PARENTING PLUS:When is a slap not a real slap and just a 'tap', asks DAVID COLEMAN
DO YOU still smack your child? The most applicable recent figures I could find were from a 2008 Northern Ireland report jointly produced by Barnardos NI, the Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People and the NSPCC NI. That survey showed that 47 per cent of parents said they had used “minor” physical punishment with their children.
So, to generalise from this survey, assuming that it is representative enough, about half of all children in Ireland probably still get hit by adults or are at risk of being hit by adults.
I know that supporters of slapping believe that a short, sharp smack, delivered in the context of a loving parent-child relationship can be an effective deterrent to certain serious misbehaviour. They might argue that it doesn’t overly hurt the child but does clearly let the child know that their behaviour was unacceptable.
These beliefs are based on tried and trusted behavioural theory that by applying a negative (or aversive) consequence for a behaviour, you will make it less likely to happen again.
In other words, your child should learn not to do the “bold” behaviour in order to avoid being slapped.
However, research has shown that children themselves think that smacking should stop and perceive physical discipline as something painful that happens when parents are angry and stressed. So it seems that children associate smacking with parental mood, not with their own misbehaviour.
It also follows that children, because of the role-modelling they have experienced from their parents, will in fact learn that when they get cross and/or stressed they can hit out.
This is because that is what they are seeing their parents do.
Even if they don’t learn to generalise that use of violence to other situations they will probably grow up to become parents who smack their own children. Indeed, they may quote another classic line from parents who smack, which is “I was smacked as a child; I probably deserved it and it never did me any harm” (except to perpetuate the idea that hitting children is in some way okay or justifiable).
Some parents will justify slapping their child by explaining that they “only give him a tap”. Perhaps these parents are trying to explain that they are reasonable people who don’t intend to hurt their children and certainly aren’t beating them. Indeed, this is probably true of most parents.
Unfortunately, according to the behavioural theory that underpins slapping, if you only “tap” your child it won’t have any effect. You have to slap them hard enough for it to be aversive, in other words it has to hurt enough that they will want to avoid being slapped in future.
So let’s be clear, nobody is just “tapping” their child, they are smacking or slapping with enough force to hurt.
The relative force with which parents will slap also varies over time. Unfortunately, what will usually happen is that the slapping will either increase in frequency or intensity. This occurs because, like all consequences, when slapping is used for a while it loses its effectiveness.
Once this happens parents have just two choices; they either stop using it (because it no longer seems to work) or they have to make the punishment more severe or more punitive in order for it to breach that threshold where their children pay enough attention to the punishment to avoid misbehaving.
There is a real danger here for children. The escalation in severity or frequency of slapping doesn’t happen in most families (most just give up on it), but the fact that it does happen in some is an issue that we, as a society, need to take some action on.