SIO332: Science Says Stop Spanking Your Kids, A-Holes! – Dear Old Dads Crossover

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:12 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 332, and we are in for a treat today. All may have heard by now on one of the other shows, or seen it, or whatever, but Dear Old Dads, the podcast is out. I know what you're thinking. I did not need another podcast. Well, I didn't think I did either, but this one is truly great. It is good enough that I wanted to do another project.

It is me, it is Tom Curry, it's Eli Eli Bosnick, talking about, well, okay, here's what I should say. A lot of people are reacting, very understandably, to the name and saying, oh, it's just for dads, nobody else. Absolutely not. This show is for everybody. And I mean that. While, yes, it might make a little more sense if you have kids, but it's not just about kids. It's also about being raised by people.

So if you are raising someone or if you were raised by someone, this show is für you. And I think that covers most people. It's so much fun. Fun. It's wholesome. It is hilarious. It has got great stories. I love it so much. So please listen to Dear Old Dads. Am so proud of it. I loved being on it. Today's show is a little of both.

So I don't even know if Dear Old Dads was on SIO or if SIO was on Dear Old Dads, I don't know. But what I do know is Dr. Lindsey Osterman is going to take all three of us through the science of why obviously no, you should not hit your kids. That is not a thing you you should do. Science, it's here we go, let's get into the lovely fusion of serious inquiries only and Dear Old Dads. You doing, Lindsey?

0:01:41 Lindsey: I'm doing well. How are you?

0:01:43 Thomas: Good. I can't wait for us to talk about whether or not we should spank our kids. I think we should approach this scientifically, so without bias, you know, so I guess I'll just ask you, hypothetically, if I can't get my child to do what I, an adult, want them to do, should I use physical force to beat them into it as I treat my child like a vending machine where good behavior is a Snickers that's stuck in it? And if I just hit it hard enough in the right way, the good behavior will fall down into the thing for me to enjoy.

0:02:02 Eli: I use violence?

0:02:18 Lindsey: Yes.

0:02:18 Thomas: Okay.

0:02:18 Lindsey: Yes. No.

0:02:19 Thomas: Yes. That's what the science, what does the science tell us?

0:02:19 Lindsey: No, actually, no, you shouldn't.

0:02:20 Tom: Wait, to point out real quick before we start this, I was thinking about this in anticipation of this segment, that spanking is one of those things that even for proponents of spanking, you know it's bullshit, because once your kids get, like, stronger than you, you stop spanking them, right? Right. We only ever spank people that we have like a really fucking clear power dynamic with.

0:02:36 Lindsey: Very telling.

0:02:39 Thomas: Yeah. Like 200 pounds on. Yeah. Yeah.

0:02:42 Eli: Yeah.

0:02:42 Tom: Right. I read real quick. I remember when I was 13 or 14, I roughhoused with my dad and I beat my dad wrestling and my dad stood up and he's like, OK, I think we're done doing that. And we didn't wrestle anymore because he was like, no, like my son is strong enough, like I'm going to lose.

0:03:01 Tom: And that's not, we're just not doing that. It's so funny to me that we only spank little kids, but no one's like walking up to their fucking junior in high school and giving them a fucking wallop on the ass because they'll get their ass kicked right.

0:02:50 Thomas: Oh, wow. Oh man. Yeah.

0:03:13 Eli: Which is weird because that I can understand.

0:03:16 Thomas: Yeah, that's, if you're going to pick a time to do it, I'm not saying you should do it. If you're gonna pick a Time to Do It, it would probably be then. Yeah. I also can't wait to talk about more about that later, Tom, because the fact that you ever had any physical contact with your dad in that way, that is a big difference.

0:03:17 Tom: Right. I-

0:03:24 Lindsey: Yeah, that's when they need it. Yeah. Oh,

0:03:32 Tom: Love.

0:03:33 Thomas: That's a, you wrestled your dad. And it's a thing that I'm doing with Mike. I love wrestling the kids.

0:03:38 Tom: Roughhousing.

0:03:38 Thomas: It's so Fun. Oh, so

0:03:38 Eli: It's so fun. They love it.

0:03:39 Thomas: Fun, they love it's the best every day, I wrestle those little kids. I also love when you talk about spanking. I love the people who are like, "I was spanked and I turned out fine," you know, and I'm always like, the gall you have to have to say you turned out funny. Does anyone show a hands who thinks they turned out fine? Is it just me? I would never, I would never say I turned, turned out fine until I'm dead.

0:03:40 Tom: It's it's, it's so easy. They're weak as hell.

0:03:58 Lindsey: Boy. Yeah?

0:04:00 Tom: Hey, right.

0:03:55 Eli: Oh, you're not fine. No, one who is defending hitting a child turned out fine by definition, never.

0:04:05 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, what kind of asshole is like, I'm great. I'm great. Look at me. I turned out great.

0:04:07 Tom: But, but even if you did turn out, okay, that'd be the same thing as being like, well, I drunk drove once. So there's no harm in it.

0:04:16 Thomas: Yeah wait, we got to do a quick poll. Who was spanked by their parents? I think I was. Yes, I was never.

0:04:21 Lindsey: Yes, I was spanked.

0:04:23 Tom: I was, but not often.

0:04:23 Lindsey: Oh

0:04:25 Eli: Never. So. There.

0:04:25 Thomas: Yeah that that tracks that tracks.

0:04:26 Lindsey: Wow.

0:04:27 Eli: There is a family story about this, which is that I was spanked exactly once. I was like four or five years old, I was running around, my dad was like, "You know, I'm gonna spank you." And I was like, "Yeah." And so he grabs me, and he doesn't know what the fuck it is, he doesn't want to spank me, but he said it, so he has to do it. So you're like, lightly taps me on the butt, and I go, "Ha ha, that didn't hurt." And so my dad gets mad, and so he like pulls his hand back, and my dad was a strong, big guy, pulls his head back and like really slaps me on my little ass. And I turn to him and I say, "You hurt my tush." And my dad was like, "Nope, not doing this again, never, ever, ever." Truly.

0:05:08 Eli: Truly, like, one, a single spank is what I received. And he was like, nah, I'm not doing that.

0:05:14 Lindsey: Nope.

0:05:14 Thomas: I was spanking as a kid. I think a decent amount, but I also realized that I don't fully remember. And so I would give another piece of advice. Definitely take parenting advice from me. If you are going to spank your kids, I'm not saying you shouldn't, but if you are, it's probably good idea to also be really shitty in other ways so that they forget about the spanking.

0:05:15 Tom: No,

0:05:34 Eli: About the spank. They blank out.

