ANN ARBOR—Children who get high levels of intellectual stimulation at home, such as books and educational games, had parents who rarely used physical punishment, a new University of Michigan study indicates.

The study, which also suggested that it’s easier to predict the incidence of corporal punishment than to predict its frequency of use, appears in the January issue of Family Relations.

Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, assistant professor in U-M’s School of Social Work, and Melanie Otis, associate professor at the College of Social Work, University of Kentucky, used data from the 2000 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Their sample, which included 800 respondents, examined the number of spankings in the past week, the ages of the child and mother, the mother’s education, religion and economic status.

Many family characteristics, such as the mother’s education and age, were not associated with parental use of spanking. With regard to religion, Protestant parents were most likely to use corporal punishment.

The neighborhood, geographic region or economic status of a family showed no relationship with spanking.

Among the other findings, the probability of spanking decreased by 0.25 percent for every month the child aged, resulting in at least a 3 percent reduction in the probability of corporal punishment would be used for every additional year in children’s age.

The overall findings suggest “that corporal punishment may be part of a parenting style with lesser amounts of positive parenting practices,” Grogan-Kaylor said.

“To reduce the use of physical punishment, it may be beneficial to focus on interventions that teach parents to increase the amount of intellectual stimulation in the home,” he said.

These findings are consistent with earlier published research conducted by Grogan-Kaylor, suggesting that increases in intellectual stimulation are associated with lower levels of behavior problems in children.

Grogan-Kaylor said using the NLSY data had some limitations, such as the fact that the NLSY does not measure the severity when corporal punishment is applied and that the respondents?not the researchers?defined spanking.

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