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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Still waiting for someone who clings to the "if you have to spank more than once it means it's not effective" line to explain how timeouts only happen once, grounding only happens once, taking electronics only happens once. [/quote]

The issue is not effectiveness.  Maybe spanking is effective to stop the desired behavior.  But that's not the issue.  The issue is long-term impact on the child and the relationship.  Sure, if it "works" then you are good for the moment/week/month - but you and your child will pay a high price over the long haul in ways that you will not if you use other disciplinary (not punishment, disciplinary) methods.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tarahaelle/2016/04/28/spanking-harms-kids-doesnt-work-and-leads-to-long-term-problems/#19d272645fa9

[i]There’s pretty much no benefit to spanking children to discipline them, and mountains of evidence show that spanking risks harming children, both short-term and long-term. Kids become more aggressive and anti-social, have more mental health problems from childhood into adulthood and misbehave more—and are more likely to end up abused. That’s the conclusion of the most recent meta-analysis on spanking, published in the Journal of Family Psychology and involving more than 160,000 children—though it’s unlikely to settle the debate that has continued for years over whether spanking is acceptable or whether it hurts children.[/i][/quote]

Another summary of the study:

http://news.utexas.edu/2016/04/25/risks-of-harm-from-spanking-confirmed-by-researchers

[quote]The more children are spanked, the more likely they are to defy their parents and to experience increased anti-social behavior, aggression, mental health problems and cognitive difficulties, according to a new meta-analysis of 50 years of research on spanking by experts at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan.[/quote]

It could be the other way around, of course.  Children with anti-social behavior, aggression, and mental health problems and cognitive difficulties were spanked more as children.

Aside from that, they did not say how they explained studies which showed no harm from spanking.  Those studies exist, but this meta-study didn't seem to include them.  [/quote]

But it did include them.

From the above link:

[i]A meta-analysis is sort of the mother of all scientific studies: researchers bring together many past studies that studied the same research questions, use specific criteria to narrow down the most similar and/or highest-quality ones, and then analyze all the numbers together to get a sense of what the general consensus in the overall evidence base is. Just four previous major meta-analyses have been conducted on the short-term and long-term outcomes of children who were spanked. This new meta-analysis, authored by Elizabeth Gershoff, PhD, at the University of Texas at Austin, and Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, PhD, of the University of Michigan, set out to address two criticisms of the past research—that spanking has too often been combined or conflated with more abusive punishment or behaviors, and that only poor quality research has found negative effects from spanking.

Despite hundreds and hundreds of studies, the general public, and sometimes even some social scientists, can’t seem to agree on how harmful or beneficial spanking is. Part of the problem is that the research on spanking is messy. It’s hard to separate out all the different factors that might influence how a child turns out, and spanking has a chicken-or-egg problem: Do more difficult children simply get spanked more by their parents, or does getting spanked cause kids to act out and misbehave more? (The handful of long-term studies looking at this question point to the latter.) But the research isn’t so messy that clear patterns haven’t emerged from it: the vast majority of social scientists agree that spanking can lead to problems in childhood and adulthood and doesn’t have any real upsides. Only a handful of social scientists disagree, and their studies tend to be less specific and lower-quality...

All 10 of the other findings showed that spanking was linked to negative outcomes to varying degrees. Children who were spanked had a poorer relationship with their parent and had lower levels of moral internalization, which means they were less able to determine that something was morally wrong for its own sake rather than knowing it was wrong because they’d get smacked otherwise. Spanking was also linked to poorer mental health, higher levels of aggression and antisocial behavior—both in childhood and later on in adulthood. Children were also more likely to become victims of physical abuse and had a higher risk of physically abusing their own child or their husband or wife if they had been spanked.[/i][/quote]

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