Chris Ferguson writes:
There are good and honest arguments for why parents might choose other discipline strategies aside from spanking.Unfortunately, these were not arguments the APA made in the voted resolution.In a recent meta-analysis I conducted with several colleagues, we found that the effects of spanking on child aggression were so weak that they were best interpreted as negligible.Indeed, depending on how one looks at the data, it’s possible to make it look like spanking has either tiny negative or tiny positive impacts on children’s behavior.
Not all scholars agree with our assessment to be sure. . . . But the larger issue is not the tendency to pick sides in this debate, but that the APA is pretending that no debate exists at all.
I looked into this topic a little bit a few years ago, and my layman’s sense lined up with what Ferguson writes.