0:05:34 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:05:35 Lindsey: So that's the least

0:05:36 Tom: The least traumatizing thing that happened to you. Well,

0:05:36 Lindsey: Of the things. Yeah Oh,

0:05:37 Thomas: Yeah, it's like it's incidental. I'm like, oh, yeah, no, I guess they also did hit me in the ass when they didn't like what I was doing. Yeah? No, that's true. They They also did that. It's an afterthought, you

0:05:46 Tom: My Dad spanked me only, only a couple, two, three times. He was a bare-ass with a belt guy, um, But like, he stopped, he only did it a handful of times. I remember the last time, brother, somebody had eaten cookies and we weren't allowed to eat the cookies, and he found the box, and so he asked us who had eaten them, and my brother didn't say he did it, and I, I didn't do it, and so my dad spanked us both. And then came to find out that my brother had had eaten these, these particular cookies. And my dad felt terrible about it. My dad came, he apologized to me about it, and you could see that he just felt terrible, terrible about having spanked us both for it. And he never spank us after that.

0:05:51 Thomas: Oh, Jesus.

0:06:24 Eli: If there was only something he could have done. If the high council hadn't commanded for him to hit those kids. He had no choice.

0:06:35 Thomas: Oh,

0:06:25 Tom: Um, But, but know. So I, think he realized in that moment, like, that's not a way that he needed to punish us at all. And he, and my dad dad was very creative in punishing us. We never, my dad never raised his voice and he never hit us after that. So, but we did, we, when I grew up, my Dad worked and he was a single dad. So before and after school, we would go to other families' homes and they would watch us until my dad came home from work. And dad always gave those families carte blanche to punish us however we needed to be punished in order to keep us in line.

0:06:40 Thomas: My God.

0:07:03 Thomas: Can shoot them if you need to. Do whatever.

0:07:05 Lindsey: Boy.

0:07:05 Tom: So whatever their, their family rules rules were, we had to follow their family rules, um, so we stayed for a while with this, this family, the the Finks, and uh, Mr. Fink would often, if we did something wrong, you know, he'd give us an option. You could, like, of the punishments we had, a, do like, you know, write a lot, you know, you could write a hundred times I won't lie, or whatever it was, or you take, like, three swats. I picked the swats every single time.

0:07:29 Thomas: Oh, yeah. I would have, too.

0:07:30 Tom: I picked a swat. I'm like, you, you go ahead and you, and he would hit hard, like he's a big strong dude, like

0:07:30 Thomas: Yeah, 100%. Them doing work. One of them is you have to do work. The other is they have to work. You know, like they got to, yeah, well, that's all horrifying. Clarifying, ongoing

0:07:38 Tom: One is over in like one, like, it's like, oh, that that does sting, and then you like whistle while you walk away, um, I got swatted a fair number of times, but not by my dad, but by other dads. He was a great dad. He was a great dad, handful.

0:07:50 Thomas: Theme of the show, is Tom's dad actually Hitler or was he a good dad? I don't know. Like, sure.

0:07:57 Eli: We'll be doing a Twitter poll on this week's podcast. Was Tam physically abused? Make sure you, you time in with the hashtag, hashtag was Time abused, I feel

0:08:05 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, retweet

0:07:59 Tom: No, was not two or three times but

0:08:08 Thomas: Equals Tom's Dad was Hitler. Like equals Tom Dad. Just said your dad was creative in the ways he would punish you. Okay. All right. Yeah great Anyway.

0:08:12 Tom: Yeah so, like, he would make us write essays a lot, so that was a like yeah, we would write, we wrote a lot of essays about why, why we should or shouldn't do something.

0:08:19 Thomas: Okay. All right. Well, let's ask the scientist here what science says about Tom's dad.

0:08:32 Tom: Mike, goddammit.

0:08:33 Eli: Like, Lindsey didn't get to share her side. She was just, like, "yeah, I got spanked a lot," and then we talked for 15 minutes. That sucks. Brought brought the mood down. Okay, Wait, I'll bring it back up. Would you, like, because I was thinking about Mr. Frisk, or whoever, the stranger who was allowed to hit you, would you like to hear the story of the only time a strange adult hit me?

0:08:39 Lindsey: Usually it was my mom. Usually with a wooden spoon. Yeah, bare bottom. It real good memory around that. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah.

0:08:49 Tom: Absolutely.

0:09:01 Lindsey: Wow.

0:09:01 Eli: We were playing in the snow. I was like I was like six or seven years old. We were playing with the across the street neighbor kids, and they were very sweet, we were friends, but we were having a snowball fight. I'm from upstate New York, so, like, you know, three, four feet of snow was actually pretty normal. We're having a snowball fight, and I throw a snowball and I hit the neighborhood kid in the face. He runs inside crying, which, again, like, for the younger members of our audience, that was the, eight, you threw, Through stuff at each other until someone was crying was the permanent game from 1980 until 2006.

0:08:36 Thomas: Oh, Yeah,

0:09:02 Tom: And how much did you tip her?

0:09:30 Thomas: I think that's still true. Until PlayStation.

0:09:36 Eli: 9-11 is, right, exactly. Until the Nintendo Wii came along, that was all we had. I don't think anything of it because I'm a little kid. And then his dad came out and he like runs over to us and he's like, who threw a snowball at Mike? And I was like, hi, dad. And he grabs me and he pushes my face into the snow. And He's, like, how do you like it? You like it when someone pushes up, and all of a sudden his weight is gone, and I hear my mom's voice, and I see her going, "Dave, Dave," and that, to this day, I'm, like, fuck, I gotta cover.

So I'm like, I look up, because I know my mother only says Dave, Dave, if my father is absolutely obliterating someone, and sure enough, my father has this guy up, I'm not kidding, like the gorilla luggage test, chest held above his head, held above, I look up, he has held him above his head, and he is up there, and he's like, "Dave, I was just, I was just," and he was like, "you were just what, you want to push me in this." No, the thing you have to remember about my dad that is key to understanding is that my dad was a naturally incredibly violent person, right, that he was, to the world, was in resistance to his natural instincts, tanks, but the

0:09:36 Thomas: Yeah. Wow.

0:10:00 Tom: Oh,

0:10:26 Lindsey: That's

0:10:49 Thomas: Fan your dad was, I guess, huh? Huh?

0:10:51 Eli: Was, was the thing that my dad was great at, right, at fighting, and he resisted that, he resisted his whole life, so the times that it came out, he was like, "oh, finally, right, like, at last, society is," so

0:11:06 Tom: I have been waiting.

0:11:07 Eli: Right.

0:11:08 Thomas: He was like trying to plan ways for you to hurt other kids, so that their dad would hurt you, and then he could hurt.

0:11:11 Eli: Exactly. Uh, we could, we could fill an entire episode with the three times I watched my father fight, but he grabs this guy and he like tosses him onto the hood of our Lincoln, and then he like scrambles back into his house, and dad was throwing snowballs at the window for, like, for too long, for, like, six minutes.

0:11:34 Eli: So, yeah, we, they didn't. My father didn't share the ability, that you were allowed to hit me. No.

0:11:13 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, wow. Oh man.

0:11:35 Lindsey: Amazing sciences.

0:11:41 Eli: Science.

0:11:41 Thomas: We have a scientist here.

0:11:43 Eli: All, right, so you got hit by your mom, brought the mood down. What does science say? Don't,

0:11:49 Lindsey: Don't do that, that's mostly what it says

0:11:51 Eli: Hit your

0:11:51 Thomas: All right. That's all the time we have. Thank you, Lindsay.

