on Child and Family Blog.