Naturally, those well-designed experiments and rigorous assessments have not been carried out. One must instead fall back on the messy natural experiments and unrigorous anecdotes of comparing societies with different child-rearing practices. At least, one can conclude that the prompt responses of hunter-gatherer parents to infants crying do not consistently lead to children who end up conspicuously lacking in autonomy and self-reliance and other virtues. We shall return to the impressionistic answers that scholars have offered to this question of long-term outcomes.
Physical punishment
Related to those debates about spoiling a child by promptly responding to its crying are the familiar debates about spoiling a child by avoiding punishing it. There is great variation among human societies in their attitudes towards punishing children: variation within a given society from generation to generation, and variation between similar neighboring societies within the same generation. As for variation within the same society between generations, spanking of children was much more widely practised in the United States in my parents’ generation than it is today. The German chancellor Bismarck commented that, even within a given family, spanked generations tend to alternate with non-spanked generations. That conforms to the experience of many of my American friends: those who were spanked as children swear that they will never inflict such barbaric cruelties on their own children, while those who were not spanked as children swear that it is healthier to administer a brief spanking than to practise the guilt manipulation and other behavioral controls that substitute for spanking, or to spoil kids entirely.
As for variation between contemporary neighboring societies, consider Western Europe today. Sweden forbids spankings; a Swedish parent who spanks a child can be charged with the criminal offense of child abuse. In contrast, many of my educated liberal German and British friends and American evangelical Christian friends believe that it is better to spank a child than not to spank. Spankers are fond of quoting the 17th-century English poet Samuel Butler (“Spare the rod and spoil the child”) and the Athenian playwright Menander (“The man who has never been flogged has never been taught”). Similarly, in modern Africa the Aka Pygmies never beat or even scold their children, and they consider horrible and abusive the child-rearing practices of neighboring Ngandu farmers, who do beat their children.
Variation in physical punishment characterizes or characterized not only modern Europe and Africa but also other times and parts of the world. Within ancient Greece, Athenian children (despite Menander’s dictum) ran around unchecked, while at the same time in Sparta everyone, not just a child’s parents, could beat a child. In New Guinea, while some tribes do not even punish babies for brandishing sharp knives, I encountered an opposite extreme at a small village (Gasten) of a dozen huts around a clearing, where village life took place in full view of all the residents. One morning, I heard angry screaming, and I looked out to see what was happening. A mother was incensed at her daughter of about age eight, shouting at the daughter and hitting her, and the daughter was sobbing and holding her arms in front of her face to ward off the blows. Other adults were watching, and nobody was interfering. The mother got more and more furious. Finally, the mother went over to the edge of the clearing, bent down to pick up some object, came back to the child, and vigorously rubbed the object into the child’s face, causing her daughter to scream uncontrollably in agony. It turned out that the object was a bunch of stinging nettle leaves. I don’t know what the daughter had done to provoke this punishment, but the mother’s behavior was evidently considered acceptable by all of the onlookers.
How can one explain why some societies practise physical punishment of children, while others don’t? Much of the variation is evidently cultural and unrelated to differences in subsistence economy. For instance, I am unaware of differences between the economies of Sweden, Germany, and Britain, all of them industrialized agriculture-based societies speaking Germanic languages, that could explain why many modern Germans and British spank but Swedes don’t. The New Guineans of both Gasten and of Enu’s adoptive tribe are gardeners and swineherds, again without obvious differences to explain why physical punishment with nettles is acceptable at Gasten while even mild physical punishment is rare among Enu’s adoptive people.
However, there does seem to be a broad trend: most hunter-gatherer bands do minimal physical punishment of young children, many farming societies do some punishment, and herders are especially likely to punish. One contributing explanation is that misbehavior by a hunter-gatherer child will probably hurt only the child and not anyone or anything else, because hunter-gatherers tend to have few valuable physical possessions. But many farmers, and especially herders, do have valuable material things, especially valuable livestock, so herders punish children to prevent serious consequences to the whole family—e.g., if a child fails to close the pasture gates, valuable cows and sheep can run away. More generally, compared to mobile societies of egalitarian hunter-gatherers, sedentary societies (e.g., most farmers and herders) have more power differences, more gender-based and age-based and individual inequality, more emphasis on learning deference and respect—and hence more punishment of children.
Here are some examples. Among hunter-gatherers, the Piraha, Andaman Islanders, Aka Pygmies, and !Kung practise little or no physical punishment. Daniel Everett relates the following story from his years of living among the Piraha. He became a father at the age of 19, and he came from a Christian background that practised physical punishment. One day, his daughter Shannon did something that he considered to merit a spanking. He grabbed a switch, told her to come to the next room where he would spank her, and she began yelling that she didn’t need a spanking. The Pirahas came running at the sound of angry voices and asked him what he was doing. He didn’t have a good answer to tell them, but he still recalled biblical injunctions about spanking children, so he told his daughter that he wouldn’t spank her there in the presence of the Pirahas, but that she should go to the end of the airstrip and find another switch to be spanked with, and that he would meet her there in five minutes. As Shannon started on her way, the Pirahas asked her where she was going. Fully aware of what the Pirahas would think of her answer, she replied with glee, “My dad is going to hit me on the airstrip!” Out came Piraha children and adults to follow Daniel Everett as he was about to carry out this unthinkably barbaric behavior of hitting a child. He surrendered in defeat, leaving his smug daughter to celebrate her triumph. Piraha parents instead talk to their children respectfully, rarely discipline them, and do not use violence.
Similar attitudes prevail among most other hunter-gatherer groups studied. If one Aka Pygmy parent hits an infant, the other parent considers that ground for divorce. The !Kung explain their policy of not punishing children by saying that children have no wits and are not responsible for their actions. Instead, !Kung and Aka children are permitted to slap and insult parents. The Siriono practise mild punishment of a child that eats dirt or a taboo animal, by roughly picking up the child, but they never beat a child, whereas children are allowed to have temper tantrums in which they beat their father or mother as hard as possible.
Among farming peoples there is variation, with the most punitive being herders whose valuable livestock are at stake if a child looking after the livestock misbehaves. In some farming communities, discipline of children is lax, and they have few responsibilities and also few opportunities to damage valuable possessions, until they reach puberty. For example, among the people of the Trobriand Islands near New Guinea, who are farmers without livestock except for pigs, children are neither punished nor expected to obey. The ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski wrote of the Trobriand Islanders, “Often…I would hear a youngster told to do this or that, and generally the thing, whatever it was, would be asked as a favor, though sometimes the request might be backed up by a threat of violence. The parent would either coax or scold or ask as from one equal to another. A simple command, implying the expectation of natural obedience, is never heard from parents to child in the Trobriands…. When I suggested, after some flagrant infantile misdeed, that it would mend matters for the future if the child were beaten or otherwise punished in cold blood, the idea appeared unnatural and immoral to my [Trobriand] friends.”
A friend who has lived for many years among a herding people of East Africa told me that the herders’ children there behave like little juvenile delinquents until the age of male circumcision, at which time they are expected to assume responsibilities. Then, following an initiation ceremony, boys begin herding the valuable cows, girls begin caring for siblings, and both begin to be disciplined. Among the Tallensi people of Ghana in West Africa, no one hesitates to punish a child who seems to deserve it, e.g., for dawdling while driving cattle. One Tallensi man pointed out to a visiting British anthropologist a scar that had resulted from his being severely whipped as a small boy. A Tallensi elder explained, “If you don’t harass your child, he will not gain sense”—similar to Butler’s dictum “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”