Spanking kids is like a wheel

Call me old-fashioned but sometimes I just think that when something isn't broke you don't fix it. In this case I'm talking about spanking a child.

A recent article by Murray Straus, a professor of sociology and co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire claims to have found a correlation between spanking children and lowering IQ's. According to a study done, the IQ's of children that get spanked are lower than kids that don't get spanked.

The biggest point of the article, that is barely touched upon, is the fact that the drop in IQ is 2.8 points. So in other words, nothing.

But if you read the article you would think the drop was 20 points. Which in itself is stupid. In fact I find it to be ridiculous polispeak to advance a liberal lifestyle agenda.

I agree that no child should be abused. But there is a massive differnce among the majority of parents in the world in regard to a spanking versus abuse. Unless of course you agree with the philosophy that a child should never be touched. The article comes close to saying a parent doesn't even have the ability to discipline a child without subcombing to abuse. Again I disagree.

First off, let's think for a moment. For millenia upon millenia children in every part of the world have been spanked. And mankind was able to advance from cavemen to astronauts. Obviously the 2.8 point in IQ didn't hurt us as a species. And I don't think that Beethoven, Einstein, Mozart, Bill Gates, Da Vinci, Plato, Stephen Hawking, and billions of others over the history of man suffered from being spanked a couple of times in their lives.

But what if we look at it from a differnt point of view. The children in the study lost 2.8 points of IQ. What did they gain? How many points of real life "street smarts" or common sense did they get? There seems to be no study or gauge for that, but I know it's far more important. And kids today seem to be severely lacking that far more than a couple of points of book smarts.

In fact, the study admits briefly that they don't know if any other factor might have caused the loss in IQ. Things like poverty, inadequate schools, societal factors, bad diets and on and on. So stating that a spanking is the root of evil is dumb.

Is spanking a child bad? The only answer is that it depends on the parent. A bad parent doesn't need to touch a child to screw up their lives. And a good parent can spank a deserving child without destroying their life; in fact they may benefit the child. Any other observation is just an attempt to persuade people into acting in a manner that someone else thinks is a good idea - basically an experiment.

Personally I hate it when I hear of studies like this. Because the findings are useless, but the goal seems to be the reshaping of society. It's studies like this that suddenly have Seasame Street being labled as too adult and detrimental for children. It's studies like this that say that television can raise your kids. It's studies like this that help create, I believe, kids that are so screwed up and lack enough knowledge to survive in the world thus becoming Columbine wakos.

Abusing kids is bad. It should not be tolerated. But spanking a child is something no one enjoyed and billions have benefited from over tens of thousands of years. And just like the wheel it's not broken, so we shouldn't try to fix it.