Carl Bialik, Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2009
Three recent, widely reported studies on spanking children claimed to show that the disciplinary practice impairs cognitive development in children. {snip}
Yet the three aren’t likely to resolve anything. Many statisticians say they find in them less a firm conclusion than further proof of the difficulty of measuring spanking’s impact.
{snip}
But researchers noted that the study didn’t remove all possible explanations for why some children develop faster than others, such as their parents’ intelligence. Dr. Berlin used maternal educational levels as an imperfect proxy for parents’ intelligence.
Daniel Mundfrom, a statistician at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, says that even without accounting for other factors, spanking at age 1 explained less than 1% of the variation in cognitive ability at age 3. In other words, maybe spanking does lower intelligence, but not by much.
{snip}
In one peer-reviewed study, published in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment, and Trauma, Prof. Straus [Murray Straus, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire] and Prevention Research Center senior research scientist Mallie J. Paschall examined how 1,510 children were disciplined and how they scored on standardized cognition tests.
The researchers found that children aged 2 to 4 who weren’t spanked gained an average of five points, equivalent to points on an IQ test, four years later compared with those who had been spanked three times or more per week.
{snip}
A second study of his [Straus’s], which was widely reported in the press and presented at a conference about violence, shows that people in countries where spanking is most prevalent have lower average IQs.
Prof. Straus concedes that the methodology was flawed and that spanking may not account for the differences in average national IQs. He says he presented the data on national IQ in part because it corroborated his other study. “The questionable statistics are so consistent with the statistics in the other paper,” he says, adding that his second study can provide “a field day writing about questionable statistics.”
Some statisticians agree. For one thing, the results are skewed by a relatively small number of countries with high rates of spanking and especially low average IQs, particularly Tanzania and South Africa—where about a third of university students reported being spanked a lot before age 12, and where average IQ rates stood at 72. Excluding these countries, “the line would be much closer to flat, indicating little or no relationship,” says Dr. Mundfrom.
Attributing cognitive problems in children to spanking is hard enough. But then saying it is a major reason behind the lower IQ of a nation’s entire population is even trickier because there could be a new raft of potential causes.
Martin Wells, a statistician at Cornell University, re-ran the statistical test to check whether regional variations in IQ—which is lower in Latin America and Africa—could account for the IQ differences Prof. Straus found. After accounting for regional variations, Dr. Wells found the effect of spanking vanished. Dr. Wells plans to use the Prof. Straus’s research in the classroom to demonstrate why it is important to consider alternative explanations.
Original article
Email
Carl Bialik
at numbersguy@wsj.com .
(Posted on October 16, 2009)
Comments
So they found that children who were spanked had IQs five points lower than those who weren’t?
What a flawed study! It merely shows that brainy bookworms (Lisa Simpson) are less likely to act up and be disciplined than underacheiving brats (Bart Simpson).
Perish the thought that a “good ol’ fashioned a double S whoopin’” might benefit the youth of a lower IQ population in terms of achieving optimal social accomplishment.
More leftist nonsense from the medical community. Maybe living next to the equator lowers one IQ, Maybe living in without electricity lowers IQ. That there is a temporal relationship does not prove any causal relationship. But the leftist journals seek their own predetermined conclusions.
So much time, effort, intellect, and research dollars spent on overly elaborate and contrived pseudoscience that avoids the obvious.
Occam, where art thou?
What ridiculous reasoning. Another way to blame IQ on environment.
I fully support spanking children starting at age four. Before that, perhaps just a slap on the hand will do. I was spanked as a child and I have turned out just fine. My parents always did it to me in private and I was always fully clothed. I do NOT in any way remember it as a humiliating or degrading process.
There was once a time when spanking was widespread in Europe and other white parts of the world, and it happened to occur during a time when we were pretty successful as a race.
Why do you think spanking has always been so universal among all cultures, with the exception of whites in recent years? Spanking has always existed in every culture and race. Since the beginning of time, the human race has recognized that that part of the body, being so cushioned and fatty, is a good area to inflict force enough to cause noticeable pain, but not to the extent of bruising in an abusive nature.
I observe the way whites try to discipline their children today and it is a total joke. The children rule the parents today. Sending Tommy to “time out” or threatening little Susan that you are going to take her doll away, to me is a form of bribing, and the child never learns anything. Spanking is something that will actually scare a child into behaving, without abusing the child.
Now if we wish to discuss actually beating or abusing a child, I fully agree that the Third World is the biggest culprit of this and always has been. But I think that is a product of low IQ and stagnant progress as opposed to the cause of it.
But whites doing away with spanking in recent years is an example of the feminization of our once great civilization.
The average I.Q. figure of Tanzania and South Africa has to be a mistake because an I.Q. of 75 in an adult person is mentally retarded; the I.Q. of just 72 given by the article implies a person no more intelligent than a ten year old child. A whole nation of ten year olds? C’mon.
This is very odd. On Oct 14 I read that “Nature”, a prominent British magazine runs an article about “celebrating human diversity” that briefly discusses racial differences in IQ. On Oct 15 I read that Channel 4 in Britain is going to have some leading authorities on racial differences in IQ discuss the issue on camera. And today, I read that the WSJ is mentioning these racial differences in passing, as if they were describing climate. Just a couple years ago, William Salesian, sacrificial lamb, was made to grovel for daring to mention these differences in Slate, the online magazine. Has yesterday’s heresy so quickly become today’s orthodoxy? What is going on?
