Comments | liveonearth: Violent Punishment Leaves a Permanent Mark on Children

liveonearth

Violent Punishment Leaves a Permanent Mark on Children

Jul 23, 2012 16:24

Bruises fade and skin heals, but the mind remembers. Physical punishment is still prevalent among US families. This study found the prevalence of physical punishment without "more severe child maltreatment" was 5.9%. Boys get physically punished more than girls, 59.4% to 40.6%. Blacks get beat more than whites. Asians and Pacific Islanders ( ( Read more... )

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ford_prefect42 July 24 2012, 00:54:27 UTC

correlation != causation seems applicable here. Thing is, I *know* some actual living breathing children. Some of them are *good kids*, they simply don't do "bad" things. They are confident, articulate, engaging and agreeable. Those kids *never* get "spanked". And then there are the others. The aggressive, confrontational, disagreeable, little monsters. They get beat whooped regularly. Now, the children that are likely to grow up without problems... gee, which would you figure that would be, the ones that drove a loving parent to hit them, or the ones that were amenable to reason? Gee, lemme think...

There's literally no way to successfully run this experiment without being able to clone test tube babies.

liveonearth July 24 2012, 17:10:31 UTC

True enough. I suspect that the disagreeableness of some children is at least partly set up by early parenting. Could it be that the same parents who can't model good behavior for their children are the ones who end up beating their rowdy ones? It's the chicken and egg question, completely unanswerable. Still, we think we know something about it.

ford_prefect42 July 24 2012, 18:16:21 UTC

Same parents. Different kids. 1 guy i know had 10 kids, 9 of them well behaved, never struck, no issues, 1 of them difficult, periodically spanked, poor outcome. Hard to blame parenting there.

liveonearth July 24 2012, 21:18:13 UTC

Yes, this does happen. Can't really blame genetics, either. In which case you have to wonder about the kid's other exposures: maybe there's another human in his life that is twisting his mind.

ford_prefect42 July 26 2012, 04:00:17 UTC

The thing is, I don't have a clue. To say that it is or isn't genetic misses the *vast* number of different combinations that can be produced when sperm meets egg. Then there are a ga-billion things that can happen during the pregnancy that can have impacts, many of which won't even be *noticed* by the mother, and then there are the the millions upon millions of things that could happen and not be remarked upon during the early formatives... too many possibilities ( ... )

liveonearth July 26 2012, 16:43:05 UTC

Good points, indeed ( ... )

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