0:11:51 Eli: Mom, all right, Lindsey.

0:11:53 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:11:53 Thomas: Frenzy, yeah.

0:11:53 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:11:53 Tom: All, I, I wonder

0:11:53 Eli: Thanks so much for coming on.

0:11:55 Thomas: What,

0:11:54 Lindsey: No, I'll show my work, but, like, really, that's, that's, yeah, um, physical punishment is the topic of the review paper that I looked into, or that I've sourced most, I drew on most heavily for this prep, and it's a slightly broader category than just spanking. Um, they define it as the use of physical force to cause a child to experience some degree of pain or discomfort, with the intention of modifying the child's behavior. So it's broader than just spanking, but spanking is the most common form of physical punishment that parents use. So this review paper was published in 2018. It was by Elizabeth Gershoff and colleagues. And Gershof is a faculty member at UT Austin. She has a PhD in child development and family relationships, and she's been doing research on physical punishment since the late 1990s. She been incredibly productive over the course of her career, and actually published another review paper on physical punishment in 2002, and in that paper made the case that physical punishment is strongly correlated with negative outcomes, particularly things like aggression and other externalizing behavior problems, like delinquency, but

0:12:52 Thomas: Was, was Eli's dad spanked? Is that where we're getting that, where's his aptitude for violence came from? Oh,

0:12:58 Eli: Yeah, he was he just paint a lot, and

0:12:59 Lindsey: Possible. Yeah

0:13:00 Thomas: There you go.

0:13:01 Lindsey: Well, yeah,

0:13:01 Tom: Like, does this paper have anything to say about, and I'm not trying to, like, make a case for, for hitting your fucking kids, right, but I am curious, like, does it make at all about the number of events?

0:13:12 Lindsey: Frequency is one of the things that they look at. Well, some people have some

0:13:12 Tom: Okay. Yeah, because, like, if you just swat them, you know, once in a while, right? That's probably fine. That's what you're, right, just

0:13:18 Eli: That's another point for the Tom defends his dad team.

0:13:20 Tom: A little bit? Come on.

0:13:22 Lindsey: Some people have argued that, but yeah, the odd, the uh, evidence doesn't really bear that out. It looks like some is better than, or is worse than none, and more is bad, is worse than some. Just, yeah, so yeah, just, it's bad, you shouldn't do it. No,

0:13:33 Thomas: Okay, so

0:13:37 Tom: It say whether or not the kids really had it coming, though? I'm just, I'm looking at my notes.

0:13:41 Thomas: They do they do this scientific

0:13:42 Tom: I'm going through the checklist, guys. Just, you now, what if your kid is an asshole, is, like what I mean.

0:13:41 Eli: Yeah. And

0:13:42 Thomas: Grading yeah Hmm.

0:13:42 Lindsey: That that is actually one of the explanations for this correlation.

0:13:49 Tom: Are you serious?

0:13:50 Lindsey: That's been, been explored.

0:13:50 Tom: 3SGs, I can't even joke about this fucking thing. What

0:13:51 Lindsey: Yeah nope. Nope. People have made these cases and continue to make, to make cases like this actually, um, yeah, so this, this paper that she published in 2002, she made the case that, like, this is a, this is strong correlation between physical punishment and negative outcomes, but at the time, in 2002, she said that the evidence wasn't strong enough to claim that spanking actually caused detrimental outcomes. In the 16 years years between that 2002 review and the one we're discussing today, the evidence that she said before was necessary to make a causal claim about spanking was in fact collected. And in this 2018 review, Gershoff argues strongly that the evidence is now sufficient to claim that spanking causes detrimental outcomes for children. And she recommends that the American Psychological Association officially discourage its use, which in 2019, the year after this paper was published, it did. And it joined the recommendations of other professional organizations like the American American Academy of Pediatrics.

0:14:10 Thomas: Dear, I, want to know who the scientific minded person was that's like, "look, I've checked with the research, they haven't established it yet, so I'm going to just hit my kid until I'm told otherwise."

0:14:52 Eli: I, Tell you, what, now that I've read this here piper, I will no longer be twaking a switch to my youngin.

0:14:55 Lindsey: I mean, Well, I mean, you know, it's, it's so, okay, so this is a consensus position, but like, people still do spank their kids a lot. It's like, over 80% of parents in the U.S. still spanked their kids and that according to a 2016 study, yeah.

0:15:09 Thomas: Yeah. What? As of right now?

0:15:12 Tom: Wait a minute. Over 80 %? Wait a minutes. Wait a second. Over

0:15:17 Lindsey: According

0:15:17 Tom: 80%, or still like, yeah, I mean, good walloping.

0:15:21 Lindsey: To a 2016 story, yeah, over 80 percent of parents. It's

0:15:25 Thomas: Wow.

0:15:24 Tom: Was that study titled Cut Me a Switch? What the fuck? What?

0:15:28 Eli: Yeah.

0:15:30 Lindsey: A lot. And, and the reason for that is that there is, is a really large knowledge gap among parents about the evidence that spanking is harmful. And on the other side of that coin, which I think you were jokingly saying a minute ago, Eli, like, there is a persistent belief among at least some people that not spanking your kids might actually harm them in the long run, right? Spare the rod, spoil the child, yeah?

0:15:50 Thomas: I'm doing you a favor kid.

0:15:52 Lindsey: Yeah, right. I mean, I think that that was my parents' position. They always said they didn't like doing it, but that, you it was going to be more harmful to not do it in

0:15:59 Thomas: Being Honest, I think that was kind of my parents' position, but also they were just so annoyed about us all the time that I, I'm pretty sure some of those they like doing, like at least a number of them, you know, some of them they're probably like, ah, I wish I didn't have to do this. I I'm curious though, I did hear, like, I don't know, a decade ago or more, Lindsey, that, uh, I did hear somebody say that it's not good to spank your kids for normal, any, whatever reasons, if they are doing something dangerous, that would be a time to spanking, like, you know, they're, they got a fork and they're going an electrical socket, that, like, their approach was that's a time spanking because you're, you're helping them avoid avoid Yeah.

0:16:34 Thomas: Like you're, you're gonna, they're gonna get electrocuted, so you're like associating a negative thing. Like, and I don't know if that's a position anyone has anymore, although if we find out that 80 of fucking people spank their kids in this country, um, that an approach that is addressed at all in this, is that something that makes sense as a distinction

0:16:33 Eli: Could get hurt And

0:16:51 Lindsey: It is an argument that is addressed. Yeah. Right. And the answer is still no, right? If you're close enough to your kid to spank them, you're closer enough to like sort of grab them and pull them away from that danger or whatever. And it's, yeah, the evidence indicates that there are alternatives. There are always alternatives to physical punishment that seem to be more effective and less harmful.

0:16:51 Thomas: Okay I still know No, what

0:17:10 Eli: There's no such thing as an intercessory spank, right? No, no. No kid is like about to put a penny in a, like, socket, and you're like, like, slow motion, you drag your kid's pants down and start playing the bongos on their ass. This is the only way to stop you. Smack, smack, smack.

