THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Bombshell study reveals why a controversial parenting practice should be banned

Bombshell study reveals why a controversial parenting practice should be banned

The "bombshell" study was a damp squib. The only evidence it marshalls for the claim that spanking is harmful comes from a 2016 meta-analysis. So hardly new.

A meta-analysis depends for its credibility on its inclusiveness but many studies were excluded from this analysis so its conclusions are on shaky grounds. I have seen from meta-analyses involving my own work how exclusions can give misleading results.

What to include and exclude is often a judgment call and it is too easy to exclude studies with awkward conclusions. There can be no doubt that the authors of this study had an attachment to a particular conclusion so that had to be a real problem in this case

Another problem is that a meta-analysis perforce had to define spanking rather broadly. But all spanking is not the same. It can range from a light tap to a damaging blow. And that difference has to be attended to if generalizable conclusions are to be drawn

I could go on to note further weaknesses in the study but I think I have said enough

Experts have renewed calls for the smacking of children to be outlawed in Australia, following dozens of other countries which have outlawed the controversial punishment.

A comprehensive new study published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health has found children who were smacked by their parents can go on to develop serious mental health disorders.

University of Melbourne professor of psychiatry Sophie Havighurst, lead author of the report Corporal Punishment of Children in Australia, said the findings made a case for the practice to be banned.

Prof. Havinghurst said the research reviewed 111 countries looking at the long-term effects of smacking and found negative effects present in children in 110 of those countries.

The study concluded that smacking had an impact of a child's developing brain and that Australia should not be lagging behind the rest of the world - where the disciplinary practice is not illegal unless excessive force is used.

Using physical force on children is currently banned in 65 countries including New Zealand, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands

Australian jurisdictions have varying laws when it comes to the divisive parental issue.

In NSW, physical punishment should not be painful for more than a brief moment, and children cannot be hit on their heads or necks.

In Victoria there is no legislation surrounding parents applying physical punishment to their kids while in various other states it must be considered 'reasonable under the circumstances'.

The latest paper reported that six in 10 people aged between 16 to 24 said they had experienced four or more incidents of corporal punishment.

Their findings also coincide with the Australian Child Maltreatment Study, which showed that 61 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds who were smacked as kids were nearly twice as likely to develop anxiety and depression later in life.

Professor Daryl Higgins, director of the Australian Catholic University's Institute of Child Protection Studies, said the older generation was more likely to believe smacking was effective.

38 per cent of those over 65 considered it necessary, compared with just 15 per cent of 16-24-year-olds agreeing it was appropriate.

The paper also found countries such as New Zealand that had changed laws and ran public education campaigns saw decreasing levels of corporal punishment

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12041477/New-Australian-study-prompts-calls-ban-smacking-children.html

**********************************************

No comments:

Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Bombshell study reveals why a controversial parenting practice should be banned

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive