An Overview of Parenting Systems: Understanding why Parental “Spanking Bans”

Consistently promote increased Child Abuse Rates Harold A. Hoff, B.Sc. Hons Parenting systems & child-discipline science researcher/ Iron Gate Research Chair / Keep43 Committee of Canada, www.Keep43.ca January 6, 2018 (Rev. 3 on Nov. 4, 2018) The field of child-discipline science has been over-run with advocacy material masquerading as research and methodologically bad science promoted by a handful of names that desperately want to prove their brand of scientifically inferior parenting styles. The intention of this treatise is lay out the matrix of parenting systems and to explain, in easily understandable terms, why the legislative attempts to eliminate “Authoritative Parenting” causes more harm than good, despite the good intentions to impose “Positive Parenting” on everyone via the blunt instrument of Criminal Law. Authoritative Parenting First, we need to define what the optimum parenting system is. It is called “Authoritative” and from over fifty years of parenting-system research; Dr. Diana Baumrind (UC Berkeley) first coined this term. Others would consider it to be a “traditional parenting” style, or a “loving and firmly guiding” style. The work concludes that Authoritative parenting produces the best overall outcomes. This has been separately confirmed by others: as examples, Dr. R. Larzelere (OK State U) and Dr. M. Gunnoe, Calvin College, MI: The four key features of Authoritative parenting are as follows: 1) Highly nurturing (love your children and let them know it continuously) 2) Highly demanding (set age-appropriate limits) 3) Highly responsive (enforce those limits with consistency), and; 4) A high proportion use moderate and occasional spanking as a back-up to a spectrum of other methods. Next, we’ll present a series of slides explaining the parenting-system matrix, and why these spanking (smacking) bans consistently yield inferior results. Each slide builds on the previous one.

SLIDE 1: The Parenting Style Matrix Based on Dr. Diana Baumrind's world-recognized research on parenting systems: This grid shows what they are and relates them by Nurturance vs. Demandingness. Note: Her work relates Responsiveness to Demandingness, but our NGO adapted this to plot "nurturance" since that might be more intuitive for the casual observer. Based on a wide variety of science, Authoritative parenting has the best outcomes whereas disengaged / aggressive-abusive styles have the worst outcomes....

SLIDE 2: Prevalence of Parental Spanking in Parenting Styles Polls indicate that 4-in-5 parents use a corrective spank as a behaviour management tool: Examples - Canada 82%, France‡ 92%, U.K. 85%, U.S.A. 86%. Countries that criminalize traditional parenting styles continue to show robust usage. Examples – Sweden‡ (ban 1979) 24%, Austria‡ (ban 1989) 70%, Germany‡ (ban 2000) 72%, New Zealand (ban 2007) 67%, Spain‡ (ban 2007) 84%. (‡ - Bussmann et. al. 2009) But WHAT is the prevalence of parental spanking based on parenting styles? It's highest for Authoritative to Authoritarian parents, and lowest at the bottom of the grid, being the Positive-Permissive-Disengaged spectrum.

SLIDE 3: Relating Child Abuse to Parenting Styles What parenting styles have the highest prevalence of child abuse? This is not just physical, but also emotional, psychological, verbal abuse and neglect. What becomes apparent is that child abuse rates are diagonally-inversely related to responsive parenting systems.... This dispels the myth that parents who may spank abuse their children. As the culmination of all research shows, it’s the disengaged and abusive-aggressive parents who more often abuse their children, not the highly nurturing, engaged, demanding and responsive parents.

SLIDE 4: What proponents of “Spanking Bans” hope to achieve What do spanking bans hope to achieve? The intent is to force everyone from the highly demanding parenting styles into Positive-Parenting Styles. This is of course a wonderful theoretical ideal for those who ascribe to the current flavours of “Attachment Parenting”, “Peaceful Parenting” and “P.E.T. - Parent Effectiveness Training” and so on. The problem is that each of these has an endemic fatal flaw that in practice leads to less desirable outcomes.

SLIDE 5: Actual Results of imposing inappropriate Parenting Systems The hope is to legislatively force everyone into Positive Parenting systems. Positive Parenting is only truly optimal for about 1 in 5 children, the meek, mild and naturally compliant personality types who require no consequential enforcement of limits. Thus the balance (about 80%), finding this an unworkable system for them will initially shift to permissive parenting. Since they have no workable or effective enforcement tool as a spanking replacement, they tend to ignore a lot of behaviour and hope it sorts itself out. That is the essence of the fatal flaw in this idealistic approach.

