"Plus, if you're just spanking, you haven't taught your child anything."

Pretty much tells you all you need to know about the worthlessness of this 'study.'

Someone actually paid for this tripe? My IQ has not changed from a young kid to my current 40+ age (otherwise it is not a reliable test eh?). I got my fair share of lickings as a kid. And even avoided some I rightfully deserved.

This type of nonsense makes a mockery of "true" science.

This is pretty easy to figure out. The order of events needs to be reversed. The kids with the lower IQ's never learned the lessons their parents were trying to teach them and therefore ended up getting more spankings.

Spanking didn't lower IQ. A low IQ led to more spankings.

which when administered properly, is NEVER a result of loss of control.

Posted by President_Friedman

2009-09-25 14:12:31

That is the key right there, administered properly. It shouldnt be done out of anger, and it should be accompanied by the reason for, a teaching moment. Otherwise it is just hitting kids and from their perpspective for no purpose.

"It shouldnt be done out of anger…

I suspect you were trying to articulate something on the order of "it shouldn't be done when strong emotions such as anger, might cause you to lose control". And that's a valid point.

But "shouldn't be done out of anger"? Anger at a child's behaviour is precisely one of the reasons you might choose to administer corporal punishment to a child. There are other motives, to be sure, but anger is definitely a valid reason to spank. Part of my point here is that angry does not necessarily mean out of control. Most normal people have learned how to be angry without losing control of themselves.

Putting myself in the place of a child, I would have much less complaint about a spanking which I received because I teed my parent off, than one which apparently came out of the blue, on an emotional level, detached from any emotional component.

Think of it as an emotional "teachable moment" as opposed to an intellectual "teachable moment".

My sister and I both got spanked. I got spanked more, and I turned out much better off. My sister had an average GPA, never finished any degree of college schooling, had one child out of wedlock with a man who dumped her, and finally straightened herself out. According to this study, she should be me.

Depends on what you spank, I guess. Supposedly it can lead to blindness and hair on your palms, too.

Huh…

I remember a whole slew of IQ studies from the 80's and 90's in which anything less than a 10 point difference was declared statistically insignificant. (Course those studies were comparing the average IQ between various races and different countries of the world…)

I do know from my studies of IQ and the tests used to measure it one can have a 2.8 point difference ON THE EXACT SAME TEST taken just ONE DAY LATTER just because of what they ate the second day. (Hell you can get a ten to twenty point fluctuation in people over the course of a year.)

I also seem to remember that most psychologists worth their salt consider administering IQ tests to children under ten to be an effort in futility.

They have to have had these same discussions, so how exactly do two nitwits justify this crap?

Oh, right it serves the liberal agenda.

I remember a whole slew of IQ studies from the 80's and 90's in which anything less than a 10 point difference was declared statistically insignificant. (Course those studies were comparing the average IQ between various races and different countries of the world…)

That's not the half of it. In the wonderful squishy world of psychometrics, there isn't even any agreement among the experts as to what IQ is, or if it can be measured in any meaningful way at all. Most IQ instruments are heavily weighted towards measures of verbal performance, which ultimately rest on the test-takers strength of vocabulary and syntax. Even the non-verbal portions of tests such as the Stanford-Binet, or the WISC/WAIS are so heavily culturally bound that it is difficult to make the case that you're actually measuring something called IQ which exists independent of the cultural context of the test-taker and the test-giver – you may indeed be measuring how well or poorly the individual taking the test has learned the psycho-social norms of the society instead.

From a strictly statistical perspective the whole story can be boiled down to this one quote:

Those findings are plausible and make some sense, Briggs said, but she added that it’s difficult to tease out all the other factors that could play a role in IQ scores — including poverty and parental education.

It's the bane of every statistically based study – proving that variable A was the sole or primary determinant of outcome B when there are other variables present. You can only do so much with multiple linear regression studies before the data show their inherent weakness in proving your point. In designing tests, people are supposed to work in some meaningful parallel studies of the reliability of the data and the validity of the conclusions reached. But this quickly becomes impossible when there are dozens of potential variables at play with varying degrees of relatedness to the process under study, and each with it's own challenges in mensuration.

BTW, these statistical problems are a major failing in many of the climate studies released over the last 10 years – a marked inability to isolate the impact of the independent variable of choice, namely CO2. They end up settling for a simple correlation of the independent variable(s) and the dependent variable(s). And as we all should know, correlation does not mean causation. It is entirely plausible that two variables exist together frequently without there being any causative relationship between them, e.g. virtually all heroin addicts chewed gum at one time or another, but chewing gum does not cause heroin addiction.