Effects of Spanking May Differ by Race

White children more likely to have problems from discipline at young age

Most parenting experts agree that spanking isn't the most effective form of discipline, yet many parents still engage in this practice. Will it harm their children?

That may depend on their race.

A study first published last year in the journal Pediatrics found that white children who were spanked before they turned 2 were more likely to develop behavior problems by the time they were school-aged than were Hispanic or black children who had received spankings at a young age.

"White non-Hispanic children who were spanked at least once during a particular week were twice as likely as kids who hadn't been spanked to have behavior problems four years later that were significant enough to require a parent-teacher meeting, and 1.4 times as likely to be rated by a parent as having severe behavior problems," Eric Slade, the study's lead author and an assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told HealthDay .

The researchers did not find a similar association for black or Hispanic children who were spanked before they were 2 years old.

The American Academy of Pediatrics' official stance is that parents should never spank. The group's Web site describes spanking as the least effective form of discipline, saying that it teaches youngsters that it's OK to use violence when you're angry.

But because many parents still use spanking as a discipline tool, the researchers indicated, they embarked on the study to learn if frequent spanking as a toddler leads to behavior problems.

"We thought it could be riskier for young children to be spanked because children under 2 have a more limited ability to understand punishment and a limited ability to comply with a parent's request," Slade said. Toddlers are still developing their sense of security, he said, and being spanked could affect how secure a child feels in his or her world.

Slade and his colleagues looked at data on nearly 2,000 children who had participated in a national study that began when they were under 2 years old. Most -- 1,023 -- of the youngsters were white, 548 were black and 395 were Hispanic.

Almost 50 percent of the black mothers, 35.6 percent of white mothers and 31.8 percent of Hispanic mothers had spanked their child in the week before the study began.

For most children, these spankings did not cause behavior problems later in life.

Except in white children. White children who received more than five spankings in a week had a 4.2-fold increased risk of behavior problems bad enough to initiate a parent-teacher conference when they were in elementary school, compared with youngsters who were not spanked.

The study's findings weren't surprising, Julie Rinaldi, a child psychologist at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago , told HealthDay .