SLIDE 6: Why Child Abuse always increases by imposing parenting styles As time goes on, mismanaged behaviour drives a component of parents further into one of two low nurturance styles. The truism that is ignored is that each child and each parent-child dynamic is unique. What works well for some is toxic to others. Hence, parents… 1) Either become disengaged and just ignore whatever the child does; or, 2) Can't tolerate the misbehavior anymore and use aggressive-abusive tactics in place of spanking; or, 3) Their frustration eventually promotes them to lash out in explosive rage, which results in serious physical assaults on children, as Sweden has experienced for about 40 years. The effects of Sweden’s 1979 “spanking ban” have already utterly proven this. This very clearly explains why child abuse always rises substantially where parents are banned from using minor force to manage their children's behaviour.

My personal parenting experience illustrates why S-206 is bad policy All my extended family was raised in safe and loving home environments, which in every case used some non-abusive spanking as appropriate. We all became successful well-adjusted conscientious contributors to society, many holding degrees including many PhDs. Nowhere in our family do we have criminality, domestic violence, substance abuse, mental health issues, or any of the negative factors generally affecting society. Think on that. In 2006, we gave birth to a beautiful healthy baby boy. Our parenting was a “Good Enough” style. But, our son was oppositional-defiant: that’s not a condition requiring treatment; it’s simply a strong-willed personality type. As consequences, we tried confinements like time-outs and sent to the bedroom. These proved futile as he responded angrily to them and refused to observe them. We also used moderate spanking which worked exceedingly well. However, my wife and I studied many "positive parenting" styles (Attachment Parenting, P.E.T., Gorilla love, etc.) and while our son was still four, we agreed to go completely "Positive" in style: Heightened preventions and no punishments. What ensued was the following: It took only 14 months for this to become a disaster. Our child quickly learned there were no consequences. The more positive we became the more defiant and obnoxious he became. The result was a formerly happy well-adjusted child degenerating into an angry, aggressive, insolent and defiant brat. He also began causing problems at school. All of this created a dysfunctional home environment for everyone. This culminated in my wife, having reached her limit of tolerance, was at risk of lashing out in frustration - as Sweden now often exhibits. So to avert disaster, just as he turned six, we agreed that she leave the country for a few months and visit her parents overseas. I would take proactive steps to fix the harm that positive parenting had inflicted on our family. I declared to our son that the experiment with “Positive Parenting” had ended, and we’d consciously move into Authoritative parenting. We sat down together and jointly negotiated “Our House Rules and Code of Discipline”, and consequences for breaking them – which was prominently posted on our wall. At first he didn't believe me, so it took two good spankings in the first two weeks. Then it all changed, like magic! When my wife returned, she was astonished to have a helpful, happy, well-adjusted and polite child, who cheerfully did what we asked. And, I only had to ask once! Imagine that. The household environment transformed into a peaceful, loving and co-operative family again. Isn’t that what YOU would want? Now at 11, this astonishingly effective technique served its purpose and we’ve moved beyond it. Would I still spank? Absolutely, but since expectations are clear and observed, there’s no longer a need for it. That’s how excellent techniques work. He knows this story and thanks me for being a loving parent who did the right things for HIM, not for me. So, my goal is now to ensure his future ability to raise great kids with the variety of excellent tools as we had, and to use them conscientiously in love and unmolested by the State and CAS.

Relating Parenting Styles to the use of Positive Incentives (Rewards) and Negative Incentives (Consequences) On a different topic, the next three slides relate how spanking is used or misused within different parenting styles. Spanking is a very useful tool, but NOT a panacea, and if misused, can create a lot of unwanted problems. This is not unique to spanking as it applies to any response that is misused, over-used or unused when called for. That is why specific definitions, as Canada now has, are crucial for the optimal benefits vs. harm balance. Slide 1 – An overview of Incentive usage based on Parenting Style

Slide 2 – The General Developmental outcomes based on Parenting Style Authoritative Parenting promises the best odds at good outcomes. Authoritarian and Positive parenting Styles are complete opposites yet yield generally the same results, and both are inferior to Authoritative because they rely only on one side of the incentive scale rather than a balance of both. As would be anticipated, disengaged (neglectful) parenting is the least desirable.

