Study: Parents may underestimate spanking force

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Spanking Parents may be unaware of force

by Stephen Strauss



Every about-to-be-spanked child who has heard a
parent piously pronounce "this hurts me more than it
hurts you" can today reply, "Not according to modern
science, it doesn't."

A new study out of England suggests that parents are
likely hitting their children 40 per cent harder
than they think they are.

Daniel Wolpert, a professor of neuroscience at
University College London, said his research was
inspired by a contradiction he observed in the
child's game of "slapsie."

The game is played with two people. One puts their
hands out palms up, while the other places both
hands palms down slightly above them. The
lower-handed player then tries to slap the hands
above him.

The contradiction is that "the child doing the
hitting gets great pleasure, while the child getting
hit feels to a large extent just pain," Prof.
Wolpert said.

This inspired him and his colleagues to conduct a
series of laboratory experiments where test subjects
were told to push on someone else's fingers with the
same force that the other person had previously
pushed on them.

The researchers discovered that there was an almost
uniform overestimation of how much force it took to
equal the initial pressure the participants felt.
Eventually, the misreading resulted in a kind of
pressure war with each participant upping the force.

The English group quickly realized their research,
which is published today in the journal Science, had
implications outside the laboratory. "Ours is
effectively a very mild form of spanking. So it
could be when a parent smacks, he or she
underestimates the force they are applying to a
child," Prof. Wolpert said about one obvious larger
implication of the work.

It is a judgment that experts in the area of
spanking say is backed up by a host of other
evidence.

"Two-thirds of all cases of physical abuse started
out as spankings and corporal punishment and then
get out of hand. The parent hits the kid, and the
kid hits back. So the parent ups the ante, the kid
responds, the ante goes up again, and eventually the
parents are not able to judge just what they are
doing," says Murray Straus, a University of New
Hampshire sociologist.

Prof. Wolpert said his research suggests that
people's inability to actually gauge how hard they
are whacking others means that parents who try to
spank no harder than they remember being spanked may
well over-hit.