Entries for June 2008

As a science writer, I'm used to dissecting a medical study in order to figure out if the results are strong enough and reliable enough to use to make decisions about healthcare. I'm no genius; I'm just following the big push in the past decade to test the value of commonly used medical treatments, a trend called "evidence-based medicine." I'm also following the time-honored journalistic practice of obsessively picking at facts, trying to figure out what's most true and what might be useful to people facing life decisions.

I'm a parent, too, so it seemed only natural to start wondering if it would be possible to have "evidence-based parenting," a subject I recently wrote about in an article on eight ways where even the best-intentioned parents go wrong. Why not use the scientific process of randomized clinical trials to test what "treatments" are best when it comes to raising children? I'm short on grandmotherly advice; my grandmothers are long gone, and my mom lives 3,000 miles away. I'd love to know if timeout really works, or if I'm just mucking things up. At the very least, some solid data might help me navigate through the parenting books section on Amazon, which is awash in bestsellers promising to produce a model child by snack time, all with precious little information as to what forms the foundation of that advice. A reality check.

I figured that spanking was long ago proved bad for kids, case closed. Yow, was I wrong!

An interview I posted last week with pediatrician Lawrence Diller, in which he said that firmer discipline—including, in some cases, spanking—might keep kids from being medicated for ADHD, sparked passionate comment, both for and against spanking. And a piece on spanking that I wrote for a larger article on evidence-based discipline methods also has generated a lot of heat. Where I live in suburban Washington, D.C., you'd think that spanking had been eradicated from family life. But preschool teachers tell me that's not so; parents just don't talk about it. I asked Murray Straus, a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire and probably the world's expert on spanking research, to tell me what he thinks is going on.

I thought nobody spanked small kids anymore. Yet your studies say that the vast majority of parents are spanking.
This is something that is experienced by over 80 percent of toddlers. It's dropped a little bit over the years but very little. There's more corporal punishment in the South, but the difference isn't that big. The only conclusion you can come to is that everyone hits toddlers.

Over the years I've talked with Lawrence Diller, a behavioral pediatrician in Walnut Creek, Calif., about how society deals with children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He often prescribes Ritalin for children with ADHD, but he also thinks that Ritalin is prescribed too often. He seems like a thoughtful, reasonable guy. So imagine my surprise when I saw an article by Diller in which he asked: "Could it be that America would rather give unruly kids a pill than a swat?" Spanking instead of Ritalin? Wow. So I called him and asked what's up. Excerpts:

Spanking is probably the most controversial issue in child rearing. You treat children with ADHD. What on earth compelled you to write that spanking may not be so bad?
I was provoked. About a year ago, a California assemblywoman from the South Bay put out a proposal to make the spanking of children 3 years old and under criminal. I thought, please, please! The reason it gets to me is that in 30 years of practice as a developmental pediatrician, issues of discipline cause 80 percent of the problems that I see. The families that are struggling with children's behavior are also struggling with spanking. Often, they've taken a vow of abstinence. They figure if spanking is bad, then all forms of conflict are bad, and they hesitate to discipline their children. They wait too long before taking effective action. This doesn't have to be spanking; it could be removal of a toy or imposition of a timeout. I am talking about middle-class, upper-middle-class families that love their kids, that have the resources for their kids.

For parents whose chubby teenagers need to lose weight, here are two odd bits of advice: Don't say they're fat and don't tell them to diet.

That well-meaning advice can backfire, with teenagers ending up heavier than before. This new insight, reported in the June Pediatrics, comes as many schools have turned to notifying parents on report cards that their children are overweight.