Slide 3 – Specifically relates use of Spanking in each Parenting Style Authoritative Parents universally use spanking as an incentive. So the question then arises: What makes their style uniquely stand out from all the others? In short, spanking is reservedly meted, used moderately and occasionally as a back-up to a spectrum of other approaches that precede it, and accompanied in a loving and safe environment. When applying consequences, the following factors lead to inferior outcomes related to Parenting Styles: 1) Overuse or harsh use (Authoritarian) 2) Under-use (Positive-Permissive) 3) Inconsistent use and uncaring environments (Disengaged)

A message to Hon. Senators from Dr. Robert Larzelere, Oklahoma State With respect to this Article, Dr. Larzelere sent the following response on Jan. 8, 2018: When you send this excellent summary of Baumrind’s parenting styles, you might remind the Senators that Diana Baumrind was one of three social science expert witnesses who, at the request of the Attorney General’s office in a liberal administration, successfully defended the retention of Section 43 in a court case decided ultimately by the Canadian Supreme Court in about January 2004. No country has considered both sides of the scientific and legal evidence as thoroughly as the Canadian court system did in that constitutional challenge that was decided in favor of retaining Section 43 at all three judicial levels. Since that time, social scientists have continued to publish mostly the same kind of evidence that was available to the justices in that court case. For example, they are still relying primarily on Gershoff’s review of the scientific literature, which makes the case against spanking solely on the basis of unadjusted correlations. To go beyond that correlational evidence, the strongest causal evidence comes from longitudinal studies that take into account statistically how different the children were BEFORE they were spanked. These studies are merely replications of Murray Straus’s strongest evidence, which was submitted for that court case. In contrast, the balanced perspective, consistent with Section 43, has produced new kinds of evidence to support the kind of balanced approach represented by centuries of common law, which is codified in Section 43. Examples includes:

1. Meta-analyses that move beyond unadjusted correlations found (1) adverse child outcomes associated with customary (typical, ordinary) physical punishment are trivial in size (Ferguson, 2013) and no different from equivalent adverse-looking outcomes associated with every other disciplinary tactic that it has been directly compared with (Larzelere & Kuhn, 2005). In addition, Larzelere & Kuhn’s (2005) meta-analysis showed that child outcomes of physical punishment are more harmful than other disciplinary tactics only when used too severely or as the predominant discipline tactic. Moreover, Larzelere & Kuhn (2005) found that conditional spanking led to less defiance or less aggression than 10 of 13 disciplinary tactics it has been compared to, with outcomes equal to the other three tactics. Conditional spanking is Nonabusive (e.g., 2 open-handed swat to the buttocks) and is used under the following conditions: when 2- to 6-year-olds defiantly refuse to cooperate with milder disciplinary tactics, such as timeout or reasoning.

2. The strongest (trivial) causal evidence has been replicated in the largest Canadian longitudinal data set (the NLSCY) and in the American NLSY data, which found that the child outcomes of customary spanking are equivalent to every other disciplinary tactics (e.g., nonphysical punishment, scolding/yelling, privilege removal, sending children to their room, grounding) and equivalent to getting professional help for young oppositional children (child psychotherapy and Ritalin). (Larzelere et al., 2010a, 2010b). The similarity of results for everything that parents or professionals can do to try to correct oppositional defiance in young children indicates that it is

the poor prognosis of these children that leads to the adverse outcomes, not what parents and professional do to improve that poor prognosis. To put it differently, if this evidence is good enough to ban spanking, then it is good enough to ban all nonphysical disciplinary consequences by parents as well as providing psychotherapy or Ritalin for children.

3. Two studies have shown that children who were spanked have outcomes that are no

worse and sometime better than never-spanked children, as long as the spanking is discontinued by age 9 or 11. One of those studies is by a leading spanking-ban advocate: Ellison, Musick, & Holden (2011), Gunnoe (2013).

4. Updated evidence about trends in criminal assaults against children in Sweden since their spanking was banned there in 1979 continue to show escalating rates of physical abuse of children under the age of 7 and criminal assault by minors against minors. According to Swedish criminal records, both are now alleged more than 20 times as often in 2010 as in 1981. In addition, rapes of children under the age of 15 are now reported 73 times as often in 2010 as in 1981. The latter statistic is evidence against Joan Durrant’s explanation that the other assaults trends have increased are up in Swedish criminal records only because much more minor assaults get reported because Sweden as that country has become an increasingly non-violent country. There are no such things as “minor” rapes. Further, if reduced thresholds for what gets reported explained these huge increases, then allegations of attempted rapes of minors would have increased more than completed rapes. Instead, the evidence is the opposite: attempted rapes of minors are reported less than three times as often in 2010 as in 1981 (all from Larzelere et al. (2013).