0:17:13 Lindsey: Right. Right? Right.

0:17:24 Thomas: If no, you don't have to reach out. You're about to go stop them through normal means, but then something catches your leg and you can only reach as far as their ass. That's as far As you can get.

0:17:34 Eli: Their ass cheeks.

0:17:39 Lindsey: I mean, as long as you only do it once, it's fine. That's Yeah, yeah, cut that. Actually, Obviously.

0:17:43 Eli: Dr. Lindsay's recommendations. Cut everything except for Lindsay saying yes to that one.

0:17:51 Tom: But I mean, it isn't the reason that you spank kids because, like, they haven't been properly, like, especially when they're super young, I mean, I have heard this, and again, I'm not advocating for, but, like, when they are real little, they can't be reasoned with, right? An argument that I've heard time and again is, is, what the hell do you do with kids that are too small to be reason with that are putting themselves in danger or whatever? Like, obviously, obviously, you hit them real hard, and then they're in less danger.

0:18:14 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. May be true that, like, if they're, if they're super, super young, that you're not going to be able to sit down and have a conversation with them, but kids are also super responsive to social feedback.

0:18:24 Thomas: Can I? Yeah, I was, I, I'm just going to say Eli is the one closest to this because Eli has the youngest kid currently, but, like, there was never a time in my two kids' recent, you know, newborn to toddlerhood, never was there any time where me saying no wouldn't be like earth shattering to that, like, that that has a huge impact well

0:18:25 Lindsey: Yeah

0:18:43 Tom: Yeah, but that's your kids, man. I could do the same thing to my seven -year -old, and that would not stop him.

0:18:48 Thomas: That, well, not that old I'm talking about, like, when, because you just said they can't be reasoned with. Oh, okay, sorry, yeah.

0:18:51 Tom: No, but I mean, when he was two or three, yeah. Yeah. I know what you mean, because the same thing was true for my 15 -year old. When he was 2 or 3, a sharp no would, I mean... Not only would that catches attention, but it would, like, he would crumble, like, he would be sad, but my, my seven-year-old, at two or three, a sharp no and he would not give a shit about a sharp

0:19:07 Thomas: Yeah Arlo's kind of that, that way too, but there's a difference between, like, I'm trying to get him to, you know, like, oh, he's not fucking getting dressed for school or something like that, where he just doesn't listen, versus, like, if he's doing something dangerous, where I've physically, take it like, picked him up and been like, you can't do, you know, that that makes as much of an impact as I think you can, and I, I guess I'm just arguing that, like, if that doesn't work, like, the spanking, you know, I don't think that's, yeah. Or it has enough bad consequences that it's, it's worse in the long run to do that. Like if the downside is what, you know, they might stick a fork in a socket. I think statistically that doesn't happen that much. So I guess you're weighing like the two risks.

0:19:14 Tom: No wouldn't work either yeah but

0:19:55 Lindsey: Yep.

0:19:55 Tom: Know, it's crazy, as 19 states still allow for corporal punishment in schools, from the age of preschool through high school, 19 state talk about like, like, like, that's fucking just teachers.

0:20:01 Lindsey: Yeah okay

0:20:03 Eli: Yeah. They're

0:20:03 Thomas: Wow. If, someone hits my kid, I will turn into Eli's dad. I'm a hundred percent.

0:20:09 Eli: Dead. You will die a thousand Deaths. Truly.

0:20:11 Thomas: Oh, Eli, I want to, at a later date, I do want to have maybe a more masculinity discussion about your violent dad and how I actually kind of feel like I'm the same way as your dad, but if somebody ever did that, I would probably murder a person, like, it wouldn't even be close.

0:20:26 Eli: Like, This is going to take us slightly off topic. Watching my dad's violence was a major change in how I viewed masculinity, because I saw that, I recognized that the world recognized that as masculinity. I also recognized that that was like squeezing my butt cheeks and hovering off the ground three feet, right? Just being capable of that kind of violence is just not anywhere in my, my, I mean, it's technically in my DNA, but it's just not anywhere in my DNA. And so I literally, watching my dad fight, made me be like, well, I gotta be a different kind of dude then, because I can't do that.

0:20:26 Thomas: Hmm. I guess I'll wear a fedora, I don't know what do I do

0:21:02 Eli: Right. You know. The story, this story that, um, mom loves to tell about me is that, uh, if people have ever looked close at a photo of me or have ever seen me, my nose is broken and so are a bunch of my teeth. Um, the first time that happened, although I've been punched several times, the first time that happened is because, like, I made a joke about a kid's girlfriend and he punched me in the nose, broke my nose and broke my teeth, and I immediately apologized to him. I was like, oh, I'm so, I was just joking around, man, like, I didn't mean to say something that would make you that mad, like, I, I do not have the violence ability, my

0:21:05 Tom: Yeah.

0:21:32 Thomas: Yeah.

0:21:37 Tom: That is interesting, because it really, like, your dad had it, though, and your dad modeled it to some degree, but it is just not in you. And that, like, one of the things that I want to talk about, I am sure will be a theme on the show, is like that whole nature-nurture concept. Like, our kids, like in so many ways, our kids are who they are in many ways regardless of the behaviors we model, or you know, because this

0:21:56 Thomas: Think Eli's saying too, like, if his dad was Michael Jordan and and modeled how to dunk from the free throw line, like, I think Eli's like, well, I can't do that. That's not, you can model that as hard as you want, Michael, like, I'm not, there's no amount of modeling that will make me do

0:22:04 Eli: Musicals, well and it. Was all. He was also always very, very clear with me that that was not the solution, right? That that was not what he wanted to be or do, it was just true.

0:22:10 Thomas: Yeah.

0:22:19 Tom: Is not the solution.

0:22:20 Thomas: As he's got a rival dad over his head, spitting him around, yeah.

0:22:21 Eli: Yeah. True, truly. He would, he would be ashamed and would talk about how ashamed he was of those behaviors the couple of times that it happened. Um, and I also, I got to see the consequences of real violence, like, I got got to see people get really hurt in violent interactions with my dad, and I was like, because in, you know, in a karate movie, there's always like, hey, no one comes to this bar, and then, you know, Bruce Willis punches him, and then the guy, literally, he, he falls out of screen and it's never seen again, right? But like, you don't have to be in a grocery store with some woman screaming like, get, oh god, he's killing him, and you're like, oh, I feel like this is how real, real violence works. Ma'am, could you calm down, please? I'm worried. I mean, he might be killing him, but you're making this weird.

0:22:48 Thomas: Yeah, right. Well, we've got Lindsey. Lindsay, why don't you go more into this paper for us? Well,

0:23:12 Tom: So,

0:23:18 Lindsey: All right, so I think this was a good discussion, though, of intuition, like, about why spanking, or the situations in which spanking might be necessary, right? Weigh that potential benefit, which I'm going to argue there's not a lot of evidence for, against all of these. I'm gonna give you a whole list of negative things that have been correlated with spanking. So, meta-analyses on these questions suggest that physical punishment is associated with lower levels of moral internalization by children, meaning that their, their moral reasoning is less, less guided by, like, an internalized sense that something is wrong, and more guided by external considerations, like fear of punishment.

