Childrearing & Politics: Red State, Blue State, Purple Butts

I’m not quite sure what all to make of it [though i'm about to make a lot of it anyway], and maybe I’m the only one only now belatedly seeing this, but I just google-stumbled [googlumbled?] on a nationwide survey on childrearing practices taken in August 2005, where 600 adults (18 and over, half male, half female) in each of the 50 states (i.e., a total of 30,000 adults) were phoned, random sampling, by SurveyUSA of Verona NJ with the following 3 questions:

1. Do you think it is OK to wash a child’s mouth out with soap?
2. Do you think it is OK to spank a child?
3. Do you think it is OK for a school teacher to spank a student?

If this survey made the news back in 2005, I’ve forgotten, but you’d think it’s just the kind of thing that would garner a blip on the screen on CNN or Fox (unless – hm – what was Paris Hilton up to that day?). Since SurveyUSA uses media anchorpeople to pose their questions, one would think the results must have gotten at least televised airplay.*

What really caught my attention, given that they coded each state as “red state” or “blue state” on the 2004 Presidential results, was this surely-too-divisive-to-be-coincidental finding:

On question #3, with the highest statewide “Yes” response being 53% (Arkansas) and the lowest “Yes” response being 8% (New Hampshire), and the weighted average (factoring in population) for all 50 states was 23% saying “Yes,” here is the kicker:

When you rank the states by response to question #3, every single one of the “top” 25 states — half the nation — saying “Yes” to this question was a “red state.” Every one.

Maybe this isn’t surprising given how we stereotypically think of cultural variants — and especially the right wing stereotype of the left wing as “soft on crime,” etc — and the right wing decidedly leading the death penalty charge, etc. There is often also glib talk (mostly by Republicans, to my knowledge, seeking by this characterization to praise their own toughness) of Democrats wanting the “Mommy state” vs. Republicans seeking the “Daddy state” by which is generally meant seeing government as ‘soft’ (e.g., welfare, education, health-oriented) vs. ‘hard’ (going to war, defending, punishing criminals).

But what I think this lends its bit of confirmation to — in a broad-based nationwide set of statistics — is just how much political ideology begins in childrearing. I’d argue that “spare the rod, spoil the child” is a philosophy of life that spreads far beyond the issue of spanking and beyond what fosters adults who then believe in capital punishment. Those who grow up knowing and coming to believe in swift (and potentially abusive) retribution also grow up as the — ironically — most ‘Darwinistic’, if you will, amongst us, the ones whose ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ ideology tells them to fight taxation as if the devil, to let others sink or swim (which leads to literally sinking in the Mississippi when a neglected bridge goes out from under you), to rationalize a view of other countries as spoils for being a superpower with the “savvy” to have fostered the world’s mega-CEOs with the ‘skill’ to know how to exploit, etc.

While the word “discipline” actually comes from Greek meaning “learning,” these “Yes” respondents exemplify the bulk [?] of American parents who use and think of the term “discipline” to mean punishment. They see those who privilege reasoning with children as “soft on crime” already in preschool-level terms. They come as adults to see diplomacy — talking out differences and problems — itself as “soft on crime” — and support going to war instead.

Psychoanalytically and factoring in cognitive dissonance, a big part of this is because children typically grow up most importantly wanting — sometimes alas desperately, in the face of much contradictory evidence — to believe they are loved, first and foremost by their parents. Thus if their parents spank them (which isn’t necessarily abusive per se but also arguably ‘teaches’ very little except to fear authority and thus obey not out of learning right and wrong but out of fearing consequences) or even go so far as to be inarguably abusive, children as we know will come to rationalize to themselves exactly what the parents typically say as they are abusing “I’m doing this for your own good” (or variations thereon)… See Alice Miller’s seminal book “For Your Own Good.”

The fact that every one of the top 25 states to show the greatest support for the idea of teachers spanking students voted in 2004 for Bush is, to me, startling even if somehow unsurprising.

And it says to me that the psycho-emotional-cultural engrainedness of beliefs in ‘strong’ vs. ‘weak’ implementation of authority, translated (rightly or wrongly – i think wrongly) into notions whereby “strong” means physical intervention rather than verbal communication, start in childrearing experience (most parents falling, wishfully or not, into applying the same disciplining responses they themselves received as kids).

What is curious and was my first line of thinking upon seeing this survey is that, of the 3 questions posed, this 3rd question was the most clearcut in terms of red-state-blue-state divisions. On the 2nd question, spanking one’s own child, a blue state or two crept into the top 25 state rankings. On the 1st question, washing kids’ mouths out with soap, five blue states were among the top 25 saying “OK.” Clearly red states are decidedly more OK overall with these physical punishments of children, but the single best ‘marker’ of red-state vs. blue state childrearing socialization practices was on the matter of having teachers spank students.

Hunh. A bit surprising, I thought, that that question would be more decisively red-state than matters of parents’ own punishment tactics. Teachers are (for the most part) government employees. Don’t Bush voters, I pondered at first, disdain government intervention? Aren’t Bush voters the ones most guarded about insisting that parents should be the ultimate authorities over how their children are ‘governed’? But, no, this finding would seem to “explain” the willingness of the same Bush voters to put government into bedrooms and snooping into phone conversations. Of course, these self-same Bush voters would surely tell you that it’s those other parents’ kids who need spanking by their teachers, not their own kids. Those other parents are the “soft on crime” ones who they want to see overridden by a tough-enforcement school, given too that they see schools indeed as being “Mommy government” — i.e., soft on crime — and “voting” in this survey for those schools to crack down more, in such ways as spanking kids.

