In the parenting class she teaches, Christina Dalpiaz likes to get right to the point: “You all know how to hit. I’m going to teach you some other skills.”
The family therapist counsels all sorts of parents across the metro area, including many court-ordered clients, with the ultimate goal of providing creative child-rearing tools and diminishing family violence.
Most recently, she has seen the controversy over corporal punishment, renewed by published photos of injuries inflicted by NFL star Adrian Peterson’s attempt to discipline his 4-year-old son, reflected in classroom discussions that mirror American ambivalence on the subject.
“People are outraged because of the pictures,” says Dalpiaz. “Even people who are court-ordered say, ‘I wouldn’t do that.’ They minimize their own behavior because they feel they have justification. And if they did do something like that, it was an accident and they didn’t mean it.”
Her clients echo the conversation at large in a country where Peterson’s actions may trigger revulsion but where spanking and other forms of corporal punishment remain culturally ingrained. Some surveys show nearly three-fourths of Americans regard spanking as sometimes necessary.
Murray Straus knows the numbers well. He has studied corporal punishment for more than 30 years, currently as co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire.
And he says his conclusion, based on hundreds of studies, is that children should never be spanked — a stance significantly at odds with longstanding parental practices.
“It’s not that you ignore misbehavior — that’s even worse,” Straus says. “But the way to deal with it is not by violence. And that’s what spanking is. That’s why we have a euphemism for it. We call it spanking, we don’t call it hitting. We’ve created this euphemism to justify the cultural belief — false belief, as far as the evidence goes — that spanking sometimes is necessary.”
He calls the evidence against spanking — that it may yield short-term results but can induce long-term problems — the best-kept secret in American psychology, ignored in part because even child psychology textbooks have failed to challenge the cultural norm.
And yet, the needle has moved, however slightly, over the last 30 years, he adds. Spanking has declined in all age groups except toddlers in the United States. In schools, only four states prohibited corporal punishment in the 1960s; only 19 — including Colorado — permit it now, though many individual districts have enacted their own prohibitions.
The culture shift is most pronounced outside the U.S., where in 1979 Sweden legally banned spanking while, consistent with the spirit of the law, offering assistance and not punishment to offenders. Widespread fear that such a move would spawn a generation of out-of-control kids hasn’t materialized.
“Eventually,” Straus says, “we’ll get around to following the example of Sweden. Not in my lifetime. Culture and tradition die hard.”
The spanking issue looms particularly germane in light of the Peterson case, he notes, because four studies have shown that about two-thirds of child physical abuse cases in the U.S. and Canada started as spanking and escalated.
“Most people now think it’s best to avoid it,” he says, “but they do it anyhow, because they also believe that sometimes it’s necessary, that it works when other things don’t work. You don’t need to read research to know that. All you need is to be the parent of a 3-year-old.”
Hand or strapElaine Neal, a former teacher and retired Denver juvenile probation officer, grew up understanding two very different entries in her parents’ lexicon of discipline: spanking and whipping.
Neal observed — and surveys have shown — that corporal punishment seemed more prevalent in black culture, particularly where she grew up in the South. Although it seemed a fact of life in her upbringing, and reflects a commonly shared experience, she no longer subscribes to it.
But her father adhered to biblical “spare the rod, spoil the child” doctrine and enforced less egregious offenses with spanking — an open hand on a clothed bottom.
A leather strap was reserved for more serious matters, such as when, instead of heading directly home from an errand, Neal would linger at a neighbor’s house to talk to their pet parrot.
Her mother preferred to employ a switch, which she would send the misbehaving child to retrieve from a nearby hedge and strip of its leaves to sharpen the sting.
After either one came a quiz: Now do you know why you were punished?
“We were deathly afraid of my dad,” Neal recalls. “The part that amazed me was how he could whip us and be so calm. And it hurt.”
But did it work? “I won’t say I repeated all the misbehavior,” she recalls, “but when my father sent me to the store, I’d still go talk to that parrot, knowing I’d get whipped.”
Eventually, her brothers hid their father’s strap and took a vow of silence. He never realized why it had disappeared until, as adults, the kids told him.
“I told him that in this day and time, you’d be in jail for whipping us,” Neal says. “But his whole idea was he’d rather whip you in shape than see you locked up in juvenile hall.”
Danny Huerta, a counselor at Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family who also has a private practice, suspects that spanking has endured in American parenting simply because “when it’s done right, it works well.”
The faith-based organization, which offers family counseling, doesn’t recommend against spanking, but Huerta regards it as “the atomic bomb of parenting” — a final option, and one probably not appropriate for adults prone to overreaction.
“If you look at the definition of spanking, it’s creating a bit of a sting — physical pain without physical injury,” he said. “I just don’t see how that would be a good thing to remove it altogether. Then you create indulgent, power-hungry kids overrunning a house.”
Huerta describes the philosophy as containing equal spiritual and behavioral components that make perfect sense — again, when done right.
“The key here, if anybody is going to read something out of Scripture that’s going to apply to parenting beautifully, it’s fruits of the spirit,” says Huerta, referring to a verse from the New Testament book of Galatians. “Peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control — if you’re going to parent with those, then you use this corporal punishment. But if you’re out of control, just angry, then corporal punishment is not your way to parent.”
More discussionDesmond Runyan, executive director of the Kempe Center and professor of pediatrics at CU School of Medicine, says that — unfortunately, in his view — the public conversation has been more about merely defining the line separating physical discipline from abuse, rather than eliminating it altogether.
“Forty countries have outlawed corporal punishment in the home against kids,” he says. “The United States is not one of them, and I don’t think it’s going to be one of them anytime soon — although we’re probably having more discussion about corporal punishment as a result of Adrian Peterson than we’ve had in a long time. But people still hold on to the concern that if they don’t spank their children, they’re not disciplining them. “
The controversy coincides with a just-completed study by the Kempe Center. A survey polled 685 Colorado mothers on how they and/or their partner have disciplined their children.
The study focused on parental behavior, not physical outcomes to the child, and asked about discipline that involved hitting a child somewhere other than the buttocks, knocking them down, kicking them, choking them or shaking a child under age 2.
The survey showed that while the rate of Colorado children suffering reported and substantiated physical abuse each year is about 0.1 percent, such abuse may actually be 30 to 40 times more common.
But even spanking, Run-yan says, remains effective mostly in the short run, while long-term effects such as behavior problems and aggressive behavior can later appear in some adults. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends alternative means of discipline.
Meanwhile, family counselor Dalpiaz works in her parenting classes to shift the tide of public practice — and with it, the culture.
“If I change one out of five, I’ve changed generations,” says Dalpiaz. “People will act differently if they have tools. They just want to feel competent and in control. Just because you’re not abusive doesn’t mean you have to be a patsy. Being a jellyfish is just as bad as being an abusive parent, because there’s no boundaries on either end.”
