That's an interesting article, but I find the conclusion peculiar. So there's no good scientific evidence that corporal punishment helps children in the long run, and the best available evidence links it to worse outcomes rather than better ones, but because we can't do stuff like double-blinded studies with control groups, "bans on smacking have got far ahead of the evidence, and should be actively opposed until the science is much more solid"?
That's not the conclusion I'd draw from that body of evidence.
Seems there actually is a fair amount of research pointing to prohibiting corporal punishment for kids leads to better mental health, lower suicide rate, etc. and it does seem like a no-brainer to me that less violence leads to more stable individuals, and a more stable and happy society in general. In medieval times there was a lot of physical punishment, and society was violent, dangerous and unhappy compared to now. Singapore may be modern in many respects, but in this area, they're a bit of a backwater.
Sometimes you don't need to make a study showing some number to act on something.
It can be a simple chain of logic saying: % of children try to test their boundaries. Of those children some get away with it, some don't. Of those who get away with it, they carry on doing it, and it has reprecussions down the line. If you look at the problem this way, it's a rational take on caning - to tighten the net against bullying.
I am as asian and I was at the receiving end of pretty severe (trust me you dont wanna know the details) physical abuse as a child. It did leave some lasting damage but surprisingly it didnt affect my academic outcomes and I dont feel like someone who would ever ever consider suicide for anything whatsoever.
Just to state what I hope is obvious - every serious person, on any side of the smacking debate, agrees that physical abuse of children is wicked and wrong. The disagreement is about smacking; some people think that it is physical abuse by definition. Others may not think that, but believe that smacking is still a bad idea. Those on the other side believe that you can distinguish between reasonable corporal punishment and physical abuse. I'm sorry for what happened to you!
I've read a lot of this literature. I don't believe there is any research that shows this with a credible research design. But I'm happy to be challenged on this, so go ahead.
Consider: not hitting kids is much easier than hitting kids, and also free. Ergo, if we're gonna be hitting kids, we need really strong research to show that it's effective. Which we don't have. The default should be DENY, not ALLOW, just like good security practice.
You basically didn't address anything I wrote - this is one of the most worthless comments I've written in a while.
I will reiterate. If you, or others, want to hit children then that's something you need to justify with cold hard studies. Not me. The default is not hitting people.
Acknowledge the reality: if I do these punishments to another adult man, I will:
1. Probably get my ass handed to me.
2. Go to jail and be prosecuted for assault and battery.
Given that, why then does it magically become okay to do it to kids?
The answer is it doesn't, fucking obviously. So, if you want to do that, justify it. And it better be a good justification backed by science, not some pussy-footing "reasoning" I'm sure you're going to bust out.
The default is hitting people. We are afforded the not hitting people personally because law enforcement and therefore hitting people is delegated to the government. Government doesn't do much law enforcement when it comes to children behavior.
We live in a civilized society, the default is not hitting people and you won't convince me otherwise. Again, I don't want to hear some pussy-footing bullshit, so if that's all you have then stop commenting.
One point is that "the best available evidence" is of very poor quality, with known obvious confounds and mishandling of longitudinal data. (For example, Robert Larzelere argues that by the methods used, grounding children, and giving them therapy, also harms them: (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/1471-2431-10-1...) Another point is that parents may be well placed to know what is best for their children - better than "experts".
I interpret their argument differently. We know that bullying leads to harmful outcomes. We know that punishment reduces the frequency of undesirable behaviour. So we know that this policy will lead to an aggregate reduction in harm. The question is whether it could lead to some degree of harm to the bully. In the absence of compelling evidence of that, the policy itself seems merited.
For the record, bullying is a complex problem to solve, and no nation or policy or tactic has the silver bullet.
Some things can be good/bad in and of themself, rather than just a means to an end. I would argue that "violence against children" is bad in and of itself, and outlawing it is good in and of itself. If you want to argue that you see violence against children as a useful means to an end, why stop there? Let's also put the children to work. The children yearn for the mine.
Right, but if you smack your child on the wrist, is it violence? You can't really answer these things by throwing definitions around. (Imprisoning children is wrong, I'm sure we can agree. So, if you ground your child, is that imprisonment?)
