Hugs, Not Hits: Warmth and Spanking as Predictors of Child Social Competence

• Author: Inna Altschul,Elizabeth T. Gershoff,Shawna J. Lee
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12306
• Published date: 01 June 2016
• Date: 01 June 2016

I A University of Denver

S J. L University of Michigan∗

E T. G University of Texas at Austin∗∗

Hugs, Not Hits: Warmth and Spanking as Predictors

of Child Social Competence

Many parents believe that spanking is an

effective way to promote children’s positive

behavior, yet few studies have examined spank-

ing and the development of social competence.

Using information from 3,279 families with

young children who participated in a longitu-

dinal study of urban families, this study tested

competing hypotheses regardingwhether mater-

nal spanking or maternal warmth predicted

increased social competence and decreased

child aggression over time and which parent

behavior was a stronger predictor of these

changes. The frequency of maternal spanking

was unrelated to maternal warmth. Findings

from cross-lagged path models indicated that

spanking was not associated with children’s

social competence, but spanking predicted

increases in child aggression. Conversely,

maternal warmth predicted children’s greater

Graduate School of Social Work, Universityof Denver,

2148 S. High St., Denver, CO 80208.

∗School of Social Work and Research Center for Group

Dynamics and Institute for Social Research, University of

Michigan, 1080 S. UniversityAve., Ann Arbor, MI 48109

(shawnal@umich.edu).

∗∗Department of Human Development and Family Sciences

and Population Research Center, University of Texas at

Austin, 108 E. Dean Keeton St., Stop A2702, Austin, TX

78712.

Key Words: aggression, antisocial behavior, child disci-

pline/guidance, early childhood, FragileFamilies and Child

Wellbeing (FFCW), mother–childrelations.

social competence but was not associated with

aggression. Warmth was a signicantly stronger

predictor of children’s social competence than

spanking, suggesting that warmth may be a

more effective way to promote children’s social

competence than spanking.

Decades of research have found links between

parents’ use of spanking, or “the use of physical

force with the intention of causing a child to

experience pain, but not injury, for the purpose

of correcting or controlling a child’s behav-

ior” (Donnelly & Straus, 2005, p. 3), and an

increased likelihood of negative outcomes for

children (Ferguson, 2013; Gershoff, 2002). The

child outcomes most often linked with spanking

are aggression and antisocial behavior, and sev-

eral large, longitudinal studies have now linked

early spanking with increases in children’s

aggression or antisocial behavior over time,

including from age 1 to age 2 in the Early Head

Start Research and Evaluation Project (Berlin

et al., 2009); from age 1 to ages 3, 5, and 9 in

several studies using the Fragile Families and

Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS; Gromoske &

Maguire-Jack, 2012; Lee, Altschul, & Gershoff,

2013, 2015; MacKenzie, Nicklas, Waldfo-

gel, & Brooks-Gunn, 2013; Maguire-Jack,

Gromoske, & Berger, 2012); from kinder-

garten to third grade in the Early Childhood

Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort

1998–1999 (ECLS-K; Gershoff, Lansford,

Sexton, Davis-Kean, & Sameroff, 2012); and

Journal of Marriage and Family 78 (June 2016): 695–714 695

DOI:10.1111/jomf.12306

696 Journal of Marriage and Family

from kindergarten to middle school in the Child

Development Project and the Pitt Mother–Child

Project (Lansford et al., 2011). Spanking is

thought to increase antisocial behavior because

it models aggression (Bandura, 1973), inter-

feres with internal attributions for appropriate

behavior, and does not teach children why

their behavior was wrong or what alternative

behaviors are appropriate (Gershoff, 2013). The

consistency of ndings has led professional

organizations, such as the American Academy

of Pediatrics (1998) and the American Academy

of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (2012), to

recommend that parents avoid spanking their

children in favor of other forms of discipline.

Despite the negative child outcomes asso-

ciated with spanking, some academics have

defended spanking as an effective means of

discipline (Baumrind, Larzelere, & Cowan,

2002; Larzelere & Kuhn, 2005), and a signif-

icant proportion of U.S. parents regularly use

spanking to discipline children. One FFCWS

study showed that about one third of children are

spanked as infants (Maguire-Jack et al., 2012),

similar to the rate of spanking of 1-year-olds

observed in a nationally representative sample

of parents (Straus & Stewart, 1999). Use of

spanking increases as children age. One study of

nearly 3,000 mothers in North Carolina showed

that 70% of mothers self-reported that they

had spanked their 2-year-old children (Zolotor,

Robinson, Runyan, Barr, & Murphy, 2011). In

another FFCWS study that examined spanking

by mothers and fathers, 44% of 3-year-olds

had been spanked two times or more in the

past month (Lee, Taylor, Altschul, & Rice,

2013). Spanking peaks at about age 3 (Holden,

Coleman, & Schmidt, 1995), and by age 10

more than 80% of children have been spanked at

least once by a parent (Straus & Stewart, 1999;

Vittrup & Holden, 2010).

Why do parents persist in spanking when

the advice of both researchers and practitioners

converges on the conclusion that it is potentially

harmful to children? One key reason is that

parents believe spanking is an effective means

of promoting better behavior in their children.

In one large study, 25% of respondents endorsed

the belief that spanking improved child behavior,

and 22% indicated that other forms of disci-

pline were not as effective as spanking (Taylor,

Al-Hiyari, Lee, Priebe, & Guerrero, 2015).

Parents’ agreement with social norms that

endorse the use of spanking is another strong

predictor of spanking behavior (Taylor, Hamvas,

Rice, Newman, & DeJong, 2011) and, as a result,

social norms and beliefs that spanking is effec-

tive often trump science. In particular, parents

who spank their children believe it is effective

in promoting desirable child behavior, such as

social competence (Vittrup & Holden, 2010).

How might spanking promote children’s

social competence? Spanking is a form of pun-

ishment that associates a negative stimulus (e.g.,

physical pain) with an undesirable behavior

in order to reduce its recurrence (Hineline &

Rosales-Ruiz, 2012). If parents accompany the

spanking with a message about what socially

competent behavior they would like to see

instead (e.g., taking turns with a sibling’s

toy), spanking may make the child’s positive

behavior more likely. Given that most parents

have the goal of increasing their children’s

social competence through parental discipline,

whether spanking predicts social competence is

an important question for research.

The majority of research on spanking has

focused on undesirable child outcomes such

as aggression or antisocial behavior (Gershoff,

2002). Little attention has been paid to whether

spanking promotes desirable child behaviors

and, if so, whether use of spanking accomplishes

this better than, or at least equally well as, other

parenting behaviors. In this study we sought to

address this gap by comparing spanking and

maternal warmth as predictors of change in both

child aggression and child social competence.

We chose to contrast spanking as a predictor

of child behavior with maternal warmth because

theories of parenting have long argued that

warmth promotes positive child development

but physically controlling behavior does not

(Maccoby & Martin, 1983). Maternal warmth

includes behaviors such as affection, positive

reinforcement, and verbal responsiveness to

the child (Rohner, 2004), and these behaviors

were selected for comparison with spanking

given prior research ndings showing that

warmth promotes the creation of trust and reci-

procity between parents and children and the

development of children’s social competence

(Darling & Steinberg, 1993; Grolnick & Farkas,

2002; Maccoby & Martin, 1983; Parpal &

Maccoby, 1985). This sense of shared trust is

thought to promote children’s prosocial behav-

ior because of children’s desire to reciprocate

with their parent. Indeed, maternal warmth has

been associated with fewer oppositional child