Spanking and Learned Helplessness

Today's crash course in psychology is learned helplessness. You'll see how this relates to my story of being spanked in a moment, just bear with me. Phase one: let's say I take a rat and put it in a cage with a metal plate, and following a warning buzzer, the rat receives an electric shock. At first the rat will try to do all kinds of things to try and prevent the shock once it learns the buzzer indicates it's coming, but none of these work. Eventually, the rat stops trying. It has learned that their is no relationship/contingency between what it does and receiving the shock. Phase two: I then put the rat on a metal plate in a new cage. On the other side of the cage is a safe, insulated plate. Cue buzzing followed by the electric shock. Shockingly (pun intended) the rat will not even try moving to the insulated plate. It will sit there and take the abuse. The rat has learned to be helpless! It's a very unhealthy state both physically and psychologically, but I digress.

Spanking seemed to be a logical follow up to my last post, Punishment & Reinforcement. For some reason, I hadn't mentioned spanking be a part of my early memories, but it was and deserves a post all to itself. To clarify, I consider spanking to be swatting a child's behind only with your hand, and not to the point they are bruised or can't sit comfortably. NM's mother only ever used her hand I heard, although she could make you "not sit for a week" and NM frequently reminded us how she wasn't being as harsh as my grandmother was to her, as if we were supposed to be grateful. There were also threats of spanking us like Grandma used to do it back in the day. (Yes, I say us a lot because E-Sis and I experienced these things together).

Now, don't get me wrong. I actually thinking spanking as I have described it has a time and place. I think anything that goes beyond what I described crosses over into physical abuse. When do I think spanking as I have defined it is all right? When, after exhausting all other options, a young child continues to attempt behavior that could maim and/or kill them. Do they keep prying the safety plugs out of the electrical outlets and trying to stick things in them? Do they keep squirming away and trying to run into traffic? Are they constantly finding ways to unlock the door and trying to climb on the balcony railing? When all other methods have failed, I see no reason not to give them a few swats on the butt with the palm of your hand. It's better than them getting hit by car! Much like vaccinations, it hurts but you aren't doing it to specifically hurt them.You aren't doing it angry and you should never punish in anger. You are honestly doing it to help protect them. So when used sparingly and for appropriate reasons, the relationship/contingency between the child's behavior and the punishment is clear to the child and shouldn't scar them for life.

This was not how my NM used spanking. Spanking probably continued until around age eight, and I think at least once she followed through with doing it "like Grandma used to do". This began at an extremely young age for various infractions such as fighting or making or mess, and so on. The most common of course being not picking up our rooms. The fact of the matter though is at the age all this began, it was ridiculous to expect us to be able to, without help, supervision, or even any motivating reward, pick up our rooms. I shouldn't have to say this, but to be clear, not being punished is not a reward! We were developmentally incapable of doing this on our own when she began demanding it and we were too young to possibly do so out of intrinsic motivation. It was completely wrong of her to expect this from us without providing support to accomplish the task. Sadly, many parents punish children for failing to do things that they literally cannot do at their age.

Now because we would be spanked for a variety of reasons, we could not see clear relationship/contingency between our behavior and the outcome. For example, times when we did manage to pick up our rooms, but were spanked later for something else (or the other way around), it contributed to obscuring the relationship/contingency. We didn't understand that different behaviors that elicited the same punishment weren't actually related to each other because we were too young to for that kind of reasoning. So what did we learn? We learned helplessness, basically, and we carried that forward as we got older. We learned that our behavior could not change or prevent NM from spanking us. This made us even less motivated or interested in doing what she wanted, because in our minds we were just going to spanked regardless. Due to these early experiences, messy room problems became an ongoing theme of our struggles with NM. Anyway, instead of doing what she wanted we did things like trying to hide from NM or padding our underwear with tissue! Of course she would always start counting down, and we knew if she got to "three" before we came out (or if she found our padding) there would be hell to pay.

So NM would spank us, we would cry, and she would feel better. Her anger was assuaged. Still no help or supervision would be offered afterwards to get our rooms picked up, and they would remain as they were until the next round. Eventually we stopped caring and stopped crying. When she realized spanking no longer caused us to react (never mind it have never taught us the behavior she desired, either) she switched to grounding us. But that is a tale for next time!