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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (193064)

7/3/2012 11:52:52 AM

From: koan

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 541933

Maybe-g:

articles.cnn.com

In Sweden, a generation of kids who've never been spanked
CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

November 09, 2011|By Jamie Gumbrecht, CNN

Hillary Adams: My father is in denial

Ian Swanson was 5 when his family moved from the United States to Umeå, a small university town in northern Sweden. It was the place where he made his first friends, where he learned to read and where, like any kid, he was "into absolutely everything."

He occasionally got a spanking from mom, or a swat on the rear and a stern look from his dad. But he remembers one day when his kindergarten teacher, school principal and a social worker came to their home. They worried Ian wasn't fitting in; they wanted to talk about the "abuse."

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Swanson remembers translating for his parents, who were still learning the language, too: "'You have to understand, things are different here.'"

In 1979, a few years before the Swanson family arrived, Sweden became the first country to ban physical punishment of children.

Since then, 30 more countries have passed bans on corporal punishment at home, and even more have banned it in schools, according to the Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children. Just last month, Togo confirmed to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child that parts of its children's code are meant to ban physical punishment.

See a country-by-country breakdown of corporal punishment bans

No countries in North America ban physical punishment by parents, but there's a perennial debate about the line between discipline and abuse, and who's allowed to administer it. It flared again last week after millions watched a seven-minute YouTube video from 2004 that showed a Texas judge cursing at his teen daughter and beating her with a belt.

While there are laws against child abuse, it's legal in all 50 states for parents to hit their children, and for schools in 19 states to physically punish kids. About 80% of American parents said they've hit their young children, and about 100,000 kids are paddled in U.S. schools every year, researchers said.

Effects of physical discipline linger for adults

Kids are still hit with hands, belts, switches and paddles, said Elizabeth Gershoff , an associate professor of human development and family sciences at University of Texas, despite research that shows it doesn't model or teach behavior parents are looking for, that it damages trust between parent and children and that it can lead to increased aggression.

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