Another idea from Finland we’ll probably ignore

L ast week President Donald Trump annoyed some of the victims of the California wildfires when he suggested that the disaster might have been avoided if Californians had taken lessons in forest management from Finland.

The Finns, Trump said, “spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things and they don’t have any problem.”

But if Trump believes that Finland is ahead of us in forest management, what other good ideas might we find there?

Publicly funded higher education for all students? It works well in Finland. Universal health care? The Finns have figured out how to do it.

And here’s another idea that we should think about: In 1983 the Finns passed legislation prohibiting striking a child under any circumstances, including spanking your own child in your own home.

This is a drastic notion for Americans, a majority of whom believe that spanking is an appropriate tool for disciplining children. In fact, we use spanking generously, despite considerable evidence that it not only is ineffective, but it actually does harm.

This has been the opinion of the American Academy of Pediatrics for two decades. In 1998, when more than 90 percent of American families admitted to using spanking, the academy, representing 64,000 doctors, strongly discouraged its use even in its most benign forms.

Parents who spank, the academy said, are also more likely to use more abusive forms of punishment. And the more children are spanked, the more anger they report as adults. Further, children who were spanked are more likely to spank their own children and to approve of hitting a spouse.

The academy’s report is clear and emphatic: “Spanking has been associated with higher rates of physical aggression, more substance abuse, and increased risk of crime and violence.”

In the 20 years since the Academy’s “Guidance for Effective Discipline” was issued, the evidence against spanking has become stronger and clearer. Last week the New York Times reported that in the December issue of the journal Pediatrics the Academy will update its guidance on spanking based on research that was not available in 1998.

Recent research confirms that children do not benefit from spanking and, in fact, ordinary spanking, as practiced in many American homes, is associated with increased aggression and defiance at levels comparable to those of children who have suffered more extreme forms of abuse.

Thus the science on spanking is solid, and the doctors who know most about children agree: Do not spank your children, under any circumstances.

Our use of spanking has diminished. In 2013 a Harris poll indicated that 67 percent of American families use spanking, compared with 90 percent in 1998.

And in 2014 another poll reported that 70 percent of American adults still agree that a “good, hard spanking is sometimes necessary to discipline a child.” Nineteen states allow corporal punishment in public schools.

So despite what experts say about the harm that a “good, hard spanking” can cause, our national mood doesn’t seem particularly open to meaningful reform on corporal punishment. Our president publicly embraces violence. Here’s one example, representative of many: Trump said of a protester at a rally: “I’d like to punch him in the face.”

And as Trump demonstrated last week, he is more likely to reject the moral principles of Finland in favor of those of Saudi Arabia, a country that still uses brutal corporal punishment on adults. In 2014 Raif Badawi, a Saudi writer and dissident, escaped the fate of Jamal Khashoggi but was sentenced to 1,000 lashes.

So the outlook isn’t promising for American children, who, despite the evidence against it, are regularly subjected to corporal punishment that often scares, humiliates and hurts them.

It’s odd: In general, we have stringent rules against hitting each other. I can’t hit you; you can’t hit me. For the most part we’ve made hitting against the law.

Just about the only group of Americans that we hit with impunity is made up of people who can’t defend themselves and who are the most likely to suffer harm from it: children.