How Often Should You Beat Your Child?

An article in Time magazine this week confirms what many parents already know: Spanking your kid is a good way to get him to stop being such a pussy. Even better, it will teach her not to be such a damn smart aleck. So writes Alice Park:

Of the nearly 2,500 youngsters in the [Tulane University] study, those who were spanked more frequently at age 3 were more likely to be aggressive by age 5. The research supports earlier work on the pitfalls of corporal punishment, including a study by Duke University researchers that revealed that infants who were spanked at 12 months scored lower on cognitive tests at age 3.

What’s great about this is that it really gets into specifics. Want to make your kid half as docile and wussy-ish? Just beat him every couple of weeks, says lead researcher Catherine Taylor: “The odds of a child being more aggressive at age 5 if he had been spanked more than twice in the month before the study began increased by 50%,” she says. Alas, she does not go on to say whether weekly beatings make the kid 75 percent more aggressive, or if daily spankings might bring the figure asymptotically close to 100 percent.

Nor does the article state whether further research is under way to see if whippings with a leather belt improve a child’s understanding of the “my house, my rules” principle, or if telling them they were “an accident, and that’s why Daddy drinks” will encourage them to cut their hair and get a goddamn job.