Should Parents Spank Their Children? Their Kids Risk Lower IQs
Posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 and is filed under Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
There’s been an ongoing debate about whether parents should spank their children. New research shows that children who are spanked have lower IQs than those who are not.
“All parents want smart children. This research shows that avoiding spanking and correcting misbehavior in other ways can help that happen,” said Professor Murray Straus from the University of New Hampshire. “The results of this research have major implications for the well being of children across the globe.”
“It is time for psychologists to recognize the need to help parents end the use of corporal punishment and incorporate that objective into their teaching and clinical practice. It also is time for the United States to begin making the advantages of not spanking a public health and child welfare focus, and eventually enact federal no-spanking legislation,” he says.
A nationally, representative sample of 806 children, ages two to four (whose IQs were five points higher), and 704 children, ages five to nine (whose IQs were 2.8 points higher) were selected. Straus’ results revealed that children who were spanked had lower IQs four years later than those who were not spanked.
“How often parents spanked made a difference,” said Straus. The more spanking the, the slower the development of the child’s mental ability. But even small amounts of spanking made a difference.”
Straus is the co-director of the Family Research Laboratory and professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire. He has studied spanking by large and representative samples of American parents since 1969. He is the author of “Beating The Devil Out Of Them: Corporal Punishment In American Families And Its Effects On Children
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