Spanky Spank

Like OMG!, I try to avoid the daily fantastic headlines and ridiculous sensationalism of Live Science, but such bullshit time and again is ultimately unavoidable.

With reporting that makes me want to raise a fist to their staff, spanking children is the topic of study in recent research. Their postulate is that while spanking can get kids to behave in a hurry, it can do more harm than good to their noggins. Well, you're doing it wrong. It's for their bottoms. But really, they claimed that the more a child was spanked the lower his or her IQ compared with others. Did that statement alone make any red flags go up? If not, perhaps you were spanked too much as a child.

One might ask, however, whether children who are spanked tend to come from backgrounds in which education opportunities are less or inherited intelligence lower. But while the results only show an association between spanking and intelligence, (study researcher Murray) Straus says his methodology and the fact that he took into account other factors that could be at play (such as parents' socioeconomic status) make a good case for a causal link.

"You can't say it proves it, but I think it rules out so many other alternatives; I am convinced that spanking does cause a slowdown in a child's development of mental abilities."

Right there in the article, the question of scholastic opportunity, and more importantly, genetic ability is broached - and then dismissed since the study only looked at how dumb kids were and how much they were spanked. And even that loose connection is only made because the researcher suggests it, based on a self-determined "methodology" and that he feels it rules out "other alternatives". Lack of proof for one thing does not in contrast establish proof of another. See how that flies when you go to your doctor with a pain and they tell you you have cancer just because they ruled out pregnancy. There's nothing better than a dipshit in guise of a researcher who'll come right out and let you know his study doesn't prove his point. Well, keep researchin' then until you have something to show...

The researchers tested 806 children ages 2 to 4, and 704 ages 5 to 9 to determine their IQs, and then again four years later. Both groups of kids got smarter after four years, but the 2 to 4 year olds who were spanked scored 5 points lower on the IQ test than those not spanked. For children ages 5 to 9, the spanked ones scored on average 2.8 points lower than their unspanked counterparts. They held their finding significant even after accounting for parental education, income, cognitive stimulation by parents and "other factors that could affect children's mental abilities". Nice blanket catchall for that.

Even the feeble writer, who lobbed such obvious softballs as "Teen Birth Rates Higher In Highly Religious States", "Facebook Can Incite Jealousy", and "Men Agree Who's Hot, Women Don't", was able to highlight the inaccuracy to this.

Whether or not spanking equates with dumber kids is not known, and may never be known. That's because the only way to truly show cause and effect would be to follow over time two groups of kids, one randomly assigned to get spanked and another who would not get spanked. Barring that method, which is unfeasible, Straus considers his study the next best thing, as he looked back at a nationally representative set of kids who were followed over time.

Wow, I never thought that bad science was "the next best thing" to good science. Supporters of this study claim it rules out the possibility that children with lower IQs somehow elicit more physical discipline, but that presupposes that the behavioral mechanisms (and actions) that trigger a spanking response in parents are in no way tied to the existing intelligence. It doesn't take more than a whack or two understand something you did was wrong and that was the consequence of your actions. If you don't grasp that, one or one hundred more times getting smacked is not going to change your aptitude...but it will be increasingly necessary until that number correlates to you stupidity level.

Let's try and make that clearer if you were an oft disciplined child: there is no physical way to reduce your IQ no more than there is the converse to increase or maintain it. In the touchy-feely world where it's PC to soften everything, this study is just another attempt at pop-parenting. That kid doesn't have a learning disability, they're fucking dumb. And spanking them isn't going to make them any more stupid than they already are. Genetics holds the key, morons.