“After accounting for regional variations, Dr. Wells found the effect of spanking vanished. Dr. Wells plans to use the Prof. Straus’s research in the classroom to demonstrate why it is important to consider alternative explanations.”
“Regional variations”. Is that what they’re calling racial differences now?
Talk about “burying the lead”!
The complete collapse of the public school system in south Georgia seems to be traceable back to , integration (fall of 1970) and the end of corporeal pumnishment in the schools , which occurred about the same time . Liberals of course will deny both .
I don’t know if spanking lowers a child’s IQ or not. Maybe the children with naturally lower IQ are more apt to need spanking to get the idea that something is forbidden across to them. It is possible that parents with lower IQ (who are more apt to have children with IQ) are more likely to spank, thus more of a consequense than a cause. In any case, I’d rather see a parent spank her kid than have it run out in front of a car and spend a year in a full body cast! I can see no reason to spank a child under the age of 1 for anything, they simpy can’t reason that well.
6 Mack: To roughly figure out what mental age corresponds to a given IQ, divide the IQ by 100, which changes an IQ of 75 to .75 Then multiply 216 (the number of months in 18 years) by that decimal. .75 X 216 = 162. The product is the mental age in months. Dividing 162 by 12 gives you a mental age on 13 years and six months. That is, an African with an IQ of 75 has the intellectual ability of an average 13 and a half year old White kid. The African would be capable of reading and doing arithmetic, operating a machine such as a drill press or car, cooking, hunting, simple farming, and a great many ordinary activities. Among Whites, a person with an IQ that low is so far below the norm that they are likely to be brain damaged rather than merely retarded, so we picture them as obviously defective, unable to walk or to speak clearly.
All I can say is that children were much more well-behaved, well-mannered humans when they were raised being spanked when they misbehaved. I got my share of spanking, and most were well-deserved. The problem is, the ding-dong parents nowadays can’t discern between beating, smacking, kicking, and pounding, and spanking.
Once a child is old enough to talk and be reasoned with the spankings should stop. When they are too young to talk spanking is the only way to keep them from sticking metal into an electrical outlet. Naturally there are exceptions; if a child intentionally injures a sibling, a beating might be the only way to reach them effectively. Or if your kid becomes a bully and could lose their school seat, you might need to teach them the hard way (if negotiating fails). Beating your kids for every infraction will not bode well for parents who hope to have close, loving relationships with their children or grandchildren (yes, adult children can and do keep their kids from unreasonable parents who beat them while they were children). Of course, we have all seen parents who clearly have lost any talent for controlling their children and choose to simply ignore them when they act up. Or worse, they come to expect the schools to “straighten them out”. Don’t abdicate, build a REAL family.
Grob, are you telling me that you consider spanking the same as beating? I as well as others have distinguished between the two very clearly in our posts above. I would never beat my child (in the abusive sense), but I most certainly WILL spank him/her.
And sometimes even beating might possibly be necessary for some parents. I have a friend who’s brother growing up misbehaved horribly. When he was a teenager he would act out of control, sometimes hitting his father, and the only way the father could control him was by fighting the kid back. The rest of us have no room to judge that father for doing that.
Our society needs to stop telling parents how to raise their kids. If I smack my kid in the car after he/she was just misbehaving in the store, it is NOT the business of a passerby to tell me “no you shouldn’t do it”.
I’m completely with Grob on this. Only blacks and low-class, ignorant whites beat their children. It’s a cultural/racial thing. Resorting to physical abuse is a mark of parents who cannot cope. People who know better don’t.
It is possible that parents with higher IQs are smart enough to figure out how to discipline their children without hitting them. The link between spanking and low IQ may be a case of gene-environment correlation.
Can it ever get any sillier than this? A little corporal punishment will inflict life-long damage on the child. Maybe if our screwed up judicial system had the collective guts to inflict some serious corporal punishment on juvenile delinquents, we wouldn’t have so many adult criminals, running loose or taking up space in our prison systems.
I think a lot of people owe Dr. Watson (of DNA fame) an apology for ending his career & defaming him just for saying that Africans are (on average) less intelligence than the average European - which no one really doubts anyway but just won’t admit it.
Mack, those numbers are correct. Back when IQ testing was new, fully half of American blacks tested as Retarded. The brilliant Social Engineering solution was to change the official threshold to a lower number, so that fewer blacks would be ‘retarded’. American blacks are smarter than African blacks, since they aren’t really all that black. So African IQs are quite low.
South African blacks are positively brilliant, compared to inhabitants of Togo (69), and Congo (65). Just google ‘National IQ Table’ (or support scholarship, and pay $105.00, like I did, for the Lynn & Vanhanen book).
I, for one, am ever so reassured to know that people with IQs in the low seventies are replacing white technicians at South Africa’s nuclear plant. I expect our atmosphere to be enriched in ways we can scarcely imagine, once all the white nuclear technicians have been replaced.
