Corporal Punishment

A Texas appellate court recently considered the acceptability of corporal punishment in the context of a termination of parental rights case. In the course of the opinion, the court surveyed some statistics and academic writing on the acceptability of corporal punishment. The verdict: corporal punishment is down but not out.

For example, in 1962, fifty‑nine percent of parents used spanking as the "main disciplinary method," whereas by 1993, that figure had dropped to nineteen percent, with thirty‑eight percent of parents preferring time‑outs and twenty‑eight percent favoring lecturing. In 1968, ninety‑four percent of U.S. adults agreed with the statement that it is "sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good hard spanking," yet by 1992, only sixty‑six percent agreed with this statement.

Deana Pollard, Banning Child Corporal Punishment, 77 Tul. L. Rev. 575, 582 (2003).

The opinion is a good resource if you need to collect authority for either side of the corporal punishment debate. Most surprising to me was a 1992 survey of Ohio doctors showing that 70% of family doctors and 59% of pediatricians still support spanking.

Thanks to a post on the Family Law Prof Blog for alerting me to this opinion.