Does Spanking Children Harm Their Intelligence?

According to Dr. Murray Straus, a professor of sociology and co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, spanking children causes them to lose IQ points.

Yahoo News reported on Friday, Sept. 26, that Dr. Straus conducted research on 17,000 students from 32 countries and found that "the higher the percent of parents who used corporal punishment, the lower the national average IQ."

In the United States he and fellow researchers studied data from 806 children between the ages of 2 and 4 and 704 between the ages of 5 and 9. Then he came back and checked their IQ's four years after the initial IQ data was collected and found that the group of children not spanked scored from 3-5 points higher on their second IQ test than the group that was spanked.

Dr. Straus then concluded that the more spanking a child received the slower their mental IQ development, but that even small amounts of spanking would make a difference, as he stated in a news release from the University of New Hampshire.

So, does spanking children really harm their intelligence, or are their parents just less educated and possess lower IQ's to begin with? It has become a controversial subject amongst parents and educators. To spank or not; that is the question that many parents ask themselves. For this parent and author, I made the decision to not spank many years before the subject was controversial; back 35 years ago when children were still routinely spanked and it was accepted discipline.

Today's parents are sometimes threatened with criminal charges for spanking. Spanking can escalate into child abuse easily and the line between the two is very narrow. It's why I made the decision to not spank, having suffered from routine beatings in several foster homes as a young child. Several of those foster homes believed in the theory we often hear spouted by the religious right.. Spare the rod, spoil the child.

This author did not find that to be the case, having being harshly spanked and becoming almost a juvenile delinquent before I was rescued from such "care". In deciding not to spank our own five children, my husband and I discovered other ways to effectively discipline them. All five managed to develop into respectful, law abiding, polite young men and women with self discipline and good control of their emotions and actions. Are they perfect? Nope. But they were always far better behaved than many of their peers who were spanked routinely.

Whether it contributed to their high IQ's, I don't know. I guess I would have been a genius if I hadn't been spanked so often as a child. Three of our five have IQ's far above the norm, and the other two rank well above the norm.

Did not spanking them make them brighter? I don't know the answer to that question.

But I do know the answer to this one. Can parents find a better way to discipline their children than spanking them?

Yes, they can, is my answer from personal experience and they should try to do so. The results might not give you a genius, but it will give you a kind and loving child who learns to control their actions and their emotions.

This survey by Dr. Straus will certainly add to the controversy over a parent's right to discipline their children, but it's a controversial subject all societies need to be debating. Fight for the right to hit your innocent child if you think that works to provide the best discipline.

But expect those of us who have learned that spanking isn't good discipline to say so. The goal of all discipline with children should be to teach and inform and educate your child on how to behave in their society. Hitting others is never the way to learn discipline. There are far more effective discipline techniques.

While reading about this research I stumbled across this anonymous posting on Religious Tolerance.org, along with some other great opinions on the subject of spanking children. I found it to be a powerful statement of how I feel also.

"In the 19th century, Christians gradually realized that human slavery was profoundly immoral, even though it was recognized, permitted, condoned, regulated and accepted in dozens of biblical passages. This was a great shock to people who had assumed that the Bible was 'the Good Book.' They were forced to realize that the Bible promoted an immoral institution, and that 19^th century morality was superior to that of the Bible. We are now in the 21^st century and Christians will be going through the same process with regard to the whipping of children."

Resources

Yahoo News http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20090925/hl_hsn/spankingmaylowerkidsiqs

The author's personal experience and thoughts

Religious Tolerance: http://www.religioustolerance.org/spankingq.htm