For data about the UK in the seventies: "Seven Years Old in the Home Environment" (John Wiley & Sons, NYC, 1976) by John and Elizabeth Newson of the University of Nottingham in England. They did a study involving interviews with 697 local mothers of 7 year old children. Among the 200+ items in the questionaire were questions relating to spanking (or as the Brits say, "smacking".
A belt or strap was the most often-used spanking implement in the sample as a whole, especially in working class families. But more affluent families tended to prefer a switch or cane. The authors write, "Slippers and other more ad hoc implements such as yardsticks, wooden spoons and the dog's lead appear in too small numbers to analyse their social class distribution."
Also:
10% of the 327 girls in this sample got spanked as often by their father as by their mother, while 8% of them were spanked mostly or exclusively by their father. Only 14% of the mothers interviewed said they and their husbands disagreed on the subject of spanking discipline, but this was four times as likely when the husband was the major spanker as when the wife was. And for a whopping 82% of these girls, their mother was their major or exclusive spanking-giver.
Three years earlier, at age 4, 75% of the children in this sample got spankings at least once a week or more. At age 7, nearly a third (31%) still did, with a luckless 6% reported by their mothers as getting spanked an average of once a day or more. 29% of the girls got spanked once a month or more, but less than once a week; and 38% were spanked less often than once a month.
Although the interviewers had not yet mentioned spanking when they asked mothers how they would deal with their child if she didn't do as she was told, 56% of mothers volunteered that they would spank their child for that.
Another spankable offense in many of these homes was use of curse words. The mother of 7 year old Tess and her older sister Cheryl, said, "[Tess] got a real good hiding for that. I was fetching her from school and another kiddy came up to take something off her, and she said "You fuck off!" Well -- I know I say some words, but I don't say anything like that, I mean that really is the worst, isn't it? And there was a lady just passing and she looked at Cheryl and she looked at me, as if I'd taught it to her. Well, that stopped pretty quick; but lately [Cheryl]'s been saying [Tess]'s at it again, not out loud, just under her breath. And I caught her at it on Sunday. She was in the yard and falling out with another kid, and I saw her through the window, not saying it, just miming it with her mouth, "fu...". Anyhow, my husband whipped her in in a minute, and said "Well, we've caught you at last, have we?"
17% of the mothers said they pulled down pants or lifted skirts when spanking their 7 year olds, with a statistically significantly higher percentage spanking their daughters with their skirts lifted than their sons with their pants down. The authors write that this, "probably reflects only the fact that the mother can turn up a skirt herself, whereas taking down trousers needs some degree of co-operation." The authors continue, "Of course, the baring or partial baring of the child's buttocks is intended to make the punishment degrading as well as physically uncomfortable; and it may be that working-class parents in particular (whose sense of sexual modesty is more acute) may feel that this is going too far - they wish the child to be shamed, but not quite to that degree. Inhibitions of this kind do not apply to the use of implements as such, however."
18% of the girls were spanked with an implement, while a much larger 41% of girls had been threatened with an implement spanking but had not yet experienced one. One mother admonished her child, "You know, straps are sometimes used on girls, as well as boys!" to which her daughter replied, "I know, Mum, but you never do!" Other mothers did carry out threats to spank with an implement, though. "I use my hand; but if I have a stick I can wave it about and it has a great effect, but I don't like smacking with a stick," said one mother. But when asked if she had ever actually done so, she replied, "Yes, I have smacked them with it sometimes on the bottom."
The authors write, "Almost any mother may hit out in a fury when tried beyond her tolerance; differences here may be basically a matter of individual tolerance level. Slowing up the act of smacking, however, immediately invests it with purposiveness and underlines for the child [her mother's] disciplinary intent. In the pre-school years, to say 'Wait till I get you home!', and to smack the child once they got home, had a similar effect of formalisation; now [at age 7], to take down a boy's trousers or turn up a girl's skirt in preparation for smacking, to fetch an implement, or even to own an implement as such, all signify the mother's acceptance of smacking as punishment as opposed to her use of it as an expression of anger. To the extent that some mothers would never dream of formalising it in these ways, however hard pressed, this divergence represents a real difference in attitude rather than just degree - though, obviously, smacking is likely to hurt more on poorly protected skin or where an implement is employed."
A distinctive difference between the real-life mothers and most fictional spanking mothers in F/* stories, was the large majority (73%) of the real-life mothers who reported feeling "guilty or upset" after spanking their child. One mother said that after she gives her daughter a spanking, "I'm the one that's upset. I feel awful afterwards. If she's gone off to bed looking sorrowful, I think to myself, Oh, you rotten devil! It makes me really tired - I can't do anything afterwards. But next day it all starts again. Because I mean you can't let it ride - she plays up to such a pitch. It wears you down, you know."
Tess and Cheryl's mother laments, "It would be nice not to ! I think they do need it. And yet it doesn't seem to have any effect on them. They titter, they defy you. If you don't smack them, they just do whatever they like with you, but then if you are strict with them it seems to me they just get rebellious; and I think sometimes, when they defy me like that, that I just get myself worked up for nothing. I despair sometimes, I really do."
