The Herald is running a week-long series on the smacking debate. On Saturday we looked at changing smacking habits, today we cover parents' stories. To tell us your stories, go to the Your Views discussion. Or you can follow the debate on our facebook page.
'Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?'
This question is about to be put to nearly three million New Zealand voters. But what has become known simply as the smacking referendum reaches much deeper into the way children are raised and treated here. Both sides of the smacking debate agree that our record is shameful.
* * * YES * * *
The case for banning smacking is that it is a further step towards a less violent society.
Barnardos advocate Deborah Morris-Travers told a "Yes" vote meeting this week: "One of the key things we need to do to reduce child abuse is to change attitudes about physical punishment, so this [law change] is one step on a very important journey that the nation has embarked upon."
My Wilkstedt, a psychology student who wrote a 2005 masters thesis comparing Swedish and New Zealand childrearing, argues that Sweden's 1979 ban on physical punishment has been part of a general cultural change.
Fifty years ago, in a study of children born in the 1950s, 60 per cent of Swedish mothers smacked their 4-year-old children at least once a week. By 2000, a comparable study found that only 1 per cent had ever smacked their children.
Wilkstedt says the law change was accompanied by "a vast educational campaign". "Information about the law was printed on milk cartons, and all households received a brochure with the title, 'Can you bring up children successfully without smacking or spanking?"'
Parent education is free and used by 98 per cent of parents through local pre-natal centres providing midwifery services and group classes before and after birth. Sweden's high school curriculum includes compulsory education on child development, infant care, parenting styles, sex and the law.
Parents who are not coping, often because of mental health or addiction problems, are offered two to six months with their children in a supported home with staff who observe the problems and try to help. The net result is that relatively few Swedish children die from maltreatment every year - only six children in every million in Sweden compared with 13 in New Zealand in a 2003 Unicef study. Sweden was seventh-best, behind Spain, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Norway and the Netherlands.
Smacking advocates note that at the time only Norway of the top six had banned physical punishment, suggesting that the ban had no effect on child abuse.
Former Children's Commissioner Ian Hassall points to health researcher Richard Wilkinson's work for the broader picture. In a new book, The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and co-author Kate Pickett trace many social problems, from violence to teen pregnancies, to a single cause: inequality.
The British writers note that humans have lived in everything from extremely unequal "dominance hierarchies" to very egalitarian societies.
But beyond a certain point - among the world's richest 23 countries with at least three million people, a club New Zealand still squeaks into in 21st place.
The top three countries on Unicef's list for child wellbeing (Sweden, the Netherlands and Finland) are also among the most equal countries measured by the ratio of incomes of the richest fifth to the poorest fifth of households.
The four countries with the lowest child wellbeing (Britain, New Zealand, Israel and the US) are also among the most unequal.
The same relationship shows up clearly for teen births, with higher birth rates in the most unequal countries.
The figures for violence are less convincing - Sweden recorded almost 20 suspected homicides a year for every million people in the three years to 2000, compared with only 11 in New Zealand. But Wilkinson and Pickett still trace a general upward trend in homicides with rising inequality.
They believe low wellbeing in rich countries stems from the stress of living in hierarchical societies. Constant worry about our relative wealth, power and status affects our physical and mental health, educational achievements and lifestyles.
On this basis, Hassall's "Anglo-Saxon tradition" of harsh parenting merely reflects the stress of inequality. The Anglo nations - the US, Britain, Australia and New Zealand - are all among the seven most unequal developed countries.
The implication is that better parenting would spring from an economic and cultural shift towards a more equal and co-operative, less harsh, society.
Banning physical punishment, in Morris-Travers' words, is only "one step" on the cultural side of that journey.
* * * NO * * *
The case against making smacking a criminal offence is that, far from ushering in a non-violent society, it actually undermines parents' abilities to shape their children into loving and productive citizens. Otago University law professor Rex Ahdar says the idea that banning smacking can somehow advance a more equal and co-operative society is a "socialist utopian view" that is divorced from reality. "Hierarchical and unequal cultures are a sociological fact of life," he says. "Non-violence is another utopian chimera."
Tim Sisarich, NZ director of the Focus on the Family agency, believes parental discipline is fundamental in moulding good citizens.
"The word 'discipline' comes from the word 'disciple'," he says. "The job of a parent is to raise good kids, to disciple them to become great adults."
That "discipling" is first and foremost about setting a good example - "living a life that is reflecting good morals, good attitudes to society".
But a good parent cannot flinch from guiding a child back on to the right path when they stray. "So it's disciplining," Sisarich says. "Sometimes disciplining is not comfortable."
US researcher Robert Larzelere has raised serious doubts about the effect of the 1979 ban in Sweden, noting that aggravated assaults on Swedish children almost quadrupled in the decade to 1994, although he agrees that actual deaths from child abuse were low both before and after the ban.
Focus on the Family, founded by US pediatrician James Dobson, promotes a full range of disiciplinary techniques including time out, removing privileges, allowing "natural consequences" such as hunger for a child who won't eat dinner, and "logical consequences" such as paying for the cost of damages.
But it believes parents also need the back-up of smacking when a child defies softer discipline.
"Spankings should be reserved for the moment a child (between 18 months to 10 years of age) expresses to parents a defiant, 'I will not!' or 'You shut up!'," writes Dobson. "You have drawn a line in the dirt and the child has deliberately flopped his bony little toe across it. Who is going to win? Who has the most courage? If you do not conclusively answer these questions for your strong-willed children, they will precipitate other battles to ask them again and again."
Dobson supports smacking only in a context of love, where the smack is followed by a hug and a talk.
"At that moment you can talk heart-to-heart," he writes. "You can tell him how much you love him and how important he is to you. You can explain why he was disciplined and how he can avoid the difficulty next time. This kind of communication is often impossible with other disciplinary measures."
Larzelere has marshalled numerous studies showing that the later-life outcomes for children subjected to "non-abusive" smacking like this are no worse than, and in some cases better than, children who were not smacked.
New Zealand's two long-term studies, of children born in Dunedin in 1972-73 and in Christchurch in 1977, have found the same nil effect.
A 2006 report on the Dunedin study by psychologist Jane Millichamp found that children who were smacked lightly with an open hand on the hand, bottom or leg had "similar or even slightly better outcomes" than those who were not smacked in terms of school achievement, aggression, substance abuse and adult convictions.
Christchurch study director David Fergusson wrote in 1998 that his study found "no evidence that those exposed to occasional physical punishment by their parents were at any greater or lesser risk of adjustment problems than those whose parents did not use physical punishment". The same studies have found that real physical abuse of children stems from stresses such as relationship conflict, poverty and addictions.
As Fergusson put it: "Young people reporting high exposure to physical punishment tended to come from socially disadvantaged family backgrounds that were characterised by multiple sources of adversity that spanned parental divorce or separation, high levels of parental conflict, parental illicit drug usage, alcohol problems, criminality, depressed living standards and high levels of exposure to [stress]."
Bob McCoskrie's Family First advocates tackling these problems through "family relationship centres" for parenting advice and marriage enrichment courses, reforming tax and welfare systems to encourage parents to stay together, and giving tax breaks to parents who stay home with their kids to match the childcare subsidies paid to parents in paid work.
"This particular law change ... had that feel-good factor. It felt like we were doing something. But we knew it was not going to make any difference until we were willing to get honest about the real causes," says McCoskrie.
