An unintended consequence of spanking?

Professor Murray Straus concludes that children who are spanked are more likely as adults to coerce partners to have sex, to have unprotected sex and to have masochistic sex.

The article that summarizes the study is here.

I don’t normally talk about sex and sexuality here on The Hodge. Generally, I don’t find the topic germane to the big discourse, preferring instead to let sleeping dogs lie. However, as a new parent who is 100% in favor of corporal punishment, I feel that this topic bears some scrutiny.

First off, you have to appreciate the motivation of child psychologists. They are looking for a way in which to provide structure and discipline to a child without causing direct physical harm or lasting mental damage. Whether their drive stems from a desire to be politically correct or a true desire to spare children from trauma, the end result is that they want happy, healthy children who become productive members of society. Where the breakdown occurs is where you fall on the nature versus nuture debate.

Psychologists that emphasize exploration, choice, and allowing children to stretch boundaries generally believe in John Locke’s idea of the tabula rasa or “blank slate.” In this model, humans are born without an inborn nature. Their behavior is predicated only on their experiences and their sensory inputs, which means that each person is solely responsible for his or her own development once they reach an age when they can make their own choices. By extension, parents and families have the responsibility to provide an environment for children that allow them to build experience and a library of perception. This idea is very attractive to Western culture, in particular America, because the underlying assumption is that each of us is the composer of our own psyche. Self-determination and freedom used to be the watchwords of our culture, and we cling to those notions when evaluating our children. (Note that Locke was not the first to come up with this–Aristotle is the earliest known proponent of this idea.)

The most glaring flaw with such an argument can be described equally well by those in the relgious camp or those in the evolutionary camp. If you are raised in any religion that owes its roots to Judiasm, then the idea of original sin and the depravity of man leads you to believe that your children, left to their own devices, are inherently selfish beings who will do anything they can to secure their needs and wants. By corollary, evolutionists believe that man has evolved from the animal kingdom. The mandate here is survival, and to survive, that means competition. From that perspective, we’re not a blank slate, either, because selfishness is stamped into our very genetic code. We’re not built to be altruistic. We’re built to crunch our neighbor’s head with a rock and take his deer carcass.

One of the first things that I’ve noticed about my own son is that he is stubborn and selfish. He turns a year old in March, but already he is exerting his will in nearly every way that he can. I would argue strongly that my wife and I have provided a loving, safe environment. We’ve allowed him to explore to the boundaries of his safety, we’ve encouraged him to try new things and seek new perceptions, and yet both of us can already see the core of selfishness that dominates his actions. There is no question that he is happy, loving, and a joy to be around, but it doesn’t change his fundamental nature.

In speaking with other parents who have children in the two to three year old range, this only gets worse, no matter the environment.  From where did the stubborness and selfishness come from? Depending on your background, you have a choice of two answers:  it came from an evolutionary imperative to secure resources for survival, or it came from the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. To consider anything else based on the empirical evidence that every parent can provide  is foolish.

What, then, are we to do with our children? If their perceptions and their environments don’t change their nature, and their nature is hard coded by Divinity or genetics, then how do we provide discipline? Tabling the idea that spanking can lead to sexual fetishes, this form of punishment is the only thing that can provide a sharp, immediate feedback to a toddler that the actions they are taking are wrong. Most toddlers either lack the mental discipline or the will to listen to a parent explain why they can’t stick a fork in an electrical outlet. The only way to ensure that they don’t contemplate such an action is to associate it with an immediate negative outcome. If they are young enough that they don’t grasp the cause and effect portion of their actions, then you are left with spanking as your only option.

The immediacy of such punishment is what makes it work. It is fast, it is startling, and most of all, it hurts. Look at it in one of two ways: Parents are using the mechanism that evolution has provided to give a real-world consequence to an action that is dangerous to their survival…or they are following the Biblical mandate which says: “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Again, based on my own experience, children who live in families which have a consistent application of spanking in their arsenal of punishments are generally better behaved than their peers. There are fewer tantrums, fewer disagreements, and most importantly, fewer instances of punishment. That sounds like a win-win situation to me. The less frequently a child has to be disciplined, the more peaceful a family can be.

Child psychologists will argue that parents who spank their children are control freaks, or that they’re living out their own vindictive fantasies against their parents. I disagree. The experience of even spatting the hand of my son leaves me hollow and depressed. It is not something that I enjoy, but it is something I do because the alternative to disciplinary action that works is that he becomes a spoiled, willful, selfish brat that no one wants to be around. I don’t spank my son because my mom or dad spanked me. I spank him, absorbing the personal cost of the action (which to me, is high), because I love him and I want to see him be the best person he can be. In a weird twist, this is an extension of a nuturing household.

For every increased step on Straus’s four-step scale of agreement, men were 10 percent more likely to have verbally coerced sex from a partner by insisting on sex or threatening to end the relationship if the partner refused. Women were 12 percent more likely to have done that. 

Now, in light of this discussion, I find it hard to believe that instilling discipline in your children can lead to sexual excursions. Coercion is going to happen in a million cars in a million parks among a million teens, regardless of their childhood or environment. This is an uncomfortable fact. Our teenagers will justify their sexuality because of their raging hormones and the biological imperatives driving them to reproduce, not because of whether or not they were spanked as children.

He [Straus] found that students who were spanked were nearly twice as likely to like masochistic sex. 

A linkage between a tendency to have unprotected sex (a death wish, in my opinion) or masochistic sex is more a statement on the rampant hedonism in our culture. A parallel study, in which psychologists look at the difference between the sexual attitudes of their study group now and twenty years ago may show different results. Either we’re more willing to talk about these issues now, or we have evolved a more pleasure-centric culture in which modern-day teens are more willing to seek their own pleasures.

A question in response to this: Is masochistic sex on the rise as a whole? With the advent of the internet and the subsequent perversion readily available at the click of a mouse, would it surprise anyone that since awareness of this type of behavior is on the rise, the act itself is on the rise? This is a classic case of the old causation/correlation debate. I don’t know that you could ever accumulate enough data to say for sure, but the attitudes of our people are strongly indicative of this.

In the end, you are left with an issue of conscience. Do you want to bear the burden and personal cost of spanking your child? If not, is your child “wired” in such a way that you can get away with not doing it? Parents bear a large share of the responsibility in shaping the lives of their children, and as such, they can’t afford to be wrong.