I don't really get what point you're trying to make, but I'll answer your questions:
1. Yes, smacking your child on any part of their body, including the wrist, is violence. You're trying to make some kind of "a lot of violence might be wrong but just a little bit of violence can be useful" point? I don't get it.
2. No, I don't agree that "imprisoning children is wrong". Sometimes children commit horrible crimes, like murder, and they need to be imprisoned. If you want to say that grounding your child is also a form of imprisonment, it feels like a stretch, but sure, we can call that imprisonment too. I don't get what the point is, though.
If you define absolutely anything as violence in that way, you’re completely within your rights to do that, but then you can’t claim it’s intuitively obvious that we should never use violence against children. Instead you will need actual evidence, which leads us back to where we started - the evidence base is weak.
Or you can say what I think many people throughout history would have seen as common sense (rightly or wrongly): violence against children is wrong, but spanking them doesn’t count as “violence”.
My imprisonment analogy was meant to point out that it is not valid to take a common intuition that X is wrong, apply a very extended concept of X (even if you think that the extended concept is the only coherent one), and then expect the intuition to still command universal agreement.
I didn't define "absolutely anything" as violence. I didn't even reach for some contested definition of the word. Just the normal everyday definition that is broadly accepted in western society today.
> Or you can say what I think many people throughout history would have seen as common sense (rightly or wrongly): violence against children is wrong, but spanking them doesn’t count as “violence”.
Just like Putin's war in Ukraine is a "special military operation" or Trump's war in Iran is "just a little skirmish", right? You can play word games all you want, but it won't change the substance of the arguments. The point I made earlier was that some things are inherently good or bad, and that "violence against children" is part of those things. If you want me to say "xzglorb" instead of "violence", sure, we can say "xzglorb", but the substance doesn't change: xzglorb against children is inherently bad.
I am not trying to play word games. Your argument is "smacking is violence against children, by the common sense definition; violence against children is inherently bad" - also, I think, by common sense. My point is that when people say "smacking is violence" by common sense, they don't necessarily think that it is the kind of violence that is inherently bad; and when they think "violence against children is inherently bad", they are not necessarily thinking of smacking.
But maybe you're right. We both agree that killing children, or kicking them in the head, is inherently bad. You also think smacking children is inherently bad. What makes you believe so?
So now you're trying to say that "smacking" is not violence? At least where I live, in Finland, smacking someone in the head is considered to be a violent crime (battery). If I smacked you in the head, you could file a criminal complaint, a prosecutor would sue me, and you would win the lawsuit. You want to argue that smacking is not violence? I don't really get this line of arguing.
No, if you reread my point, I didn’t say “smacking is not violence”. My point was subtler than that - if you don’t understand it I can try to explain it better.
You don’t seem to have answered my second question.
Okay, I reread your comment and I still don't understand what you were trying to say, sorry.
Regarding that second question:
> You also think smacking children is inherently bad. What makes you believe so?
Are you asking me why something is "inherently" bad or good? That question doesn't make sense, because if there was some external reason, then it wouldn't be "inherently" bad or good.
I don't think there's much point in continuing this discussion, because we've now gone several times back and forth where each time I have no idea what you're trying to say.
*edit: maybe you were looking for an answer like this: each person has their own moral foundation (or, most people do, at least). it's shaped by a combination of their genes and cultural influence, and later in life, possibly re-shaped by some introspective moments. some person might feel very strongly that "truth" is valuable in and of itself. another person might feel very strongly that all forms of "violence" are wrong. a third person might not care much about either of those things. everybody has a different set of morals. i don't know what specific causes caused my morals to think "violence against children is wrong", but some combination of genes and cultural influence I guess.
No, it's about as "controversial" as claiming lead exposure is bad for children's brains.
Do we have RCTs for that? Or might we reasonably shape our priors from the hundreds of studies using a dozen different causal methodologies, which all find the same result?
The evidence for lead exposure harming children's brains is extremely solid, I believe. The evidence for spanking is not in the same league. It is not just about a lack of RCTs.
