Spanking had a dozen names.
A swat. A pop. A spanking. Getting the belt, getting the switch, getting it when they got home.
The language changed house to house, but the thing itself was the same, and in most American families raising kids in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, it wasn’t questioned any more than putting a kid to bed at eight o’clock.
Parents did it because their parents had done it. Their parents had done it because it worked, or seemed to, because the kid stopped doing the thing they weren’t supposed to be doing. That was the whole proof. The behavior stopped, so the method worked.
Then researchers started asking a different question. Not whether the behavior stopped in the moment, but what happened to the child over the next five, ten, twenty years. And the answer, once enough data had piled up, changed everything.
It was everywhere, and it was ordinary
The wooden spoon in the kitchen drawer. The belt hanging on the back of a closet door. The phrase wait till your father gets home, which every kid understood wasn’t about a conversation.
This wasn’t behind closed doors. Teachers could do it. Principals did it. Neighbors could swat someone else’s kid, and the kid’s mother would thank them for it.
Spanking wasn’t a parenting philosophy; it was just how kids got corrected. Parents used it the way they used the same recipe for meatloaf their mother made. It was inherited, not chosen.
A research team at the University of Minnesota measured how common it was using data from 16,390 parents across twenty-five consecutive years, all of them age 35 with children between two and twelve.
In 1993, half of those parents were spanking their kids at least several times a year. Among parents of the youngest children, ages two to four, it was closer to six in ten.
That’s not a fringe behavior. That’s a majority. And it held for both mothers and fathers.
From the parents’ side, it felt proportionate. The kid did something wrong, the kid got a consequence they’d remember, and it was over. Fast, clear, done. No twenty-minute conversation about feelings.
A correction, delivered and received, and everybody moved on with the evening.
Except the research says they didn’t all move on the same way.
Fifty years of research found the same answer
Elizabeth Gershoff, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, and Andrew Grogan-Kaylor at the University of Michigan pulled together fifty years of spanking research: 160,000 children across 111 different findings. They wanted to settle the question once: Does spanking work?
It didn’t.
Thirteen of the seventeen outcomes they measured came back in the same direction, and it was the wrong one. Children who were spanked more often were more aggressive over time, not less.
More defiant, not more obedient. More likely to develop mental health problems and more likely to struggle with thinking and learning.
Every single significant finding pointed the same way. Not a mixed picture. Not some kids helped, and some kids hurt. All of it worse.
The reason, once you hear it, is hard to unhear. A parent spanks because they want to teach the child something: don’t do that. But a small child’s brain doesn’t sort the experience that neatly.
What it registers first is that the biggest, safest person in their world just caused them pain on purpose.
The lesson the parent intended, that behavior is wrong, gets buried under a louder message: the people who love me will hurt me when I make a mistake.
And that message doesn’t go away when the child grows up. Adults who were spanked more as children showed more anti-social behavior and more mental health difficulties. The pattern held across decades of data, across different countries, across every study design the researchers examined.
It’s the kind of finding that makes people defensive, and understandably so, because most people who were spanked turned out fine by any reasonable measure.
The researchers aren’t saying otherwise. What the data shows is a shift in probability, not a ruling on any one family. Across 160,000 children, the trend pointed in one direction every time.
The researchers put it in one sentence: spanking does the opposite of what parents want it to do.
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A majority practice became a minority practice in one generation
By 2017, the same survey that had found half of parents spanking in 1993 found the number had dropped to about a third. For parents of the youngest kids, it went from six in ten to fewer than four in ten.
A straight, steady, twenty-five-year decline.
In 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the largest professional organization for children’s doctors in the country, updated its official position.
In 1998 they’d said parents should be “discouraged” from spanking. Twenty years later, they dropped the hedging entirely. The new position was plain: don’t spank, don’t hit, don’t slap. Use other methods.
What made millions of parents change wasn’t one study or one policy statement. It was that the information reached them from every direction at once, from their pediatricians, from parenting books, from each other.
A parent in 2015 heard something a parent in 1985 never had the chance to hear: that the tool they grew up with doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, and the science on that point isn’t close.
For a lot of parents in the middle of this shift, Gen X and older millennials who were spanked as kids and chose not to spank their own, the decision came with a specific kind of discomfort.
It meant looking at what their parents did and deciding not to repeat it, without being able to say their parents were bad people for doing it.
Both things had to be true at the same time, and that’s a harder place to stand than either one alone.
The generation that used it most wasn’t doing something they invented
Boomer parents who spanked their kids were doing what their own parents did, and what every pediatrician, teacher, and advice columnist of their era endorsed.
There was no meta-analysis in 1978. There was no AAP statement saying stop. There was a wooden spoon, a child who wouldn’t listen, and an entire culture confirming that this was the right response.
Calling it wrong in hindsight is easy and not entirely fair. What’s more accurate is that the evidence didn’t exist yet, and when it arrived, the culture moved.
Not overnight, not in a clean break, but steadily enough that a practice most parents were using in 1993 became a practice most parents had stopped by 2017.
Most people, hearing that the thing they trusted was doing damage, don’t want to believe it. The parents who believed it anyway and changed course are the reason the numbers moved.
And the ones who didn’t change aren’t villains. They trusted what every generation before them had trusted, and the evidence that would have stopped them hadn’t arrived yet.
