Comment by jasonwatkinspdx
8 hours ago
We have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general, and very harmful for kids.
As someone that was on the receiving end of that kind of violence due to growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical family, I will not mince words: the view you have expressed is pure evil. I simplly cannot imagine the mentality that kids need to be physically tortured to learn how to behave.
>We have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general, and very harmful for kids.
This is false. The evidence is not overwhelming; it's actually extremely poor quality. And the research question is one of the most difficult to resolve in social science. I wrote on this here: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-academic-literature-on-sma.... See also this guy: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=2HtqmZ0AAA...
There will never be proper studies with control groups to test exactly how harmful beating children is, so this is an unrealistic standard to expect. Given this context, the person you're responding to is correct: we have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general and very harmful for children.
The point isn't just that we can do RCTs. The point is that the methods used are not even adequate on their own terms. Just as one example, the standard method with longitudinal data would be to throw in individual fixed effects. But they don't do that. Another example: I know of no serious cross-country panel analysis with (say) time and country fixed effects to examine the effect of national spanking bans. There is a cross-country cross-sectional analysis, which is just not adequate to draw any conclusions.
Even if the methods were the best possible given the difficulties, you wouldn't then say this was "overwhelming" evidence. You'd say "the best evidence we've got" and you'd then assume that parents don't know nothing and exercise a bit of humility. (Though to be fair, that argument does not generalise to the Singapore decision-making authorities! Maybe they don't have any deep local knowledge that should lead us to trust their judgment.)
You might not have noticed what you've done here, but you've not only agreed to corporal punishment for children but also for harsher corporal punishment for criminals across the board. Read the whole conversation chain and reflect on how bad the optics are. There is a reason why your stance is unpopular.
"Spanking looks like an 8/10 on the subjective harmful scale, but actually on the objective harmful scale its closer to a 3/10. We must rectify the bad reputation of spanking!" is not the type of motivation that should drive pedagogy research.
If you're saying we should pretend that spanking is worse than (we currently know) it is, then I don't agree.
I haven't said anything about corporal punishment for criminals, and I don't know of any evidence for or against it - that strikes me as a very different argument, partly because the level of violence is likely to be much greater.
Yeah my bad. I was the getting bullied side of students, but the current punishments are something that should be ended.