0:23:51 Tom: Just like go through the rest of your life looking for a giant hand to appear to just

0:23:54 Eli: Yeah.

0:23:54 Thomas: Yeah yeah if if instead of someone explaining to you why something is wrong, you get hit. Maybe you take on a mentality of like, well, I just do whatever until there's an owie, and then that tells me that it's not okay, which is not a good way to go through life. Then you're Eli, bullying people until they punch him, you know?

0:23:55 Lindsey: Yeah. No.

0:24:09 Tom: Oh

0:24:10 Eli: Yeah.

0:24:11 Lindsey: Yeah, that's one, right? It's also been linked with academic impairment, poor parent -child relationships, poor self -esteem, and poor mental health in both childhood and adulthood. Higher levels of aggressive and antisocial behavior in both childhood and adulthood. And that relationship is actually among the most strong and most consistent that you see in this literature. Risk of suffering physical abuse, meaning the more injurious form of abuse that is specifically excluded by this term of physical punishment. So just to explain this one a little bit, because I don't know if it's obvious, some findings suggest that non -injurious physical punishment can in some into injurious physical abuse and that that's actually a very common story.

0:24:49 Tom: So you start off spanking your kid and then you're just like, you know, this feels pretty good and you just keep going with it. Jesus.

0:24:55 Lindsey: So, that they've done with parents who are actually abusive, it seems like the very common story is that that started with things like spanking.

0:25:05 Thomas: And then it like didn't miraculously make the kid do everything they wanted all the time. So then they had to escalate it maybe.

0:25:09 Lindsey: Yeah, and it escalates, yeah. And finally, it's been associated with a higher risk of later abusing one's own child or one's spouse as an adult. That's a whole host of negative things. Yeah, A whole lot of bad things. So yeah, so spanking is correlated with a lot of negative things, but inferring whether spanking causes these outcomes is a little bit tricky, because almost zero of this research is experimental, because it's not ethical to randomly assign parents to spank their kids or not and see if they suffer harms.

Um, actually, unfortunately, there were actually a couple of experiments on spanking in the 1980s that we'll come back to, because of course there were, there was the 80s. Um, since then, ethics boards have not allowed experimental studies on spanking. Because working almost exclusively with non-experimental data, there are interpretational challenges in this literature that make causal claims more difficult than they would be if we had experimental evidence. Challenge is between spanking and negative outcomes could plausibly be interpreted in at least two ways. So it could be that the spanking is causing the problems, or it could be that the children who exhibit more problems elicit more spanking, so that's the maybe your child's an asshole alternative.

0:25:11 Thomas: Yeah. Those are bad things. Yeah, right.

0:25:42 Thomas: Oh God.

0:26:16 Eli: Maybe they deserve it, right?

0:26:17 Lindsey: Yeah yes

0:26:17 Tom: Had it coming I guess in a follow up, what was the child wearing is my other

0:26:22 Eli: Yeah.

0:26:23 Lindsey: Exactly

0:26:24 Thomas: Yeah, like a target on their butt or something? What would be the...

0:26:26 Eli: You know, the body has a way of shutting those things down.

0:26:29 Thomas: Oh, my God.

0:26:30 Lindsey: Jesus. Oh

0:26:32 Tom: All this data for income

0:26:34 Lindsey: There have definitely been studies where they they control for things like socioeconomic status for sure yeah that seems like a plausible alternative explanation too, for sure. It's going to increase stress.

0:26:41 Thomas: Right.

0:26:37 Tom: Yeah right because a lot of the things that you mentioned are also side effects of poverty so

0:26:44 Thomas: Yeah.

0:26:44 Lindsey: Yes. Yeah. Right. Problem of inferring causal direction makes it very important to collect longitudinal evidence on this relationship, meaning that you have to collect data on the same individuals over time and establish that the spanking precedes later problematic behavior, right? So if physical punishment at age five predicts problems at age 10 or 20 or 30, it just cannot be the case that those future your behavior problems cause the physical punishment at age five, because that's not how time works, right?

Even if you rule out the directionality problem with longitudinal evidence, it's still possible that spanking isn't causing the negative outcomes. That relationship could be caused by some third variable, like you just mentioned, poverty, right. So for instance, maybe certain kinds of parents, like parents who are not very warm, are more likely to spank their children.

And it's actually those unique parent characteristics that are causing negative child outcomes, so experiments are sort of the gold standard for ruling out third variables, but there are other ways of doing it, so you can create samples for instance that are matched on those confounding variables but differ and whether the kids have been spanked or not and that

0:26:45 Tom: Yeah yeah

0:27:44 Lindsey: Or you could measure and statistically control for confounding variables in your analysis, so point is, there are ways of making a case for a causal relationship from non-experimental data, it's just tricky and it requires really resource intensive research. So, does the current evidence suggest about whether these negative outcomes are actually caused by physical punishment? We're going to go through the evidence that five criteria that are necessary for inferring causality have actually been met in this literature on spanking and negative outcomes, outcomes. Um, the first regards the the plausibility of the proposed causal relationship, so the question we're answering is, is spanking as a cause of negative child outcomes a plausible and coherent explanation for this relationship? Yeah.

0:27:43 Thomas: I think that's a no -brainer. Yes, we could probably move on from that one.

0:28:24 Lindsey: This is the this is the shortest uh section in the paper, actually it's it's like, yes, it is in

0:28:31 Tom: Was it just one word, was it just like duh

0:28:32 Thomas: Doy. Yeah.

0:28:33 Eli: Sure.

0:28:34 Lindsey: My notes I just wrote sure period. Um, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because regardless of whether somebody is pro or anti-spanking, the underlying assumption is that the spanking is causing a change. So that's the whole argument. So yes, of course, it's plausible.

0:28:35 Tom: Right

0:28:37 Eli: I

0:28:45 Tom: Otherwise you wouldn't do it right otherwise right yeah right well

0:28:47 Lindsey: Yeah, right. We don't do it for fun. I hope, right? You shouldn't. Yeah. Criterion two regards the overall strength of the relationship observed. So is spanking strongly and consistently related to negative outcomes? So if the relationship is weak or it's inconsistent across observations as to whether the relationships are positive or negative, this weakens the case. Spanking actually causes negative outcomes, but the relationship is indeed consistent and the average strength of the effect that they found in these studies is moderate. So recent meta -analyses suggest an average effect size of spanking of 0 .33, which means that overall outcomes differ between children who are versus are not spanked by about a third of the standard deviation, which is considered a moderate effect size. And additionally, the direction of the relationship is consistent across observations, meaning that the vast majority of research suggests just detrimental effects of spanking on outcomes like long-term compliance, aggression, behavior problems, mental health, cognitive performance, parent -child relationship quality, and risk of physical injury and abuse. So,

0:29:45 Thomas: There's not a ton of examples the other way, like confounding things. I was spanked into being perfect all the time.

