“Spare the rod, spoil the child” is where African-Americans, born-again Christians and Republicans find common ground.
Minnesota Vikings’ Adrian Peterson has been accused of abusing two of his sons. He says he just disciplined them.
Amid the furor over reports that Minnesota Vikings star Adrian Peterson brutally “whooped” two of his kids, the website FiveThirtyEight discoveredthat Americans’ feelings about spanking kids depend on where they live, how they vote, the color of their skin and their religion.
Crunching numbers researchers from the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey have been collecting since 1986, they discovered that New Yorkers and people in the northeast are much less likely to spank their kids than Southerners such as Peterson, who lives near Houston.
“Republicans are more likely than either Democrats or independents to favor spanking,” the website reported. “And that gap has become wider over time.”
Blacks tend to vote Democratic. And yet, they were more likely than whites and other races to use corporal punishment to discipline their children, the numbers revealed.
Also, some 80% of born-agains support spanking while support among the rest of the people surveyed was 65% — and slipping.
Back in 1986, 84% of the country was pro-spanking.
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Since then, spanking has become less socially acceptable and, as of 2012, the percentage in favor was down to 70%, the researchers found.
FiveThirtyEight said there appears to be a correlation between the decline in spanking and that fact that Americans had been growing less religious.
Two years ago the Pew Research Centerreported that a fifth of the U.S. public — and third of all adults under age 30 — reported no religious affiliation.