June 28, 2011
A new survey finds that 30 percent of North Carolina mothers of children less than two years old say they have spanked their children in the last year.In addition, 5 percent of North Carolina mothers of three-month-old babies say they have spanked their very young children. More than 70 percent of mothers of 23-month-old children say they have done so, too.

“We were pretty surprised by the staggeringly high rate of spanking,” said Adam Zolotor, MD, MPH, lead author of the study, assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine and a core faculty member of the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center. “We need to do a better job as a society teaching parents how to teach their kids what they need to learn without fear, pain, or coercion.”

Dr. Desmond Runyan

Dr. Desmond Runyan

The study, published June 24, 2011 by Frontiers in Child and Neurodevelopmental Psychiatry, an open-access online journal, was co-authored by Desmond K. Runyan, MD, MPH, clinical professor of epidemiology in UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. Runyan also is professor of social medicine and of pediatrics in the UNC School of Medicine.

In the study, a total of 2,946 mothers of children born in North Carolina between Oct. 1, 2005, and July 31, 2007, completed the anonymous telephone survey. The survey was conducted from Oct. 1, 2007, to April 7, 2008, at UNC’s Survey Research Unit.

“The very young children who are the focus of this study are not developmentally sophisticated enough for willful misbehavior,” Zolotor said. “Family physicians, pediatricians and parent educators must start much earlier at helping parents understand child behavior and develop disciple strategies.

“The cost to society is huge,” Zolotor said. “We know that spanking has been associated with child abuse victimization, poor self-esteem, impaired parent-child relationships, and child and adult mental health, substance abuse, and behavioral consequences.”

Co-authors of the study, in addition to Runyan, are Ronald G. Barr, MDCM (Doctor of Medicine), of the University of British Columbia’s Child and Family Research Institute, in Vancouver; and T. Walker Robinson, MD, MPH, and Robert A. Murphy, PhD, both of Duke University Medical Center.

 

UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: Ramona DuBose, director of communications, (919) 966-7467 or ramona_dubose@unc.edu.

 

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