5. The most objective evaluations of the effects of spanking bans continue to provide

evidence against those bans, when details of the evidence are examined closely. For example, a study comparing five European countries found (1) that several outcomes were worse in countries with spanking bans than countries without them (e.g., insulting marital-like partners: 79% in Sweden, 64% in other spanking-ban counties, 36% in no-ban countries; tackled or hit marital-like partners: 34% in Sweden, 32% in other spanking-ban countries, 18% in no-ban countries). Parents keep using physical punishment in countries with spanking bans, albeit at a lower rate: 24% in Sweden, higher in other spanking-ban countries. In 2007, Less than 1/3 of parents were aware that all spanking had been banned in Austria (in 1989) and in Germany (2000), so other countries don’t take their spanking bans as seriously as Sweden (and Norway). Their Table 2 (Table 24.2 in the chapter in the book edited by Durrant and Smith, 2011), show that support for mild spanking (either in parents’ experience when growing up or in thinking mild spanking is legal in Germany or Austria) is associated with LESS severe physical punishment (all from Bussmann et al., 2011). This confirms our speculation in 1999 that the main effect of spanking bans might be to reduce the kind of mild spanking that has traditionally been used to bring the most difficult discipline episodes to a close, thereby preventing further escalation of parental frustration toward the levels that could erupt in physical abuse. (Larzelere & Johnson, 1999)

References: Bussmann, K. D., Erthal, C., & Schroth, A. (2011). Effects of banning corporal punishment in europe: A five-nation

comparison. In J. E. Durrant & A. B. Smith (Eds.), Global pathways to abolish physical punishment: Realizing children's rights (pp. 299-322). New York: Routledge.

Ellison, C. G., Musick, M. A., & Holden, G. W. (2011). Does conservative protestantism moderate the association between corporal punishment and child outcomes? Journal of Marriage and Family, 73(5), 946-961. doi: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2011.00854.x

Ferguson, C. J. (2013). Spanking, corporal punishment and negative long-term outcomes: A meta-analytic review of longitudinal studies. Clinical Psychology Review, 33, 196-208. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2012.11.002

Gunnoe, M. L. (2013). Associations between parenting style, physical discipline, and adjustment in adolescents' reports. Psychological Reports: Disability & Trauma, 112(3), 933-975. doi: 10.2466/15.10.49.PR0.112.3.933-975

Larzelere, R. E., Cox, R. B., Jr., & Smith, G. L. (2010a). Do nonphysical punishments reduce antisocial behavior more than spanking? A comparison using the strongest previous causal evidence against spanking. BMC Pediatrics, 10(10). doi: 10.1186/1471-2431-10-10

Larzelere, R. E., Ferrer, E., Kuhn, B. R., & Danelia, K. (2010b). Differences in causal estimates from longitudinal analyses of residualized versus simple gain scores: Contrasting controls for selection and regression artifacts. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 34(2), 180-189. doi: 10.1177/0165025409351386

Larzelere, R. E., & Johnson, B. (1999). Evaluation of the effects of Sweden’s spanking ban on physical child abuse rates: A literature review. Psychological Reports, 85, 381-392. doi: 10.2466/PR0.85.6.381-392

Larzelere, R. E., & Kuhn, B. R. (2005). Comparing child outcomes of physical punishment and alternative disciplinary tactics: A meta-analysis. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 8, 1-37. doi: 10.1007/s10567-005-2340-z

Larzelere, R. E., Swindle, T., & Johnson, B. R. (2013). Swedish trends in criminal assaults against minors since banning spanking, 1981-2010. International Journal of Criminology and Sociology, 2, 129-137. doi: 10.6000/1929-4409.2013.02.13

Advocates for spanking bans want to overwhelm policy makers with one side of the evidence, ignoring all of these newer lines of evidence since the Canadian court case. Bob Robert E. Larzelere 233 Human Sciences Bldg. Stillwater, OK 74078 (405) 744-2053