UC Berkeley study finds no lasting harm among adolescents from moderate spanking earlier in childhood

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UC Berkeley study finds no lasting harm among adolescents from moderate 
spanking earlier in childhood 
24 August 2001 
By Patricia McBroom, Media Relations 
Berkeley - Occasional spanking does not damage a child's social or emotional 
development, according to a study of long-term consequences in the lives of more 
than 100 families, reported today (Friday, Aug. 24) by a University of California, 
Berkeley, psychologist. 
The research presented by Diana Baumrind, who co-authored the study with 
Elizabeth Owens, both research psychologists at UC Berkeley's Institute of Human 
Development, calls into question a current claim that any physical punishment is 
harmful to a child. 
The study separates out parents who use spanking frequently and severely - 
resulting in evidence of harm - and focuses on those families who occasionally 
spank their children, a practice that Baumrind calls normal for the population 
sampled. 
By "spanking," Baumrind refers to striking the child on the buttocks, hands or legs 
with an open hand without inflicting physical injury and with the intention of 
modifying the child's behavior. 
Baumrind's study also compares spanking with another kind of discipline, namely 
verbal punishment. 
"We found no evidence for unique detrimental effects of normative physical 
punishment," Baumrind said in an invited address to the American Psychological 
Association annual meeting today in San Francisco. 
"I am not an advocate of spanking," said Baumrind, "but a blanket injunction 
against its use is not warranted by the evidence. It is reliance on physical 
punishment, not whether or not it is used at all, that is associated with harm to the 
child." 
She said that, in the absence of compelling evidence of harm, parental autonomy 
and family privacy should be protected. 
Her study of spanking in middle-class, white families was undertaken in response to 
anti-spanking advocates who have claimed that physical punishment, by itself, has 
harmful psychological effects on children and hurts society as a whole. 
These claims, Baumrind said, have not distinguished the effects of occasional mild-
to-moderate spanking from more severe punishment, or taken into account such 
confounding factors as earlier child misbehavior and the effects of total child rearing 
patterns - from rejection, on one hand, to warmth and explanation, on the other. 
The UC Berkeley study, however, was able to account for all of these factors and 
others, due to its unique data base. The data were drawn from longitudinal records 
of child rearing and child outcome in California East Bay families collected at the 
Institute of Human Development. Families in the Family Socialization and 
Developmental Competence Project (FSP) were first studied in 1968 when their 
children were preschoolers, and then in 1972-73 and 1978-80, when the children 
were early primary schoolers and early adolescents. 
In addition to the rich archival material on parental styles and discipline, combined 
with independent observations and interviews with the children, Baumrind's team 
created a new instrument for the spanking study. Called the Parent Disciplinary 
Rating Scale, this instrument rated parents on their strategies for using discipline. 
Few of the families, only 4 percent, never used physical punishment when their 
children were preschoolers, but there was a wide range in the frequency and 
severity of spanking throughout the whole sample, said Baumrind. 
A small minority of parents, from 4 to 7 percent depending on the time period, used 
physical punishment often and with some intensity. Although these parents were 
not legally abusive, they were overly severe and used spanking impulsively. Hitting 
occurred frequently, but it was the intensity that really identified this group, said 
Baumrind. 
She said intensity was rated high if the parent said he or she used a paddle or other 
instrument to strike the child, or hit on the face or torso, or lifted to throw or shake 
the child. 
This group of parents, identified in the "red zone" for "stop" was removed from the 
sample at the first stage of analysis. With them went most of the correlations 
initially found between spanking and long-term harm to children, said Baumrind. 
"When we removed this 'red zone' group of parents," said Baumrind, "we were left 
with very few small but significant correlations between normative physical 
punishment and later misbehavior among the children at age 8 to 9. 
"Red zone parents are rejecting, exploitative and impulsive. They are parents who 
punish beyond the norm. You have very little to explain after you remove this small 
group." 
She said the few links that remained were explained by the child's prior 
misbehavior. In other words, when researchers controlled for the tendency of the 
child to be uncooperative or defiant as preschoolers, all correlations between 
spanking and harmful effects were close to zero. 
In addition to a "red zone," parents were classified into orange, yellow and green 
zones. 
"There were no significant differences between children of parents who spanked 
seldom (green zone) and those who spanked moderately (yellow zone)," Baumrind 
said. 
Families in the orange zone could have used spanking often, but with little or no 
intensity. Those in the "yellow zone" used physical punishment only occasionally, 
with little or no intensity, while those in the "green zone" used little or no physical 
punishment with no intensity. 
The children of parents in the green zone who never spanked were not better 
adjusted than those, also in the green zone, who were spanked very seldomly, 
Baumrind said. 
Studies of verbal punishment yielded similar results, in that researchers found 
correlations just as high, and sometimes higher, for total verbal punishment and 
harm to the child, as for total physical punishment and harm. 
"What really matters," said Baumrind, "is the child rearing context. When parents 
are loving and firm and communicate well with the child (a pattern Baumrind calls 
authoritative) the children are exceptionally competent and well adjusted, whether 
or not their parents spanked them as preschoolers." 
Baumrind emphasized that her study does not address at all the damaging effects 
of abusive physical punishment, of which she and other researchers have found 
ample evidence. 
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