0:29:51 Eli: Was never closer to my dad than after he spanked me. Where's the outliers in that study, huh?

0:29:51 Lindsey: Yeah. Oh, dear. Yeah,

0:29:58 Thomas: Like, we find out, like, well, it would be like if you found a Jimmy Carter and Like. Rogers were spanked just relentlessly, and you'd be like, well, that cuts the other way, but

0:30:09 Lindsey: Be a convincing outlier. Yeah, no, these observations of detrimental outcomes are consistent across hundreds of studies. You can find a few examples that seem to go in the other direction, but the weight of the evidence is very clearly.

0:30:20 Thomas: They were sponsored by like dads for hitting the fuck out of your kids. Yeah.

0:30:24 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:30:24 Eli: Dave Sticks sponsored this study.

0:30:24 Thomas: Yeah. Big Stick. Well,

0:30:31 Tom: Oh.

0:30:32 Lindsey: So, it's across studies. It's consistent across cohorts. So it's been observed with kids from the 1950s through the 2000s. And it's consistent across cultures, which is another argument that you hear sometimes that, you know, depending on the cultural context, physical punishment can be okay as long as it's considered culturally acceptable.

0:30:49 Tom: Like if the music you're playing in the background is different or like you just had like rice instead of beans, I see how they could- that could- could definitely change the outcome of being hit by someone that you trust.

0:30:52 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

0:31:00 Eli: Honestly, if my father had spanked me to, do you really want to hurt me? I think it would have entirely different psychological detriment.

0:31:07 Thomas: I do imagine there's some amount of effect it might have, to be spanked within a context of nobody else around me has ever hit, ever. And I have like the one asshole parent that's fucking hitting me versus like in a context culturally where everybody hits their kids and it's an expectation. I can imagine that might have some effect on, you, the dire consequences.

0:31:11 Tom: You're like, well,

0:31:27 Lindsey: Intuitively, I think that that actually makes, I can see that case. But when you look at meta -analyses across cultures, the effect seems to go in the opposite direction. So yeah. So in cultures where physical punishment is considered acceptable, the relationships between the physical punishment and bad outcomes actually get stronger, longer. Possibly because more extreme forms of physical abuse are more acceptable. I- I don't know, that's that's one way to explain it but yeah

0:31:34 Thomas: Oh, wow.

0:31:43 Thomas: Huh, interesting. Oh, okay. Yeah

0:31:51 Tom: You got to keep up with the Joneses. You know what I mean? Like if they're, if they'RE using a belt and like, you've got to use a bigger belt, it's a whole thing. It's an appearance issue.

0:31:53 Lindsey: Yeah

0:31:54 Thomas: Yeah yeah they have a certain amount of square footage, you got to get more square footage. They hit their kid four times a week, you got hit your kid five times. I get it.

0:31:58 Lindsey: Um,

0:32:00 Tom: Right.

0:32:04 Eli: Phil's launching his kid out of a cannon. God damn it. You gotta keep up.

0:32:05 Thomas: Yeah

0:32:08 Tom: I

0:32:10 Lindsey: So criterion three is about the temporal relationship between the variables so when we look at longitudinal studies are children who are spanked likely to experience increases in problems later after the spanking and gershoff reviews nine longitudinal studies that have examined this association and controlled for children's initial behavior problems, so ruling out the asshole kid hypothesis, and all nine demonstrated that use of physical punishment predicted increases over time in things like physical aggression, verbal aggression, and disruptive behaviors like tantrums and disobedience. So longitudinal work supports the interpretation that spanking precedes and thus may cause later behavior problems. Four is about whether we see a dose -response relationship between spanking and detrimental outcomes. So, as the amount a child is spanked increases, do detrimental outcomes also increase? And as we were talking about a minute ago, some folks who defend physical punishment have suggested that there's like a curvilinear relationship here, meaning that if you

0:33:04 Tom: Don't think they phrase it that way. Lindsay, though, I just want to point out like the, the defenses that I've heard are not quite, are not quiet phrased that way,

0:33:06 Thomas: Let's get Eli's uh, southern character again to be like, see, the curvilinear as they're fashioning a switch. I

0:33:14 Eli: It's the curvilinear, y'all. Lindsay, I think you're not accountin' for a lot of metrics here, can I just say that? I'm Dr. Tux McBuckin, here for Liberty University.

0:33:28 Thomas: Think only four of the criterion for- uh, are established in this case, so, uh, bend over. Yeah, exactly.

0:33:35 Lindsey: Well, some people have called it a curvlinear relation.

0:33:36 Eli: I have nuts on my diploma.

0:33:40 Lindsey: Yeah, what they mean by this is that if your using light or infrequent spankings, that that's actually not harmful, could be helpful, and that spankins only become harmful when they are frequent, harsh, or cause injuries. The handful of studies, including at least one longitudinal study examining this relationship, have not supported this idea, and they rather suggest that infrequent physical punishment is worse than no physical punishment, and that frequent physical punishment is worse than infrequent punishment. So there's a gradient. Finally, criterion number five is about ruling out a spurious relationship between spanking and detrimental outcomes. So have, you possible causes been ruled out as explanations for the relationship between spanking and bad outcomes. There are two ways to rule out alternative causes. Gold standard, again, is to do experiments. And as I mentioned, there were only a handful of spanking experiments back in the 1980s. They all had tiny samples, and none of them examined whether spanking was harmful. They were examining whether spankings are effective at eliciting compliance.

0:34:35 Tom: Was it so?

0:34:36 Lindsey: It appeared to be, but it turned out that at baseline, the children in the spanking group happened to be more compliant than the children in the no spanking group, and once you controlled for those differences Yeah, so

0:34:44 Tom: They were spanking the good kids

0:34:47 Eli: Lindsay, maybe too broad a question here, when did you guys get good at science? Like would you say it was 1995?

0:34:47 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:34:55 Eli: When did you start givin' it your all As a scientific community? Community was Was it 9-11 that really you all decided to get it together

0:34:57 Lindsey: Yeah, that was when we got our shit together, yeah, yeah, um, 80s apparently is when we became ethical. So good for us.

0:35:07 Tom: That's Amazing that the more compliant kids just happen to fall into the getting wet study, Jesus. Christ.

0:35:08 Lindsey: Yeah, well And they because they they

0:35:14 Tom: Well, kids are pretty Small, Lindsey, it's kind of a whole thing about kids. Oh,

0:35:14 Lindsey: Use, they use like these tiny samples, like the samples were between 8 and 18 Kids. Kids. That's true. It's true, they're all very short as well, but like if you, so usually random assignment takes care of baseline differences, but if you only have eight kids in your study, then yeah, like by, by random chance, it's possible you're going to get differences in compliance.