(There’s also the fact that a surely greater proportion of Bush voters are the ones opting for and clamoring for vouchers to put their kids in private schools where conceivably they think teachers are more task-mastery in ways consistent with the notion of spanking unruly kids. They are, perhaps above all, prioritizers of ‘order’ far above all else. And with very concrete notions of how order is best achieved.)

What I think this survey points to is how much those notions of order are grounded in how they view (and experienced) childrearing. I do not think this is a chicken-or-egg question. It’s not people’s politics per se that determines their childrearing beliefs. It is definitely the childrearing beliefs that arise first. What I think this survey shows is just how determinatively they may be ‘dictating’ subsequent adult politics… through, of course, a circuitous individual life path of beliefs which get applied to notions of governance, but I think it’s plausible to suggest that it may all begin with whether they believe in spanking or not.

A further ramification of this set of findings is that a strong case can be made to see each of these childrearing practices as being, even beyond the physical punishment (whether to a level that’s abusive or not), part and parcel of a view of children as appropriately being shamed. These are very shaming responses to children, in the case of #3, not just private but also public humiliation. It’s long struck me that what the GOP has come to tap into — at least since the era of Reagan realignment of the Republican party (e.g., the “Southern strategy” which Nixon introduced but really took hold by the 80′s) — has been a very shaming notion of political strategizing. It’s not coincidence that the first recourse of the Bush administration and all the GOP pundits and politicians at every turn has been a blatant effort to shame dissenters as “unpatriotic” and “weak” at a time of war. It seems to me it’s not just the patriotism per se which is called upon here. If it were, then rational argument would seem to stand a better stead to deflate the attacks on the grounds that indeed caring enough about one’s nation to dissent is a hallmark of patriotism. But it’s the sinister emotional appeal of the indictment, whether orchestrated by Ashcroft or Cheney or Bush or his press secretaries or whoever, that I think taps into shaming that is far more insidious, harder to pick out for what it is and argue against … And this “belief” in shaming as rightful tool of authority-imposing government strikes me as a direct outgrowth of a belief in shaming children as similarly appropriate swift-kick response.

If this topic strikes your interest, you’ll see that you can actually get much much more detailed demographic data on survey results state-by-state. Link on any given state in the survey results, by question, and see the breakdown of replies among the 600 interviewees by gender, by age, by race, by political party, ideology, religion, and churchgoing. It’s a lot of data to make generalizations from but i’ve checked these data for numerous states and so far it’s not just the red-state-blue-state categorization: on every measure I’ve checked so far in several of the states, the Republicans phoned favored these three practices more than the Democrats did. And, perhaps even more intriguing, even on such seeming apolitical questions as these, on every state-level breakdown of demographics I’ve checked so far, Independents always placed somewhere between Republicans and Democrats in their state in the degree to which they approved of these childrearing practices.

Well, that’s it from this armchair ‘analyst’ for the time being here, raising this issue to see what others might make of this interpretation or any other, also realizing since this survey is ‘old news’ I’m just now seeing, it might be a case of ‘been there done that’.

It does seem that the consequences of any such linkage as I’m making here go a fair ways to accounting for how this nation has voted itself into thirst for retribution at any cost, lives, treasury, privacy, liberty. “Order” employs shaming and physical boundary-crossing aggression (if children — all of us as individuals — can be seen to have boundaries to our physical being, an ‘airspace’ around us not to be violated either by spanking hands or shoving soap bars or big-brother-infiltrations) and one of the reasons misbegotten retributive wars and governmental invasions of privacy find popular appeal — and shame bystanders into acquiescence — grows out of an engrained sense of rationalized response that divides red-state from blue-state thinking along the lines of purple butts.

Given the apparent ‘crisis of faith’ among Bush voters now in Bush himself — and, as I proposed in another post here replying to Joe over the weekend, perhaps even a crisis among GOP voters in terms of changing their priorities toward ones of compassion with a track record — I for one will be curious to see whether any of these “top 25″ belief-in-punitive-childrearing states will have turned from red to blue.

It does, alas, seem to me that in fact the way to a more truly compassion-based and diplomacy-based politics (not just bumper sticker lipservice like Bush gave) starts way ‘down’ at the level of how children are raised and how they come to see the appropriate dynamics between authority, power, and people, what kinds of physical boundaries they grow up early on believing are inviolate or to what extent they learn to see traversing physical and private boundaries as being “for your own good” kinds of necessary signs of ‘strong leadership’. I’m afraid that as long as pluralities learn early to accommodate their belief systems to these everyday practices in handling ‘crime and punishment’, the uphill battle for Democrats in particular is still a long-shot appeal to reason that’s still vulnerable to the on-a-dime reversal of fortunes wrought by a threatening dose of shame.

That seems to be how the new FISA bill just got passed.

* For an interesting discussion of the SurveyUSA methodology/rationale using anchors as phoners compared to major media polls, which employ third-party interviewers, check here.]