the rate of hospital admissions related to SIDS is actually lower than the rate of child abuse — 50 per 100,000 children under age 1 for SIDS, compared with 58.2 per 100,000 births, according to research published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.
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Nearly 4,600 U.S. children were hospitalized with broken bones, traumatic brain injury and other serious damage caused by physical abuse in 2006, according to a new report. Babies younger than one were the most common victims, with 58 cases per 100,000 infants. That makes serious abuse a bigger threat to infant safety than SIDS, or sudden infant death syndrome, researchers say in the report.
The researchers estimate that the hospitalizations cost about $73.8 million in 2006, although that’s only a fraction of the overall cost of abuse to society.
- A new analysis concludes that spanking fails to alter kids’ behavior in the long term. What it does instead is amp up their aggression. (Canadian Medical Association Journal)
- Moms and dads who spank do so because they believe it’s effective, and research actually shows that it is — in the short term. A child reaching for a tempting object will stop if he gets swatted. “It does work in the immediate moment, but beyond that, in most cases, it’s very ineffective,” says George Holden, the study’s author and a professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University. “The most common long-term consequence is that children learn to use aggression.”
- In some countries, spanking is not a choice. Durrant is currently living in Sweden, where she’s researching child-and-family policies and the evolution of that country’s law prohibiting physical discipline of children. In 1979, Sweden was the first country to pass such legislation; now 32 countries — including much of Europe, Costa Rica, Israel, Tunisia and Kenya — have a similar law. (..) In Sweden, for example, new parents are hooked up with support groups and given information about developmental stages.
- There may be some cause for optimism: in cases tracked by state Child Protective Service agencies, physical abuse has declined by 55% between 1990 and 2010. Leventhal is in the early stages of comparing more than a decade of data, but so far he has not found a substantial decrease.
- Based on data from the 2006 Kids’ Inpatient Database, the last such numbers available, Leventhal’s team found that six out of every 100,000 children under 18 were hospitalized with injuries ranging from burns to wounds to brain injuries and bone fractures.