0:35:29 Thomas: Can't do it, yeah, at

0:35:29 Tom: Jesus. Was this a Wakefield sponsored study with a sample size that small, or just what

0:35:37 Lindsey: Probably, yeah,

0:35:35 Eli: Yeah, exactly he's giving, offering kids candy if he lets them spank him in the corner

0:35:42 Thomas: The same time they're also letting them each smoke a cigarette and see how that affected like they're just it was a it was no man's land, it was just fucking

0:35:47 Tom: Do

0:35:46 Eli: Yeah exactly it's a different time then there was a tiny kid prison, the spanked kids were the guards, yeah

0:35:49 Thomas: Yeah yeah

0:35:50 Lindsey: it'S a different time, yeah That was Zimbardo, that was a good one. Yeah, so once those baseline differences in compliance were accounted for, there was no difference in compliance between the kids that were spanked versus those that were exposed to a different method, like a timeout, so it's sure, like, you can elicit immediate compliance by spanking, but it's not better than alternatives. That's

0:36:12 Tom: They factor in though the time savings on the parent, you know, I mean, like a time out, like you you got to watch them.

0:36:12 Thomas: Well, yeah productivity was there a productivity

0:36:17 Eli: Watch them Now, Lindsay, that actually does bring me to a good question though, because I don't think anyone who's listening to this necessarily spanks their kids end of scent

0:36:18 Thomas: Uh metric

0:36:18 Tom: And right. It's just, yeah,

0:36:19 Lindsey: True. There's statistically

0:36:28 Thomas: Well, if fucking 80 percent of the country does. I, you know, probably

0:36:29 Lindsey: Yeah

0:36:31 Tom: I don't, I wouldn't. Yeah.

0:36:31 Eli: I Just I can't picture anyone being like, let me check out this podcast as soon as I'm done punching my son, I'm gonna listen to the fucking, I guess if you hit your kids, stop, and we've convinced you, but like, what punishments do work, right? Because one thing that I definitely felt as a parent while knowing I can't hit my kid is, what the fuck do I do? Is there any data on that?

0:36:53 Lindsey: Yeah, so the, like, the year after this review came out published a resolution, which I'll give the link to, um, a resolution on the physical school discipline of children, and they recommended alternatives to spanking that focus on respectful communication with your child, collaborative conflict revolution, and parental modeling, so like modeling, you know, effective ways to cope with with situations and to and to behave. So like this includes things like reasoning with your childhood when they're old enough, obviously, um, anxiety about a dangerous action can be effective, so if instead of hitting your kid when they're doing something dangerous, you you sort of go, "No, stop," and then you say, like, "Look, look, this is a really dangerous thing. You're freaking me out. You need to stop." That can be effective. They mentioned taking away privileges, timeouts combined with parental guidance on what the kid can do differently next time, as well as using praise to reinforce good alternative behaviors. So that's a consistent thing to give the kid an alternative way to behave and then to reinforce that. So those are some things that they recommended.

0:37:40 Thomas: Yeah yeah so If they have the fork and the socket, you do like a hotter, warmer, colder, like as they get away from the socket, like yay buddy, yeah, you know, but

0:37:59 Tom: Soft.

0:38:02 Lindsey: Yeah, you give them some fettuccine and then they'll do that with the fork.

0:38:04 Thomas: I will tell you, as a firm user of timeouts, uh, timeout, don't want to fuck with timeout, timeouts are really effective, you in a in a household, in a safe household where you know you don't beat your children, that's like the worst thing they experience, so for them, the are super high on a timeout and it's very effective. Yeah

0:38:09 Lindsey: Mm-hmm, mm -hmm.

0:38:17 Eli: Yeah, we A of positive reinforcement, and we also do something called bedtime sweet talk, which I learned from Happiest Toddler on the Block and also How Toddlers Thrive, which is, at night, as counterintuitive as it seems, um, talking about the bad behavior, you praise how quickly they calmed down, how well they handled that emotion uh so we we do that, which, let me tell you, as someone who writes roast comedy for a living, is very difficult for me to be like, "Hey buddy, when you absolutely lost your shit because you could not eat more blueberries today," um, that was good, I liked that, it was great for me, but yeah, no, that that's what we use, Lindsey.

0:38:38 Thomas: Yeah we do that yeah yeah

0:38:38 Lindsey: Yes. Yes. Yeah.

0:39:02 Eli: I have another question, um, of the things that comes up and I grew up with this, there's a lot of the, if you don't spank your kids you're not manly, and more importantly, if you spank your kid your child will be effeminate or soft, right?

0:39:02 Thomas: We wow

0:39:19 Tom: Yeah, yeah.

0:39:18 Thomas: Okay, Just butting in, I love the idea that physically using physical force on a defenseless tiny thing is the manly thing to do, like, also, do you kick your dogs and cats around just because otherwise I'm not a man, man, I'm a fucking pansy. If I don't kick my cat out the window.

0:39:33 Eli: Yeah

0:39:37 Lindsey: Yeah, I mean, if by, your kid isn't going to be manly if you don't spank them, or they're going to be soft, you mean they will be less aggressive. I guess that's true, according to this research.

0:39:46 Eli: I mean obviously I don't agree with this, but I was wondering if there was any like data study

0:39:51 Lindsey: That, I means, that's not one of the, yeah, It's not of the objections that they were addressing in the stuff that I read. Um,

0:39:53 Thomas: Well, that's a values judgment, you know, like, oh,

0:39:59 Eli: Non-spanked kid, I grew up very, very much in the environment of like, Eli is go, several people told my father, Eli is going to be soft and spoiled because you don't spank him.

0:40:10 Thomas: Oh I can, but I can give a great counter to that because as as a child, I was spanked and I was a complete wimp. So, you know. It didn't help me when I was little.

0:40:12 Lindsey: Okay. Yeah.

0:40:19 Eli: Right.

0:40:22 Lindsey: I but actually think so, now that you phrase it that way, I think it goes back to the to the idea that like spanking is is effective as a form of discipline. And again, when they've done studies where you sort of compare these forms of discipline, that's not really borne out, that it's especially effective. It looks like these other forms are also effective. Yeah.

0:40:30 Eli: Right.

0:40:39 Tom: If you think about like, you know, the idea of like spanking your kid to toughen them up, like a lot of that, that sort of toughening up stuff, stuff, it's like, it's not to callous their ass, it's to toughen them up emotionally, like, not so much, but everything that you've described is the outcome, actually makes kids less emotionally resilient. It makes them like more emotionally involved. Like, it doesn't, there's nothing tough about somebody who has like of the shit you just mentioned, Lindsey.

0:40:50 Lindsey: Yeah. Right. Yeah.

0:41:05 Tom: Like, those, like, people are not emotionally tough at all. See?

0:41:08 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:41:08 Thomas: Exactly. Because you could, another way you could describe it is the consequences of spanking that Lindsay's outlined in the scientific paper is of it is toxic masculinity, like toxic masculine traits. And so if your question is, but my kid won't be a toxic male if I don't spank them, it's sort of like, well, yeah, you're right. Like if you want to create a toxic mail, somebody who is emotionally stunted, doesn't communicate well about, you know, immorally, all that stuff you described. Yeah, go ahead and hit them if you're trying to create a toxic male, that will be the best way to do that.

0:41:08 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:41:24 Lindsey: No. That's true or At least a very good way. I'm sure there's lots of ways to do that, but yeah.

