promethea.incorporated

dagny-hashtaggart:

noctis-nova:

transpanpat:

eltigrechico:

SHOCKER!! Turns out that small and vulnerable children being physically attacked by the large and strong adults they most love and trust in this world has negative effects. Who knew?

also, thanks to @thedoomreport for this link

I’m adding onto this by providing the PDF of the actual study (thanks to still being able to access the journal post-graduation) and uploaded it to google docs here 

So if you want the exact source, it is there (and without paying a dime and you can download it as well!!

Stop hitting kids.

This is a really interesting piece of research. Cursory inspection of the source looks favorable to me; I can’t see any obvious problems with study design or unjustified conclusions. I’d be curious to hear if anyone sees things worth criticizing about it, but so far I don’t. (It is worth noting that the term ‘50-year study’ in the headline is misleading: this wasn’t a 50-year longitudinal study, it was a meta-analysis of 50 years of other studies.)

What the study found, in sum: there were no significant long-term benefits to spanking; the only factor on which it produced positive effects was short-term compliance. That’s not really news as far as the state of the field; few studies have found long-term beneficial effects associated with light corporal punishment, and when they do those effects are minor. What’s more novel is that this establishes a strong correlation between spanking and bad long-term outcomes in terms of criminality, aggression, mental illness, etc. We’ve known for awhile now that child abuse and heavy corporal punishment (anything involving an implement, e.g.) is strongly correlated with problems later in life, but to date studies on light corporal punishment, considered individually, have been more equivocal. Across the meta-analysis, however, it’s pretty clear that there’s a strong correlation between spanking and negative outcomes. It’s not as strong as with heavy punishment, but it’s not much weaker (effect size of .25 and .38, respectively). In other words, we’re likely looking at a fairly linear relationship between severity of punishment and severity of long-term negative outcomes.

The causal relationship is somewhat more difficult to ascertain: the authors leave open the possibility that the causal relationship could be reversed, i.e. children with the most long-term issues get the most spanking, which doesn’t have a substantial effect one way or the other on those issues. The authors give several good statistical reasons to see spanking > mental/social problems as the substantially more likely causal sequence, but acknowledge that none of them constitute definitive proof. Still, all in all this evidence makes a pretty solid case for avoiding even light corporal punishment in disciplining children.

(via metagorgon)