UB Psychologist Urges Abandonment of Corporal Punishment

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Corporal punishment should be abandoned as a form of disciplining children because it is morally objectionable and because there are effective, non-punitive alternatives available, a University at Buffalo psychologist maintains.

Parents should be encouraged to learn and use techniques that effectively discipline offspring without resorting to forms of subabusive corporal punishment, such as spanking and slapping, according to Anthony Graziano, Ph.D., UB professor emeritus of psychology.

Thirty percent of middle-class families could be at risk for child abuse through the escalation of subabusive corporal punishment, and reducing this type of punishment would reduce the risk of escalation, says Graziano, co-director of the UB Research Center for Children and Youth.

"Parents can be taught how to control anger, to explore and understand children's normal need for independence, to understand and better deal with authority conflicts," he told participants at a symposium on spanking held during the recent annual meeting of the American Psychological Association.

Graziano supported his position with results of a study he conducted and reported last year of 590 parents and 320 of their children from middle-class, educated, primarily Caucasian, suburban families.

Although 93 percent of the parents felt corporal punishment is effective and justified -- especially in curbing short-term defiant or authority-threatening behavior -- 86 percent felt agitation, anger and/or remorse at using it.

Eighty-five percent said they'd be willing to use some other forms of discipline if they believed them to be as effective.

Most of the 320 children, aged 6-11 and interviewed separately from their parents, said they believed parents had the "right' to use these and other forms of discipline -- including hair pulling and pinching.

But they admitted that the punishment was unpleasant and often hurt.

But it's disturbing, Graziano said, that 2 percent of parents said they "usually" inflicted considerable pain, with 1 percent admitting the subabusive punishment "usually" caused welts and bruises.

Also upsetting, he added, is the fact that 35 percent of the children said their parents meted out discipline using paddles, whips and cords, while 17 percent said these items were used at least half the time.

More than half of the 320 children said they experienced "some" to "much" pain. Seventeen percent said they underwent such discipline "a few times a week," with 4 percent indicating it occurred "every day."

Graziano notes that although the empirical evidence shows that corporal punishment is effective in the short-term and only briefly causes pain and emotional distress, there are many alternatives equally effective in the short term that do not cause pain or distress.

Therefore, he says, the issue becomes "not a technical one of effectiveness, but is about the morality, in a supposedly enlightened world, of inflicting pain on children.

"The question is, 'Why do parents choose to use corporal punishment when it is not necessary,'" he asks. "What is in parents that keeps them using an unnecessary punishment that causes their children pain?

"Corporal punishment in child-rearing should be discouraged because it is morally objectionable and, in any event, is not even needed."

Graziano's study was supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and UB's Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy.