Spanking - tompaine2016/demographics GitHub Wiki
Charts - Univ. Chicago General Social Survey Data
And though the sample size makes it irresponsible to chart by year, non-whites and non-blacks (e.g. Asians, Native Americans, etc.) are, on average, 5 percentage points less likely than whites to approve of spanking.
Republicans are more likely than either Democrats or independents to favor spanking. And that gap has become wider over time. Since 2008, 65 percent of self-identified Democrats have been in favor of spanking, while 80 percent of Republicans have been.
There’s some overlap here, obviously. There are a lot of Republicans in the South, for example, so saying the South favors spanking and Republicans favor spanking is somewhat redundant. But all of the differences in these charts hold, even when controlling for the variables in the other charts. That is, put each of these variables into a regression, and it shows that the differences are real — the South, for example, isn’t more pro-spanking than the Northeast simply because there are more Republicans in the South.
Gershoff Report, 2008
- Report on Physical Punishment in the United States: What Research Tells Us About Its Effects on Children by Elizabeth T. Gershoff, PhD. (2008) http://www.phoenixchildrens.org/sites/default/files/PDFs/principles_and_practices-of_effective_discipline.pdf
Hitting by Parents
Several recent studies reveal that the majority of parents in the United States continue to physically punish their children. Nearly two-thirds of parents of very young children (1- and 2-year-olds) reported using physical punishment. By the time children reach 5 grade, 80 percent have been physically punished. By high school, 85 percent of adolescents report that they have been physically punished, with 51 percent reporting that they have been hit with a belt or similar object.
Hitting by School Employees
Prevalence rates in the states that allow physical punishment average less than 1 percent of all students but there is variability among the states. Mississippi has by far the highest rate at 9.1 percent of all schoolchildren (45,197 students), which means that 1 in 11 of all K-12 students in Mississippi experienced physical punishment in the 2002-2003 year.
Texas reported the largest absolute number of students who were subject to physical punishment at 57,817, but this large number constitutes a prevalence rate of only 1.4 percent because Texas has a large population of students. The Office for Civil Rights also reports that African American students were 2.5 times more likely than White students and 6.5 times more likely than Hispanic students to receive physical punishment; boys were 3.4 times more likely than girls to receive physical punishment.
In a 2005 poll, only 23 percent of adult respondents believed that teachers should be permitted to spank children in school; in other words, 77 percent of Americans disapprove of school physical punishment.
Gershoff Report, 2011
- Longitudinal Links Between Spanking and Children’s Externalizing Behaviors in a National Sample of White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian American Families by Elizabeth T. Gershoff, Jennifer E. Lansford, Holly R. Sexton, Pamela Davis-Keanand, and Arnold J. Sameroff http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01732.x/abstract
The majority of mothers in the ECLS–K sample (80%) reported at the kindergarten wave that they had used spanking at some point with their children, with some variation by race/ethnic group: 89% of Blacks, 79% of Whites, 80% of Hispanics, and 73% of Asians reported that they had ever spanked their child.
Trends
In the 1960s, 94 percent of adults were in favor of physical punishment. According to the General Social Surveys (GSS), by 1986 84 percent of American adults agreed that children sometimes need a “good hard spanking.” In the latest GSS completed in 2004, the percentage had dropped to 71.3 percent of surveyed Americans as agreeing or strongly agreeing with that 15 statement.
Projection based on a decay of 4.8% per decade, sampled from 1960 to 2010.
ABCNews Poll (2014)
- http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=90406
- http://themedicalblog.net/2014/09/18/poll-most-approve-of-spanking-kids/
Sixty-five percent of Americans approve of spanking children, a rate that has been steady since 1990. But just 26 percent say grade-school teachers should be allowed to spank kids at school; 72 percent say it shouldn't be permitted, including eight in 10 parents of grade-schoolers. Indeed, even among adults who spank their own child, 67 percent say grade-school teachers should not be permitted to spank children at school.
Among parents with minor children at home, 50 percent report that they sometimes spank their child, while 45 percent do not. That's about the same as it was in a Gallup poll a decade ago.
There are big regional differences in spanking. Among Southerners, 62 percent of parents spank their kids; that drops to 41 percent in the rest of the country. Similarly, 73 percent of Southerners approve of spanking children, compared to 60 percent elsewhere.
Spanking Study (2013)
- Spanking and Child Development Across the First Decade of Life by Michael J. MacKenzie, Eric Nicklas, Jane Waldfogel, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2013/10/16/peds.2013-1227
- http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/early/2013/10/16/peds.2013-1227.full.pdf
Overall, 57% of mothers and 40% of fathers engaged in spanking when children were age 3, and 52% of mothers and 33% of fathers engaged in spanking at age 5.
Spanking remains a typical rearing experience for American children.
Hitting in Texas
- The Demographics of Corporal Punishment in Texasby Stephanie Phillips, B.S., M.Ed. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc115140/m2/1/high_res_d/dissertation.pdf
