spare the ears; spoil the child?

That's the clever editor-chosen sub-title in the article by Hilary Stout of the NY Times as reprinted in the C-J...

Many in today's soccer-cheering, organic-snack-proffering generation of parents would never spank their children. We congratulate our toddlers for blowing their nose (“Good job!”), we befriend our teenagers (literally and virtually), we spend hours teaching our elementary-schoolers how to understand their feelings. But, incongruously and with regularity, this is a generation that yells.

“I've worked with thousands of parents and I can tell you, without question, that screaming is the new spanking,” said Amy McCready, the founder of Positive Parenting Solutions..."As parents understand that it's not socially acceptable to spank children, they are at a loss for what they can do. They resort to reminding, nagging, timeout, counting 1-2-3 and quickly realize that those strategies don't work to change behavior. In the absence of tools that really work, they feel frustrated and angry and raise their voice. They feel guilty afterward, and the whole cycle begins again.”

Numerous studies exist on the effect of corporal punishment on children....But there is far less data on the more common habit of shouting and screaming in families.

One study that did take a look at the topic — a paper on the “psychological aggression by American parents” published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2003 — found that parental yelling was a near-universal occurrence. Of 991 families interviewed, in 88 percent of them a parent acknowledged shouting, screaming or yelling at the kids at least once (though it didn't specify how many did it more often) in the previous year....

Psychologists and psychiatrists generally say yelling should be avoided. It's at best ineffective (the more you do it the more the child tunes it out) and at worse damaging to a child's sense of well-being and self-esteem.

“It isn't the yelling per se that's going to make a difference, it's how the yelling is interpreted,” said Ronald P. Rohner, director of the Ronald and Nancy Rohner Center for the Study of Interpersonal Acceptance and Rejection at the University of Connecticut. If a parent is simply loud, he says, the effect is minimal. But if the tone connotes anger, insult or sarcasm, it can be perceived as a sign of rejection....

Rohner gets to the key point at the end: how the discipline is taken by the child. As with other forms of communication, both parties-- but here, especially the adult-- bears responsibility for how well the communication works.

In producer theory, we talk about scale and substitution effects from a change in the price of an input into production. For example, if the price of labor increases, then the scale effect is that production becomes more expensive, leading to some combination of higher prices for consumers and reduced output (and input use) by the producer. The substitution effect is that other inputs become relatively attractive-- and so, here, firms will substitute as possible from labor toward capital and other input options.

In this context, one could consider spanking and shouting as two inputs to the production of higher-quality children. One might easily assume that both can have positive input on that output-- but that too much would face diminishing and eventually negative returns. If spanking becomes more "expensive"-- here, because it is socially and sometimes legally more costly-- then we can predict that parents will substitute toward other inputs and that they will find it more difficult to produce higher-quality children.

Of course, if one assumes that spanking or shouting is always a bad input, then one would conclude that eliminating the input might even improve quality. The social and political question, then, is whether one would enshrine those assumptions in a paternalistic public policy which tries to dictate how a parent can discipline their own children.