Tina Knowles Lawson Says Beyonce Doesn’t Spank Her Kids… But Is Spanking Really Acceptable Anymore?

Beyonce’s mom, Tina Knowles Lawson, is opening up about how her daughter raises her own kids.

“No spankings,” Bey’s mom told Us Weekly. “Just really talking to the kids and reasoning with them. I can say, [she] pretty much has my parenting!”

She also hinted at those pregnancy rumors surrounding the singer, and said Bey and her husband, Jay Z, are open to adding to their family. The two entertainers, who married in 2008, welcomed daughter Blue Ivy in 2012 and twins Rumi and Sir in 2017.

Tina added of the family: “[They] have nannies for the kids and their assistants help out too, but they mostly try and bring the kids everywhere. Blue always travels with Beyonce and comes with her when she’s working. The twins are getting older and Beyonce has been taking them out a little more too. … They’re a very tight-knit family and like to do everything together.”

Psychology Today reports that "spanking is correlated strongly and quite exclusively with multiple negative outcomes for children.

"Being spanked is bound to elicit feelings of resentment, hostility, fear and shame in children. Such feelings may be suppressed due to fears of retaliation or rejection on part of the parent, but are bound to emerge later in the form of neurosis or chaotic emotional expression."

PT further explains:

"Children form an 'internal working model' of the world and other people through the constant give and take of daily parent-child interactions. This working model sets the child’s expectations about world, self, and others, and is used to guide behavior in new situations and into the future. A child who is routinely spanked when she is in need of comforting and support may internalize a view of the parent as rejecting and herself as unworthy of love, which in time may lead to eroded intimacy with the parent as well as depression and low self esteem. (Research has indeed documented consistent link between a history of spanking and less close parent-child relations, as well as higher risk for emotional disorders such as depression and anxiety)."

It's a good argument for not spanking your kid. So does anyone spank anymore? Well, likely if it happened to you, you will repeat that behavior, if you aren't aware. 

"Research has shown that spanking does in fact increase children’s stress levels, as well as their risk for a host of future psychological problems," Psychology Today continues. "These findings have prompted some researchers to propose that spanking be added to the accepted list known to predict adult adjustment and health problems, and that we begin to consider spanking a public health concern.

"It is rare for parents who were not spanked as children to begin to spank their children. Spanking, like other behaviors and customs, is readily transmitted from one generation to the next absent a strong counter-current. Research has shown that, particularly when we are under duress, we tend to fall back on our primary responses—those that are well learned, those we grew up with. Parenting is stressful, so parents will often fall back on primary responses, those learned early, from their role models for parenting—their own parents."

In 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended in a policy statement in the journal Pediatrics that parents not spank, hit, or slap their children because it has lasting negative effects. 

And the American Psychological Association suggests that those parents whose history involves physical abuse should be counseled by a therapist "not to use corporal punishment as a technique to discipline their children."

"Until researchers, clinicians, and parents can definitively demonstrate the presence of positive effects of corporal punishment, including effectiveness in halting future misbehavior, not just the absence of negative effects, we as psychologists can not responsibly recommend its use," says the report.