Discipline and Deviance: Physical Punishment of Children and Violence and Other Crime in Adulthood

This paper presents a theoretical model of the antecedents and consequences of the use of physical punishment by parents and teachers and preliminary tests of that theory using data from a variety of sources, most notably the 3,300 children and 6,000 couples in the National Family Violence Survey. Over 90 percent of American parents use physical punishment to correct misbehavior. The findings support the theory that although physical punishment may produce conformity in the immediate situation, in the longer run it tends to increase the probability of deviance, including delinquency in adolescence and violent crime inside and outside the family as an adult. However, since the findings are based on cross sectional studies, experimental studies are needed to test the causal nature of the relationships. If the results of such experiments support the theory, important implications emerge for both individual parents and national policy. For individual parents, the theory suggests that parents who use no physical punishment will, on the average, have better behaved children. At the national policy level, the theory suggests that one of the steps needed to achieve a society with a minimum of crime and violence is for parents to avoid all use of physical punishment.