Study Finds What Type of Parents Tends to 'Spare the Rod'

A University of Kentucky College of Social Work professor and colleague’s research on predictors of spanking as punishment for children in the home was recently published in the journal "Family Relations: Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Studies." In response to recent studies that found corporal punishment caused significant anti-social behavior, Melanie D. Otis, an associate professor of social work at UK, and her colleague Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, researched what factors, independent of others, predict whether or not a parent is likely to use spanking as a punishment.

Their research indicates children who get high levels of intellectual stimulation at home through books, educational games, and the like, had parents who rarely employed physical punishment. “Our findings suggest that decisions about the use of physical punishment are often related to a parent’s overall approach to the parent-child relationship,” said Otis.

It also indicates that it is easier to predict the incidence of corporal punishment than to predict its frequency of use.

Otis and Grogan-Kaylor analyzed surveys of 800 respondents in the 2000 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth that collected such data as the number of spankings in the past week, ages of the child and mother, mother's education, religion and economic status.

The research found that intellectually stimulating home environments give children opportunities to think through the offense and any consequences that might follow and imagine alternative responses for the future. This opportunity to intellectualize appears to lead to less anti-social behavior in the future. Beyond the type of offense itself, research also found that religious affiliation could have an impact on how parents punished their children as well. Other socio-economic factors appear to have little connection with use of corporal punishment.

Source: Univertsity of Kentucky
31 January 2007

http://news.uky.edu/news/display_article.php?category=0&artid=1920&type=1

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