New research called Portraits of American Life is underway, and it involves interviews of 2,600 people and their adolescent children every three years for the next 20 years. Dr. Marjorie Gunnoe is working with the first wave of data on the teens. It turns out that almost a quarter of these teens report they were never spanked. Gunnoe discovered a shocker in the data: those who’d been spanked just when they were young—ages 2 to 6—were doing a little better as teenagers than those who’d never been spanked. On almost every measure. A separate group of teens had been spanked until they were in elementary school. Their last spanking had been between the ages of 7 and 11. These teens didn’t turn out badly, either. Compared with the never-spanked, they were slightly worse off on negative outcomes, but a little better off on the good outcomes. Only the teenagers who were still being spanked clearly showed problems.
Source: Newsweek
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/nurtureshock/archive/2009/12/30/never-been-spanked.aspx
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