The debate over spanking (打屁股) goes back many years, but the essential question often escapes discussion: Does spanking actually work In the short term, yes. You can correct immediate misbehavior with a slap or two on the rear end or hand. But what about the long-term impact Can spanking lead to permanent, hidden scars on children years later
On Sept 25, a sociologist from the University of New Hampshire, Murray Straus, presented a paper at the International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Trauma (创伤) in San Diego suggesting that corporal punishment (体罚) does leave a long-lasting mark—in the form of lower IQ. Straus, who is 83 and has been studying corporal punishment since 1969, found that kids who were physically punished had up to a five-point lower IQ score than kids who weren’t.
So how might getting spanked on the bottom actually affect the workings of the brain Straus notes that being spanked or hit is associated with fright and stress; kids who experience that kind of trauma have a harder time focusing and learning. In another recent paper that he co-authored with Paschall, Straus writes that previous research has found that even after you control for parental education and occupation, children of parents who use corporal punishment are less likely than other kids to graduate from college.
Still, it’s not clear if spanking causes lower cognitive ability or if lower cognitive ability might somehow lead to more spanking. It’s quite possible that kids with poor reasoning skills misbehave more often and therefore bring harsher punishment. "It could be that lower IQ causes parents to get very annoyed and hit more," Straus says, although he notes that a recent Duke University study of low-income families found that toddlers’ low mental ability did not predict an increase in spanking. (The study did find, however, that kids who were spanked at age 1 displayed more aggressive behavior by age 2 and scored lower on cognitive development tests by age 3.)
"I believe the relationship between corporal punishment and IQ is probably bidirectional," says Straus. "There has to be something the kid is doing that’s wrong that leads to corporal punishment. The problem is, when the parent does that, it seems to have counterproductive results to cognitive ability in the long term."
The preponderance (优势) of evidence points away from corporal punishment, which the European Union and the UN have recommended against, but the data suggest that most parents, especially those in the U.S., still spank their kids. It’s most common among African-American families, Southern families, parents who were spanked as children themselves and those who identify themselves as conservative Christians.
Sometimes spanking seems like the only way to get through to an unruly toddler. But the price for fixing his poor short-term conduct might be an even more troublesome outcome in the future.
What can we infer from the third paragraph