Spanking mad

DeVore isn't the only one worried about that slippery slope. "The thing that really bothers me about this, is that it could open the door for all kinds of legislation promoting one parenting philosophy vs. another," one blogger said Sunday on the Web site Silicon Valley Mom. "Most experts agree that breastfeeding is nutritionally optimal for a newborn. Should we legislate that? If you decide not to breastfeed your kid, should you be in violation of the law?" she asked. The government has intervened many times in the past to protect children, enacting laws governing child labor, safety and education. The state also provides lots of free advice, like what to feed children (recall the old food pyramid that is now a customizable MyPyramid), how not to overfeed them (recall the recent childhood obesity/diabetes campaigns), how much exercise children should get, how much reading they should do, how often parents should be eating dinner with them, how to keep them away from strangers trying to lure them into cars with puppies or candy, and how to say no to drugs, sex and alcohol.

The result of this -- and of being part of a society so saturated with information that if any child anywhere in the developed world is harmed, we know the details whether we want to or not -- is that we have become a generation of parents whose most distinguishing characteristic is anxiety. In a 2002 survey from Public Agenda, a nonprofit public policy research group in New York City, a whopping 76 percent of parents said they found raising children today "a lot harder" than when they were growing up; 17 percent said they felt "overwhelmed" by it. Steven Mintz, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and a leading authority on the history of families and children, called today's society "child obsessed" in an editorial titled "How We All Became Jewish Mothers." As we obsess over rearing the perfect child, we're driving ourselves crazy. Criminalizing spanking is only going to make us more paranoid and hypercritical. What about hair yanking -- will that be next? Or arm grabbing? Gritting teeth? Yelling?

"Anxiety is the hallmark of modern parenting," Mintz wrote to me in an e-mail. "Today's parents agonize incessantly about their children's physical health, personality development, psychological well-being, and academic performance. From birth, parenthood is colored by apprehension." In his editorial, Mintz wrote that contributing to parental anxiety are "three decades of panic over children's well-being. Since the early 1970s, there has been recurrent alarm over stranger abductions, poisoned Halloween candies, childhood obesity and pedophiles."

Child and family therapist David Anderegg, author of "Worried All the Time: Overparenting in an Age of Anxiety and How to Stop It," said in an interview with Child.com that parents now tend to over-research, overthink and overworry about even the most routine matters. "The problem with over-researching is that experts often don't agree. At some point," says Anderegg, "parents just have to trust themselves." Unfortunately, the government won't let us.

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Child psychologist John Rosemond, a syndicated columnist who takes a "traditional" approach to parenting and the author of "To Spank or Not to Spank," calls Lieber's bill "fascistic." "These people are fascists," he says of Lieber, Nazario and anyone else who supports the bill. "They want to insert the state into how families operate. Parents exercising reasonable discretion and discipline should not be interfered with by the state. And there is absolutely no research that justifies this bill, and I've looked at all the research." Rosemond says Lieber keeps using the term "beat" instead of "spank" and her rhetoric is obscuring a line that is extremely clear. (Nazario said the line is vague and that "the truth is parents don't really know where the line is.") Rosemond scoffs at the suggestion that most parents -- and the vast majority of parents, he says, are well-intentioned and love their kids -- have trouble distinguishing the difference between a beating and a spanking. "This is not a fine line. Two swats on the rear end is on one side, beating a child with a belt is on the other. It's not a fine line, not at all. It's a Grand Canyon," he says.

Rosemond doesn't advocate spanking, but says if you do spank, spanking appropriately -- not in anger and sparingly -- is the way to go. He admits many parents use spanking too much, but not necessarily because they are physically hurting their children, but because it becomes just another ineffective disciplinary tool. "If it's a one-note approach -- doesn't matter what the note is, spanking, timeouts -- if you do the same punishment for everything, you immunize the child against it," he says.

Research on spanking is notoriously suspect and unreliable, with plenty of data to support both sides of the issue. A recent study of 168 white, middle-class families found that occasional, mild spankings don't hurt children. Child psychologists Diana Baumrind and Elizabeth Owens conducted the study. Owens is a research scientist at the Institute of Human Development at the University of California at Berkeley and says the paper and its findings haven't been peer reviewed yet, but she feels confident in the analysis the pair has done up to this point. As a parent -- Owens has a 3- and a 5-year-old -- she is "morally opposed to spanking." But as a scientist, she says, "I like to quote Diana [who could not be reached for this story]. She says a blanket injunction against spanking is not warranted by the data. If you look at the causally relevant evidence, it's not scientifically defensible to say that spanking is always a horrible thing. I don't think mild, occasional spankings in an otherwise supportive, loving family will do any long-term harm," says Owens.

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