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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is such a white American discussion.

Spanking is not associated with negative outcomes across all cultures.  For example, in black Americans some studies have found that spanking has an inverse association with outcomes. Here's an excerpt from NurtureShock:

Excerpt from Nurture Shock, p. 186-187:
 
[quote]“...so Dodge conducted a long-term study of corporal punishment’s affect on 453 kids, both black and white, tracking them from kindergarten through eleventh grade.
When Dodge’s team presented its findings at a conference, [b]the data did not make people happy. This wasn’t because blacks used corporal punishment more than whites. (They did, but not by much.) Rather, Dodge’s team had found a reverse correlation in black families - the more a child was spanked, the less aggressive the child over time. The spanked black kid was all around less likely to be in trouble.[/b]
 
Scholars publicly castigated Dodge’s team, saying its findings were racist and dangerous to report. Journalists rushed to interview Dodge and the study’s lead author, Dr. Jennifer Lansford. A national news reporter asked Dodge if his research meant the key to effective punishment was to hit children more frequently. The reporter may have been facetious in his query, but Dodge and Lansford - both of whom remain adamantly against the use of physical discipline - were so horrified by such questions that they enlisted a team of fourteen scholars to study the use of corporal punishment around the world.
 
Why would spanking trigger such problems in white children, but cause no problems for black children, even when used a little more frequently? With the help of the subsequent international studies, Dodge has pieced together an explanation for his team’s results. To understand, one has to consider how the parent is acting when giving the spanking, and how those actions label the child. In a culture where spanking is accepted practice [an African-American community, in this study’s case], it becomes ‘the normal thing that goes on in this culture when a kid does something he shouldn’t.’ Even if the parent might spank her child only two or three times in his life, it’s treated as ordinary consequences. In the black community Dodge studied, a spanking was seen as something that every kid went through.
 
Conversely, in the white community Dodge studied, physical discipline was a mostly-unspoken taboo. It was saved only for the worst offenses. The parent was usually very angry at the child and had lost his or her temper. The implicit message was: ‘What you have done is so deviant that you deserve a special punishment, which is spanking.’ It marked the child as someone who has lost his place within traditional society.
 
It’s not just a white-black thing either. A University of Texas study of conservative Protestants found that one-third of them spanked their kids three or more times a week, largely encouraged by Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. The study found no negative effects from this corporal punishment - precisely because it was conveyed as normal.
 
Each in its own way, the work of Cummings and Dodge demonstrate the same dynamic: an oversimplified view of aggression leads parents to sometimes makes it worse for kids when they’re trying to do the right thing. Children key off their parents’ reaction more than the argument or physical discipline itself.”[/quote]

And here's a link to the original study:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2772061/[/quote]

Alfie Kohn has a good rebuttal to this in Unconditional Parenting. Nurture Shock in general is some good science mixed with junk science.[/quote]

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