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There’s a new study out this week in which researchers claim physically punishing kids – hitting, shoving, grabbing or pushing them – leads to an increased likelihood of mental illness later in life.

It’s the latest shot in the “should you or shouldn’t you” debate over spanking, a parental controversy that has gotten increasingly emotional in the United States.

In this new research, published in the journal “Pediatrics,” a group of Canadian academics analyzed data collected from nearly 35,000 adult Americans who reported whether they were physically disciplined as children. Among those adults who reported harsh physical discipline – but not abuse – conditions such as depression, anxiety disorders and alcohol dependency were between 2 and 5 percent more common than among those who did not experience harsh corporal punishment; more complex psychiatric illnesses were 4 to 7 percent more common...


And overall, the study didn’t delve into a phenomenon that authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman explore in their influential book “NurtureShock:” That it’s not necessarily the fact of the spanking that matters, but how the spanking is done.

Bronson and Merryman looked at cross-ethnic and international research into spanking and found that when a culture views spanking as normal, then spanking does not cause later harm.