A Parenting & kids forum. ParentingBanter.com

If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Go Back   Home » ParentingBanter.com forum » alt.parenting » Spanking
Site Map Home Authors List Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read Web Partners

Chris Dugan discusses the Baumrind Paper



 
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
Old June 10th 07, 02:51 AM posted to alt.parenting.spanking
0:->
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 3,968
Default Chris Dugan discusses the Baumrind Paper

http://www.nospank.net/dugan7.htm

Chris Dugan's response to "UC Berkeley study finds no lasting harm
among adolescents from moderate spanking earlier in childhood," by
Patricia McBroom, Media Relations - U. of California at Berkeley
August 24, 2001

McBOOM: UC Berkeley study finds no lasting harm among adolescents
from moderate spanking earlier in childhood, 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.

DUGAN: Diana Baumrind is a respectable researcher. This study is
hardly "the best" though, since it was not subjected to peer review,
and is based on a small sample size. The nonspanked group was only 4%
of the sample, which meant it consisted of only 4 or 5 children. In
contrast, the combined sample size of Straus et al (1997) and Gunnoe &
Mariner (1997) was roughly 2,000 children, and Gelles & Straus (1990)
was based on a sample size of over 8,000.

A sample size of "over 100" may sound like a lot but in
statistical terms it really isn't. But let's leave that aside and
proceed on to the actual results such as they were.

McBOOM: 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.

DUGAN: This included parents who take the Bible literally and use
a "rod" of some sort for spanking. It also included parents who used
harsh methods (like crushed red pepper in the mouth).

McBOOM: 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.

DUGAN: This is what the Aylmer Church of God parents in Ontario
became international fugitives in order to avoid having to do: use
their hands for spanking instead of implements. What Baumrind and
Owens have done is further add to the evidence linking long term harm
with the kind of spanking defended by the most highly active and vocal
members of the prospank movement. If I can obtain a copy, read it and
be certain of how it was designed etc., I would enjoy having yet
another study to cite in order to buttress certain points in the
antispanking position. Despite the way the early media reports are
spinning the news of this paper, this new study is not a serious
challenge to the antispank position at all, and I suspect, will be
useful to the antispanking cause despite its small sample size.

McBROOM: 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.

DUGAN: Since the actual study is not being published, it is
difficult to determine what parameters were used here. What
detrimental effects were the authors looking for and how were they
operationally defined? What controls were used? I would look up this
study and read it if it were published somewhere. But apparently it is
only a paper which was read at a meeting.

McBOOM: : "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."

DUGAN: Whenever anyone cites this study as if it vindicates
spanking, I will be sure to remind them that the major author herself
said that reliance on physical punishment is associated with harm to
the child. This is not surprising. Baumrind has in the past concluded
that authoritarian approaches to parenting are associated with long
term negative effects on children. And neither this study, or any
previous studies by Baumrind, have found any measurable evidence of
any form of measurable long term benefit to children from spanking.

Once again, spanking has been placed under scientific scrutiny,
and once again no evidence of long term benefit to children has come
to light.

McBOOM: 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.

DUGAN: It is true that no single study has controlled for all of
the factors Baumrind mentions. However, various previous studies have
controlled for most of the factors she mentions. ("Effects of total
child rearing patterns" is awfully vague - I won't say if it has been
controlled for in the past until I am certain what the phrase means in
the present context).

As far as differences in severity are concerned, Strassberg et al
(1994) separated out children subjected to more severe physical
punishment even once in their lives from the rest of their spanked
group and the correlation between spanking in the home and aggression
at school remained significant. Regarding prior misbehavior, the
experimental designs of Straus et al (1997) and Gunnoe & Mariner
(1997) made the issue of earlier child misbehavior irrelevant by
comparing parental ratings of the child's general overall conduct at
two different times. Parental warmth and involvement was controlled
for in Straus et al (1997).

I am disappointed that Baumrind apparently made statements to the
press suggesting that no previous studies have addressed the factors
she mentions, since this is not in fact true.

McBOOM: 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.

DUGAN: This use of a pre-existing database is not "unique" but is
actually quite similar to what the earlier larger studies of Straus et
al (1997) and Gunnoe & Mariner (1997) did. (Again, I wish I had the
actual paper to read rather than having to glean information through
the filter of the popular media).

McBOOM: 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.

DUGAN: In other words, even after removing the harshest spankers
from the sample, Baumrind and Owens still found some significant
correlations between spanking and later deterioration in children's
behavior. This is to be expected, since it replicates earlier
research, cited frequently by antispankers on the internet, which also
found that spanking correlates with worse behavior in the long term.