0:41:40 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:41:42 Eli: Scientifically proven way. Ooh, our first sponsor. Spanking.

0:41:43 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:41:46 Thomas: Again, Jordan Peterson is our first I

0:41:47 Tom: I just, I just blast the Joe Rogan podcast that the kids while they're sleeping is hoping it'll subtly kind of do that work for me.

0:41:52 Thomas: Know

0:41:52 Eli: That's definitely abuse. Do they wake up with bad science ideas? Looking like their skin is full of marbles.

0:41:54 Lindsey: Most

0:41:58 Thomas: Know

0:42:00 Tom: No

0:42:01 Lindsey: There haven't been experimental studies on whether spanking harms kids, but there have been a number of interventions studies in which parents' use of physical punishment happens to be reduced by a treatment and then child outcomes are measured. So for instance, there was a 2020 study in which they randomly assigned families to combinations of three types of interventions that were designed to improve children's behavior problems.

So spanking was not the experimental variable here, but it was one of the intervention outcomes that they examined, and they found that the intervention did lead to reductions in physical punishment and improvements in children's behavior problems, and that the improvement in the behavior problems was partially accounted for, or explained by the fact that the parents were using spanking less. You know, it's not a true experiment, but those kinds of demonstrations are compelling.

I alluded to earlier, if you can't do an experiment, the second strategy to rule out third variables is to control for those variables statistically. So you can measure potential confounding factors and account for their effects in your analysis, and see if you still get an effect of spanking. Studies that have used this strategy have indicated that spanking emerges as a unique predictor of problems after controlling for potential confounds.

And another option, and the couple of studies that were talked about here were really interesting, another option is to match your participants on potential confounding variables, and thus create groups that are as equivalent as possible, but for the use of spankings.

So if I'm concerned, for instance, that child age or gender or baseline behavior problems might all be plausible alternative causes of the apparent relationship between spanking and outcomes, I could match each of the children in my spanking group with a control child of the same age, gender, and baseline behavior problems who is not spanked. And that way, if there are differences between the children and their match controls, I can make a stronger case that that difference is because of spanking.

So in this 2018 study, they did exactly this. They matched two groups of children, one group who were spanked, the second who had never been spanked, on 38 dimensions that were were potentially relevant. So they match them on child demographic characteristics, and initial teacher ratings and behavior problems, they match parents' demographics and mental health, family income, language,

0:44:01 Lindsey: Region, right, is,

0:44:01 Thomas: That that's that's a ton of dimensions, I feel like you'd run out of dimension, uh, they wear a wristwatch, they have long pants versus short pants, like. Like, I

0:44:04 Lindsey: Yeah, Right. 38 dimensions, it's, it is like, it gets it, gets like exponentially I

0:44:09 Tom: Yeah. Well,

0:44:12 Thomas: Just want to say, I don't have 38 dimensions. Like I have as a person, like 10, 10, 12.

0:44:16 Lindsey: Got like 10. Yeah, yeah. Um, is very impressive, though, because it gets exponentially harder to create these match controls as you add variables that you're matching on. So 38, like this is intense. And they found that the children in the spanked group, so there was almost 10,000 children in that group, were more likely to have teacher reports of behavior problems one and two years later, after baseline measurements, than their match controls who had never been spanked, which was about 2,500 kids. A similar study in 2017 included more than 29,000 children who were matched on 28 variables, and also found that spanked children exhibited more behavior problems than their match controls who had never been spanked.

So again, these studies aren't truly experimental, but this strategy of intentionally matching samples on plausible confounds really can get you a lot of the benefits that normally we get from random assignment and experiments. And it can justify stronger causal inferences in conjunction with all of the other things we've talked about so far. Are those, are the five criteria, and so that's, that's the basis upon which the authors make the recommendation that the APA officially say spanking is not good, don't spank your kids, do other things.

0:44:18 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Yeah.

0:45:22 Lindsey: Not

0:45:23 Thomas: I at least in recent memory, in recent years, are really fucking careful. So like, everything Lindsay's saying, I think that if you were talking in conversation, it, you'd be like, yeah, fucking obviously this does this because of this, look at the data, you fucking idiot, but scientists can't do that, they got to be like, all right, since we can't put one child in a glass thing that doesn't get spanked and another child in another glass thing yeah like not

0:45:48 Eli: Yeah. There

0:45:47 Tom: Not since the 80s we can't do that since the eighties. Oh,

0:45:49 Lindsey: Since the 80s I'm

0:45:49 Thomas: Exactly we apparently did that up until. Since we can't do that perfect experiment that then teases apart a direct connection, these five criteria you're talking about are all about trying to demonstrate that through other means. And it seems incredibly convincing to me that all of those criteria point toward, yeah, actually, if we could do that experiment, we would likely find with, it seems to me, that average children who are spanked, keeping everything else equal, will demonstrate these really bad possible side effects, right?

0:46:21 Lindsey: Glad you said it that way, because it's, it, like, it does say a lot for somebody to, on the basis of non-experimental evidence, say, nope, we've got, got enough evidence to conclude a causal relationship here. It's very, it's very unusual. I, you know, the most salient example is like lung cancer and smoking, right, obviously that's, that causal connection is not based on experimental data, but the strength of the evidence they got through these other means was so compelling that they're like, yeah, smoking causes lung cancer, so this is like that. Yep.

0:46:30 Thomas: Right wow Um, don't spank your kids is a good firm policy standpoint.

0:46:52 Lindsey: Mm.

0:46:52 Tom: I See, I didn't get that from that, did you get, did I, you guys got, don't, I, I made different notes. What

0:46:54 Thomas: Okay if you want to create a Jordan Peterson kid, then, yeah, okay, spank your kid, I guess. But if you're not an asshole and you don't want to create an asshole, don't speak your kids. Yes.

0:47:04 Lindsey: -hmm Yeah, actually, if we go back to that list, it does sound like it describes Jordan Peterson pretty well. Doesn't it. Yeah.

0:47:12 Thomas: Totally. That's what

0:47:12 Eli: We go, we found it, everybody. Yeah.

0:47:16 Lindsey: Cracked it.

0:47:17 Tom: If it's a mythic spanking, though. Yeah.

0:47:21 Thomas: All Yeah, what if it's an archetype of spanking? Yeah.

0:47:24 Eli: Are you spanking me with Thor's hammer?

0:47:25 Thomas: Yeah

0:47:24 Tom: Right, yeah. It's like a Youngian spanking, then.

0:47:31 Thomas: Yeah.

0:47:27 Eli: Yes. What if I dream I'm getting spanked by my mom, Lindsay?

0:47:36 Thomas: What, have I spank you with a raw slab of meat? You know, just, just the all meat spanking, no veggies in that spanking. All right, Lindsey, thanks so, so much for science, explaining to us why we shouldn't hit our kids, which was fucking obvious, but just in case 80% of the country apparently thinks that's okay, it's not a good idea. Thank you so much, Dr. Lindsay Osterman.

0:47:57 Lindsey: You, this is very fun.

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