What does spanking do to kids? The case against hitting is settled

The moment Augsburg University professor Christina Erickson almost lost it with her young daughters sent her on a journey to answer the question: What does spanking do to our kids, and why does our society accept it?

She was seething in the kitchen, trying to make dinner and take a phone call before heading out to a work meeting, while her toddlers tussled over purple ponies despite Erickson's pleas to share. She threw down the spatula and followed her urge to spank them.

But before Erickson's hand could smack a tiny bottom, she changed her mind. Her white-hot anger took her aback.

"It struck me as bizarre," Erickson told me. "These are children I wanted for years, and here I was about to hit them. In that moment, I saw the absurdity."

Erickson, after all, was not only a college professor, but a social worker. Much of her life's work focused on children and families. Her friends would describe her as kind and peace-loving. Why was she about to strike two little humans she loved the most?

That moment of reckoning led to more than a decade of trying to understand the research behind spanking, a trove of findings she details in her new book, "Spanked: How Hitting Our Children Is Harming Ourselves."

Erickson — a child of the '70s — "was spanked and turned out fine," a popular argument she deconstructs and eviscerates. When she first set out to write the book, she figured it would amount to neutral analysis of how spanking came to be a commonly accepted discipline tool. She wasn't going to take a stand. Her first draft even included a section with step-by-step directions on how to safely spank a child.

Yet Erickson was so convinced by the reams of research demonstrating spanking's harm — from increased aggression to mental health problems — that she produced an entirely different book, one that could inform both parents and professionals.

"I wanted them to see what I was seeing in the literature," she said. "It's astounding how much research has been done on spanking, and how much we know about it, and how we're still not talking about it."

A 1957 study established the link between children who are hit at home and antisocial behavior and aggression, Erickson said. "The more you're spanked, and the harsher you're spanked, the more aggressive you are. As kids age, this lands them in all the things we don't want for our teenage kids — school delinquency, crime, aggressiveness toward other people," she said. "They look like they deserve another spanking, and that's the evil treadmill that parents can get on and struggle to get off."

Decades after that study, researchers found that adults who had been spanked at least monthly were more likely to assault their spouses. Spanked kids also tended to show higher rates of depression as adults.

But what about the millions of people, over multiple generations, who turned out fine?

That's a "dangerous narrative to continue," Erickson said, noting that every child has different temperaments and vulnerabilities. "A spanked child in a home with fewer privileges and opportunities is going to be very different than a child with lots of opportunities and lots of love."

Spanking does not work in the way parents hope it would, she said. It may immediately stop a child's unwanted behavior, but it loses its effect in the long term. In 1998, researchers found that a conversation paired with a timeout or a removal of a privilege worked just as well as a conversation with a spanking. So, why spank?

A spanking stigma

Much of the discussion of spanking moved underground in the 1970s after government campaigns raised awareness of child abuse on billboards and TV ads. Parents who spanked began to feel stigmatized, Erickson said. And in the silence around spanking, parents were left to tiptoe along a tenuous line. How hard should one spank? How many times? What is "hard enough" — but not so hard it leaves injuries?

"We're expecting a 180-pound adult to figure out how to hit a 40-pound child without hurting them," she said.

Sometimes it takes a high-profile spanking or whipping to bring the practice of physical discipline out of the shadows — and into an explosive debate. In 2014, Adrian Peterson was the face of the Minnesota Vikings when he was indicted by a grand jury on child-injury charges. He had used a tree switch to punish his 4-year-old son, leaving cuts and bruises on the boy's back, butt, legs and scrotum. Peterson said this was the same method of discipline used on him while growing up in Texas, and even credited it for his success.

Parents who spank often profess that it's a form of love, and in some families of color, it can be seen as a way to prepare their children for a racist environment that is dangerous for them.

"Black and brown kids aren't allowed to have the social faux pas that white kids can. Parents want to teach kids how to be respectful," Erickson said.

In the broadest strokes, research has suggested that spanking is more common among evangelical Christians ("spare the rod, spoil the child") and families experiencing economic hardship. But Erickson pushes back against pinning the trend on specific groups of people, as spanking is not the province of any one community or culture.

"It's pretty much everybody," Erickson said.

While spanking has been banned in more than 60 countries, the practice is still allowed in every state in America. Although the trend appears to be declining, 55% of people who responded to a 2021 survey conducted by the University of Chicago believe a child sometimes should be disciplined "with a good, hard spanking."

And just in time for the new school year, a district in Missouri revived a policy of allowing students to be spanked with a paddle. Nineteen states, mostly in the South, allow corporal punishment in public schools. (Minnesota banned the practice in 1989.)

How it harms the parent

Erickson's other argument, neatly stated in the subtitle, is that spanking additionally hurts us. Under certain circumstances, it can strain or break the bond of trust between parent and child.

I reflected on this — as a kid who wasn't spanked — because I know the opposite was true for my dad. Because of a legacy of laws excluding Chinese immigrants to the United States, our family was separated for the first several years of my father's life. He didn't come face to face with his own dad until he was about 10. And by that time, my laconic grandpa was ill-prepared to parent.

"He was very rough," my dad told me. "My dad thought it was the right thing to do because he got it from his mother."

Technically, my dad wasn't spanked. My grandpa struck him hard on the side of his head with an open hand, or worse, two knuckles. Usually it was for talking back or making mischief. (My dad also remembers his grandma in Hong Kong striking him with the stick end of a feather duster, leaving red marks on his legs.)

It would be many decades before my grandfather would own up to his mistakes — literally from his deathbed in the hospital. He asked about his grandchildren, then admitted he didn't know how to treat his own kids. "I think he knew he was going to die, and he wanted to let me know," Dad said.

When my brother and I were born, my father made a conscious decision not to strike us, not even a swat on the bottom, because he still remembered the humiliation of being smacked. "I never hit my kids," my 77-year-old dad tells me, maybe with a swell of pride. "Me, I said, I'm not going to do that."

"You don't hit your kids, do you?" he asked me.

"No," I said, though my mind silently flickered to moments where I felt so overwhelmed that I almost did.

"That's good."

There probably are a lot of families like mine, evolving over generations to bend toward a kind of parenting that is less harsh, and more connected. We naturally stumble when we're shaping small children into responsible humans who know right from wrong, but I hope the era of spanking — and the naughty paddle, the tree switch, the feather duster — can be left in the past, so we can set things right for the future.

After all, I wasn't spanked. And I turned out fine.