A sociologist and professor at New Hampshire University and co-director of the family affairs research laboratory, Murray Straus, is also known as a specialist in the study of corporal punishment in raising children, said the following:
“All parents want their children to be well-educated and intelligent. Our research in this area leads to the fact that if you do not apply a force to children and correct their behavior with more humane methods, their mental abilities will increase noticeably. ”
The scientist believes that these studies will have a beneficial effect on children all over the world if their parents listen to him. The sociologist urges psychologists to pay attention to his research and advise parents to avoid corporal punishment. Ostrich believes that this should be the leading goal among practicing psychologists and teachers.
The findings of the scientist are based on 2 main groups of statistical studies. He conducted the very first study with his colleague Malley Parshal, a senior fellow at the Pacific Institute of Analytics and Research. They examined 800 children from 2 to 4 years and 700 children from 5 to 9 years. Their parents were asked about the use of corporal punishment in raising children, and the children themselves were tested using special methods for determining IQ in children. All tests were repeated after 4 years. As it turned out, the growth of IQ was mainly observed in those children who are not slapped by their parents. And this statistics was observed in all age groups.
The development of intelligence in children is directly dependent on how often they are beaten. The more often corporal punishment occurred, the slower his intellectual abilities developed. But even relatively rare punishments with beatings lead to a perceptible difference in the development of children.
This statistic applies not only to American children, this trend is observed around the world. Professor Ostrich compared the data on IQ in 32 countries with data on the frequency of forceful punishment of children by parents. All the data were collected by his colleagues from the respective national universities, who asked almost 18,000 students that they were beaten or not in childhood or adolescence. With the help of all this data, the Ostrich has built a dependency that speaks for itself. This trend is especially evident in families where children continue to be beaten even during adolescence. The greater the percentage of such families in the country, the lower the level of IQ among citizens.