Baumrind is a spanking apologist, at least for the least-severe
forms of it, and her personal bias appears to have influenced the
kinds of statements she made to the media and the kind of spin she
hopes will be used. This is understandable. We saw something similar
when Gunnoe & Mariner (1997) released their findings. These
researchers, working out of a conservative Christian college,
emphasized the nonsignificant findings regarding spanking and
aggression in their statements to the press while ignoring the
significant link they found between spanking and later increases in
antisocial behavior. This latter finding was the opposite of what they
had expected to find, and replicated the findings of Straus and other
researchers. I will need to read the original Baumrind and Owens
presentation paper to be certain, but it sounds as if history may be
repeating itself here. I cite Gunnoe & Mariner (1997) as often as
nearly any other paper, despite the initial media hype portraying it
as support for spanking. It was not, and I don't believe this new
Baumrind and Owens paper is either.

McBOOM: "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.

DUGAN: I will examine this portion of the paper with great
critical scrutiny once I obtain a copy of the paper. This news story
does not provide any detail at all about how uncooperative tendencies
or defiance were measured and how these variables were disentangled
from parental perceptions which might also correlate with spanking
behavior and with self-fulfilling negative parental expectations about
the child, among other factors.

McBOOM: 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.

DUGAN: This also comes as no surprise since it replicates the
findings of Straus & Mouradian (1998), an earlier and larger study,
which also found that the most infrequently spanked children did not
differ significantly in antisocial behavior scores from the somewhat
more frequently spanked children. The biggest distinction these
authors found was between the infrequently spanked children and the
children whose mothers never spanked them in their entire lives. The
latter group were markedly more well behaved than even the most
infrequently spanked children. Whether a similar significant
difference was found in the new Baumrind & Owens study or not is
impossible to determine from the news stories, but I will not be at
all surprised to find such a correlation among the "few" which
remained after the "red zone" parents were removed from the sample. We
shall see.

McBOOM: 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.

DUGAN: In other words, both nonspanked and infrequently-spanked
children were lumped together in the "green zone." Only a reading of
the actual paper will clarify if this was used as a "control group" or
if the 4 or 5 never spanked children were used as a control group. Due
to the small sample size of this study either approach would have
problems. The former case would suffer from not being a true
nonspanked control group, while the latter would suffer from being so
small as to make numbers based on it statistically questionable.

McBOOM: 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.

DUGAN: This supports arguments advanced by Dorothy/toto, d'geezer,
and others about the negative side effects of punishment in general.
It further buttresses the position of parenting authors such as Thomas
Gordon who advocate avoidance of all use of punishment and reward.

McBOOM: "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."

DUGAN: In other words, Baumrind is saying the same thing which
numerous antispankers on the net have been saying for years, that it
is possible to raise terrific kids without spanking them. All she
would need to do to sound exactly like an antispanker would be to add
the rhetorical question, "So why do it?!"

McBOOM: 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.

DUGAN: What Baumrind calls "abusive" would include cases of
"spankings" which prospank activists have attempted to turn into
national causes. Christopher Lab put himself beyond Baumrind's "red
zone" when he left marks on his live-in girlfriend's 4 y.o. daughter's
buttocks visible days later. He was the focus of a major support
campaign by prospank activists earlier this year. At least some of the
"spankings" at the church in Atlanta Georgia which won national
attention a few months ago would also qualify as abusive under
Baumrind's definition, despite the frenzied support one heard on the
net from the usual people. Kay Henson, who was just this week
convicted of misdemeanor battery for "spanking" her 10 y.o. son, also
would fit Baumrind's definition of abusive, despite her status as a
prospank and anti-CPS martyr. In other words, what the activist hard
core of the prospank movement calls "spanking" includes practices
which even Diana Baumrind says are linked with long term negative
effects on children. Some of these people are slow to recognize the
fact, but Dr. Baumrind is most assuredly not on their side.

At any rate, I eagerly look forward to obtaining a copy of the
actual paper so that I can read it without any media spin and
distortions interposing themselves. I anticipate that this paper will
become a useful addition to the antispank rhetorical armamentorium,
and I look forward to citing it in the future.

Chris Dugan

Return to The Baumrind Fallacy
http://www.nospank.net/toc.htm#baumrind

 




Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
NPR discusses NH bill Werebat Child Support 1 March 8th 06 08:05 PM
Chris Dugan posts a letter from a researcher on reducing child street entries [email protected] Spanking 1 November 9th 05 07:38 AM
The Baumrind Study Doan Spanking 8 August 19th 05 05:03 AM
Chris Dugan: Shut UP! The Dirt Beneath Your Feet Spanking 0 May 18th 04 02:20 PM
This is what Dugan supports... Catherine Woodgold Spanking 0 July 11th 03 03:04 AM


All times are GMT +1. The time now is 10:14 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright ©2004-2024 ParentingBanter.com.
The comments are property of their posters.