Engineering the Future
Meet Glenn Gaudette, the chair of Ď㽶Đă’s new engineering department.
Illustration: Lucy Jones
RESEARCH
Breaking the Cycle
Professor Catherine Taylor is testing strategies to prevent spanking and its negative outcomes.
Winter 2021
print
mail
Studies suggest that spanking occurs in . It’s a staggering statistic, especially considering that there is abundant evidence that children who experience physical punishment, such as spanking, are at much greater risk of suffering long-term consequences, according to School of Social Work Professor Catherine Taylor. “They experience many of the same poor outcomes as children who are physically abused,” Taylor said.
Taylor, a specialist in child-abuse prevention who came to Boston College in 2020 after fifteen years at Tulane University, has researched physical punishment’s deleterious effects. In one , she found that the odds of a child being aggressive at age 5 increased by 50 percent if he or she had been spanked more than twice a month at age 3. she coauthored found that teenagers who had experienced physical punishment as children were significantly more likely to commit dating violence.
Now Taylor is testing strategies to prevent spanking and break the cycle of violence. Her most recent project centers on interventions with parents. She recruited more than 800 mothers in New Orleans to take part in short educational programs designed to give parents alternatives to spanking. One program, called Triple P-Level 2, introduces the principles of positive parenting, such as praising and reinforcing good behavior and setting up rules and expectations that are aligned with a child’s age and stage of development. The other program, Play Nicely, presents parents with different methods for responding to an aggressive child.
“I’m examining these two programs to see if they can change parenting attitudes and behaviors,” Taylor said of the initiative, which is funded by the . “If so, then implementing these brief, low-cost programs on a wide scale could help reduce rates of child physical abuse.”
Taylor is optimistic that the use of spanking can be reduced. “Physical punishment persists because it’s normal for parents to do what they learned from their parents,” she said. “But as the science and new recommendations get out, it’s gradually declining.” Indeed, the prevalence of spanking has been trending downward in the U.S. in recent decades, and according to , nearly three-quarters of American pediatricians do not approve of the practice. Meanwhile, sixty countries—nearly one-third—now ban the use of physical punishment for children, up from just four countries in 1992, per the .
The key is to let parents know that there are effective alternatives, and Taylor believes the interventions she’s testing will do just that. “We want to get the message out to parents in the most effective way possible,” she said, “so that, for the next generation of children, physical punishment becomes a thing of the past.” 
Research Briefs
“A Population in Peril,” a new joint report by the Boston College School of Social Work and the Harvard Global Health Institute, outlines the public-health crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. The paper’s coauthors call for a “comprehensive response” to the situation and offer recommendations to better protect vulnerable migrants seeking asylum.
Converting carbon dioxide into methanol, a potentially renewable fuel, offers an opportunity to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, according to research by a team of Ď㽶Đă chemists. Inspired by naturally occurring processes, the team used an efficient multi-catalyst system to make the conversion, as reported in a recent online edition of the journal Chem.
Unfounded financial rumors on Twitter can distort the price of a stock for weeks, Associate Professor of Accounting Susan Shu and colleagues reported in the Journal of Accounting and Economics. “Simply put,” Shu et al. wrote, “repeated encounters of the same information in one’s social media network can lead to an inflated assessment of its validity and temporarily distort price discovery.”
