ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at several questions including: What proportion of children in the United States is hit by parents and how does this change as the children grow older? Do fathers hit more or less often than mothers? and Have fewer parents used corporal punishment in years? The corporal punishment rates are based on interviews with parents in two large, nationally representative samples of families known as the National Family Violence surveys. The chapter discusses the early nineteenth-century campaigns against corporal punishment were really concerned with physical abuse. In 1975, traditional differences in bringing up boys and girls were not very large in respect to corporal punishment, but they persisted among the parents in the 1985 survey. The good news about corporal punishment in the United States is that the long historical trend to reduce violence against children appears to be continuing.
