Spare the rod and help the child

Spare the rod and spoil the child, the old adage goes.

Recent research has shown that precisely the opposite is true: If you use the rod, you harm the child’s ability to cope in the world. That was the headline recently about research by Professor Murray Strauss of the University of New Hampshire.

A survey of 17,000 university students from 32 countries demonstrated, he writes, “that the higher the percent of parents who used corporal punishment, the lower the national average IQ.� So Straus and an associate looked at the IQ scores of 1,500 children when they were very young, and then re-examined the scores of the same children four years later, as well as data on whether their parents spanked them, and how often.

 They found that children who had not been spanked scored a higher IQ than those who had been. Moreover, the results showed that “how often parents spanked made a difference.… The more spanking, the slower the development of the child’s mental ability. But even small amounts of spanking made a difference.â€�

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To my mind, this research verified guesses made 50 years ago by the developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, the guiding genius behind Head Start. Introduced in 1965, Head Start has helped 50 million children from low-income families. Head Start grew out of Bronfenbrenner’s founding of a whole new field, “human ecology.�

At its heart was his insight that what a child learns depends not only on what is taught in school, but also in the family environment, the community environment, and even through the government’s involvement in education. Head Start was an acknowledgment of that truth, an attempt to harness the positive aspects of community, family, school and government to help disadvantaged children.

It also derived from Bronfenbrenner’s comparative studies of education in the United States and in the Soviet Union. Born in Moscow in 1917, he came to the United States in 1923 and spent most of his life here before traveling to the USSR for research in the 1950s.

What he found amazed him: Soviet parents, in collaboration with Soviet communities and with a strong push from the government, were fostering child-rearing practices that produced very good students at all levels of the system. Soviet parents were taught to discipline children only by withholding affection, not by spanking, putting “bad� kids in corners or denying dinner. Positive reward tactics were taught by community groups, factory communes, parent-teacher associations, and the Communist Party.

In terms of child-rearing, Bronfenbrenner contended, the Soviets were way ahead of Americans. But this was the Cold War, and anything smacking even faintly of Communism was anathema to Americans. Many good ideas were buried because they were labeled as “socialist,� a word that even today rings alarm bells.

Bronfenbrenner had a difficult time convincing U.S. authorities that early childhood education ought to be practiced in a fashion that derived in part from Soviet models — until Sputnik in 1957.

Sputnik was a wake-up call that spurred the federal government to pay attention, in particular to math and science education — we were far behind the Soviets — but also to education in general. This opened the door to such revolutionary programs as Head Start.

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In his later years, Bronfenbrenner thought about what makes human beings human. “The hectic pace of modern life poses a threat to our children second only to poverty and unemployment.… We are depriving millions of children — and thereby our country — of their birthright … virtues such as honesty, responsibility, integrity and compassion.�

He identified five processes that fostered the development of character and competence. I particularly like the first: “In order to develop — intellectually, emotionally, socially and morally — a child requires participation in progressively more complex reciprocal activity, on a regular basis over an extended period in the child’s life, with one or more persons with whom the child develops a strong, mutual, irrational, emotional attachment and who is committed to the child’s well-being and development.�

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Spanking has no part in that program. Dr. Rahil Briggs, a child psychologist with the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in New York, when asked about the Strauss study by AP reporter Serena Gordon, said she believes that “discipline should be an opportunity to teach your child something,� but that “If you spank, you teach your child that hitting is the way to deal with a situation.�

She added, “if you use other methods of discipline, you can begin teaching your child higher-level cognitive skills, self-control, cause and effect and logical thinking.�

Those skills, as Bronfenbrenner tried to teach, are what children need to properly develop “intellectually, emotionally, socially and morally.�

Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written more than two dozen books and many television documentaries.