Copyright © 1997, Dorian Scott Cole 

I never was a violent type person - if there was a non-violent way to get things done, that's the way I usually chose. You can attract more bees with honey. Gentle persuasion. Attitude change. Yep, if I didn't know better I would think of myself as a bleeding-heart wimp.¹ I vowed, "When I have kids, I'm not going to spank them. I'm going to sit down with them and reason with them. They're going to love me and be my friend, and because of that they will do what is right, so I won't ever have to spank them." Yep. I may have been reacting to a harsh father who had to stomp around endlessly in the jungles and kill other soldiers (WW2), and who then applied corporal punishment liberally and without concern. 

I took a walk in the woods the other day. I had a mission - find a mother bear and give her a good talking-to. So I found a mother bear and her two little cubs. Full of innocence and cute as buttons, one cub had a white mark over her eye. The cubs were playing in the fall leaves and having a great time. Then one of them bit the other, and the other let out a howl of pain. Mother bear ignored them. I twisted this way and that, hardly able to contain myself. That little bear needed a good talking-to about biting. But the two bears continued rolling and playing. In fact they were so preoccupied with themselves that they rolled right into Mama bear. Slightly ruffled, she glanced at them, but again ignored them. But the one little cub took a notion to bite mama bear. That did it - she smacked that cub with her great paw and he went rolling. She glowered at him and growled. He looked back at her and cowered down, and slunk away. 

Now was my time. I said, "Look here, mother bear, don't you know you're going to do permanent damage to that precious little cub?" She looked at me with a quizzical expression that seemed to say, "What are you, some kind of nut?" I continued with my well prepared sermon. "Why you're damaging that cub's sense of self-esteem. He's going to grow up and be a failure - he'll never excell at anything." That was not happy news. She growled at me. "And you're teaching that child violence. When he grows up he'll be a bully and hurt the other little woodland creatures." Outraged, she stood on her rear legs and glowered down at me. I continued, "This little cub will probably end up hurting an innocent tourist and he will be banned from the park - may even have to be destroyed because he will turn into a psychopath who can't be stopped." Mama bear had listened to all she could take. I ran for my life, knowing from Mama bear's fury that I had effectively made my point. Yep, somebody has to take it upon themselves to get out there and talk to those bears - they can't possibly do it right all by themselves.

So years later I returned to the woods to see the next generation of bears. After hours of looking I finally spotted a bear with a white mark over her eye. She was a proud mother now with cubs of her own. Her little cubs rolled and played, and once in a while nudged her, and she ignored them. Then one of them bit her and she smacked it, and it went rolling and cowered down and slunk away. Then the great brown head turned toward me and looked to see if I was going to say anything. I was busy reflecting on what I had seen. A squirrel scampered by her, temporarily getting her attention. She watched it, and I thought I saw her smile - but bears don't smile. Finally she snorted and plopped her humongous body back to its warm resting place. 

My father raised five children. We were all basically well mannered and usually didn't even come close to deserving the spankings we got. None of us grew up to have a violent nature or to have any violent tendencies for resolving problems. In fact, we all grew up thinking we wouldn't spank our kids. One sibling had children who never did anything wrong. My kids were born with "born to raise hell" tattood on their knuckles. I prayed they could be diagnosed as "hyperactive" so they could be sedated. :) No such luck. I tried desparately to reason with them. Ever try to talk to a two-year-old who is just learning he can say no? My kids never had a rational day in their lives - the only reasoning they could understand was finding ways to get what they wanted. They enjoyed arguing about what they wanted more than getting it - that put an end to rational discussions. All my intentions and all my radical theories about child-raising were shot down in the first three years of life. None of the books on parenting were written about my kids - they weren't the off-the-shelf variety. I developed a lot of ways to punish kids, including spanking. Once in a while punishment actually worked, but mostly what worked over their child-rearing years was they finally learned the message - no matter how it was delivered. 

In fact, when I looked around I saw that only a few parents had children that were easy to work with. So I found a strong correlation: psychologists who write books on child-rearing have wonderful kids. So we can conclude from that correlation that they are absolutely right about child-rearing, as evidenced by their nearly perfect kids.

Correlation studies are very interesting. Some doctor recently did a two-year study on mothers who do and don't spank their children. He found a correlation - children who are spanked have more problems two years later. So he smiles proudly and announces that we shouldn't spank kids. We can believe this because he is a doctor, and he did a study, right? 

Over 80% of parents in the US spank their kids. Are they taking out their frustrations on their kids, or just repeating what was done to them? Most of us seem to remember that spanking stopped us in our tracks and we ceased doing the activity that really upset some other person. This after being told and set in a chair and sent outside and anything else a parent could think to do to intervene. We all seem to be somewhat unstoppable at times, and spanking is a last resort that works. It's kind of a low-level shock treatement - it momentarily adjusts our attitude and makes an impression on us that we don't forget. 

On the one hand, there are children who never seem to do much wrong and never need an attitude adjustment. On the other are kids belonging to about 80% of parents who need an occassional attitude adjustment - and have those same tendencies even later regardless of whether they are spanked or not. Or we can mindlessly accept the supposed implications of correlation studies that seem to be done by people with a bias to prove. Correlation studies are not the proof of theories - they simply indicate whether it is worth taking a look to find the actual causes of the correlation.

¹I'm neither liberal nor conservative, and I hate tags. I am staunchly moderate and typically very opposed to extreme positions, believing they are usually gross exaggerations, bad science, or represent extreme bias.

Story Ideas

¤ An executive in the health-food industry is about to see his business go under because of improved health brought about by the medical field. He feels that prescription medicine is ultimately harmful and that people should use a "natural" approach. He decides to embark on a path of social engineering - change people's beliefs and improve the world. So he hires a "doctor" to do a correlation study on a medicine used for heart attach patients compared to patients who take his health-food tablet. The study concludes that eight percent of those on the prescription medicine die within three years. But of those on his health-food tablet, only three percent die within three years. There is absolutely no way that he can say that the medicine prevents heart attacks or death. However, he can cite the study without talking about medicine. People go off their prescription medicine and flock to his health resorts and to health stores to get the tablet. Statistics accumulate very slowly.

One woman loses her husband to heart failure, then learns from his physician that the executive's study is probably bogus and that it was extremely dangerous for him to go off his medication. She makes it her personal campaign to stop this insanity. She demands to see the study - which he has no legal reason to supply. She tries the legal approach with no success. In the meantime, statistics are growing that heart failure is on the rise - cause unknown. Finally she breaks into the executive's office and finds the study results. She uncovers that the group of people used for the study using the health food was in fact nothing more than results of a questionaire packed with the bottles of health food tablets. The survey had no accuracy whatsoever. The "doctor" who had been hired to do the correlation study has his doctorate in English, and has simply reported known statistics from government sources for the medication, and reported the results of the survey. The executive then took the results and reported them to suit his own purpose. 

Legally she can't take any action. But she copies the study and mails the results to a major network. After an investigation, the network runs a complete expose. The biased executive carelessly misinterpreted the survey results, then prayed on other's bias about natural alternatives to medications. As a result, hundreds of people died who might have lived another ten to thirty years with proper medical treatment. The expose goes on to explain that a correlation study doesn't even mean that one thing causes another. Even if the results were true, the reduced death rate in those taking the health food tablet might have been because those people are more health conscious and watch their diet better. Biased people make studies and statistics say what they want them to say.

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