The Morning Meeting with Al Tompkins is a daily Poynter briefing of story ideas worth considering and more timely context for journalists, written by senior faculty Al Tompkins. Sign up here to have it delivered to your inbox every weekday morning.

A fourth of parents lied when they found out their kids were or probably were infected with the COVID-19 virus during the height of the pandemic, a just-released study says.

A survey of a couple of thousand parents found that they face different pressures than adults without kids, and that may have led parents to seven kinds of misrepresentations (lies) that would allow their children to break quarantine and potentially spread the virus.

The study said the most common reason for misrepresenting their child’s condition was “wanting to exercise personal freedom as a parent. Additional reasons included wanting their child’s life to feel normal and not being able to miss work or other responsibilities to stay home.”

The researchers say the fact that one in four parents represented their child’s level of infection is a sign that we need to find ways “to address parents’ concerns that were identified as reasons for these behaviors (e.g., desire for autonomy), and to implement better support mechanisms for parents (e.g., paid sick leave for family illness) during such crises so that misrepresentation and nonadherence feel less necessary.”

Will and should state athletic leagues allow organized slap fighting?

A state senator I admired used to admonish colleagues by saying that people should have the right to be a fool. Tennessee Sen. Doug Henry’s teaching is in my head as I look at the Nevada Athletic Commission’s regulation of “slap fighting,” which is when two people stand toe to toe and slap each other into unconsciousness. TBS is televising it.

The New York Times’ Kurt Streeter called the televised events “indefensible.”

But Ultimate Fighting Competition chief business officer Hunter Campbell, who defends slap fighting, told the Nevada Athletic Commission, “With any sort of combat when you’re taking shots to the head, to have it done in a way where there isn’t medical procedures and regulations put around it is an unsafe environment. … The second issue is integrity of the sport. The other thing that we’ve seen is, you’ve seen instances where a guy might be 400 pounds, and he’s slapping a guy who’s 130 pounds, and that’s also not what we’re looking to do.”

Nevada is regulating the rules but, as happened with the UFC, the interest in this kind of violence will spread and regulators say they have to be ready to evolve rules quickly. The Associated Press quotes the Nevada Gaming Commission chair:

“So, these guys want to get serious about the sport and it sounds like they do,” said Anthony Marnell III, chairman of the commission which also regulates boxing and other combat sports. “It sounds like they want to evolve the rules. We as a commission need to keep up with them at lightning speed on how we’re going to review this. And we have to have a process for it because there’s going to be controversy.”

It is interesting timing. Slap fighting evolves just as professional football and hockey come to terms with the lifelong health problems that head injuries cause.

This may evolve in a lot of ways in other states. One would be to allow regulated slap fighting, which would be overseen much as states oversee boxing and UCF now. Wyoming jumped on Nevada’s regulations by allowing online waging for contests. Wyoming is not new to such things since, in 2018, it became the first state to sanction bare-knuckle boxing in more than 100 years.

Wyoming’s Cowboy State Daily reports:

Officially, Wyoming is not weighing in on whether it’s right or wrong to slap someone silly for sport.

State officials are simply saying it’s OK to bet on it. And that’s saying something considering the sport is still in its infancy and bookies still aren’t sure how to even handicap or take action on it.

European slap fighting league SlapFIGHT has been around longer than Power Slap. Wagering on those events has been available via DraftKings since late last year. Bettors in Oregon, Wyoming, Colorado and Connecticut have been wagering on that action using DraftKings, FanDuel and the like.

On Feb. 8, Wyoming became the first state to approve wagering on Power Slap League events. That same day an agreement between Power Slap and U.S. Integrity was announced, making the nation’s leading technology-driven sports wagering monitoring company the overseer of betting in 2023.

Still, it remains to be seen just what bettors can put their money down on.

Betting industry giant FanDuel is one of the online wagering sites toying with the idea of taking bets on slap fighting.

It is interesting that upcoming slap-fight events are being held in “undisclosed locations.” Many are pay-per-view.

One UFC defender says slap fighting is indefensible:

In slap fighting, short of biting your mouthguard and hoping to hell that your opponent obeys the rules against clocking you in the ear, there’s little for the “defender” to do but stand there and take it. “There’s nothing sporting about it with no defense,” says Chris Nowinski, pro wrestler turned neuroscientist and cofounder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation. “[Slap fighting] is perhaps one step above the old Bumfights videos. So sad.”

One could argue that this foray into slap fighting by UFC execs is itself a clever bit of jiu-jitsu. Slap fighting pushes boundaries of acceptable and, inasmuch as MMA still struggles for mainstream acceptance, well, it now looks downright quaint (and hardly marginal) compared to slap fighting.

But there’s a more convincing argument: Slap fighting has the effect of delegitimizing the UFC and validating old criticism, wrongheaded as it might have been, that the organizers were always just building a business based on bloodlust. MMA may never threaten the NFL, as White long ago predicted. But it has its real estate in the current sportscape, and it has come a long way since being dismissed as human cockfighting. Why threaten that progress by associating with something as base as slap fighting?

Learn more:

• BlackBelt Magazine calls slap fighting “the next big thing”
• Slap fighting competitor left disfigured
• Medical community condemns slap-fighting

It’s legal in 15 states for teachers to hit your child; 7 more states take no stand

Let me lay my cards on the table right here. I am so opposed to the notion of a teacher or principal hitting a child that it is difficult for me to understand how 15 states explicitly allow it and seven more states don’t forbid it.

(The Journalist’s Resource)

Schools, mostly in the South, are still hitting children under what is euphemistically called “corporal punishment.” Note that 16% of the physical punishment doled out to children by schools involves children with disabilities. Black students are twice as likely to be legally hit by an adult in authority than white students. Across five states, 851 preschoolers were physically disciplined in a single year.

The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy has assembled a collection of research on this issue to help journalists report on why school administrators hit Black children more often than other children. Here are the opening paragraphs of that report:

Despite academic studies noting the harms associated with corporal punishment, U.S. public schools use it to discipline tens of thousands of students each year, data from the U.S. Department of Education show.

Public schools in 22 states reported using physical discipline to control student behavior during the 2017-18 academic year, the most recent year for which national data is available. Twenty-eight states have banned corporal punishment in public schools, but 15 have laws giving public schools explicit authority to use it and seven states have no laws allowing or prohibiting it, according to a September 2022 report from the education department’s Office for Civil Rights.

Meanwhile, corporal punishment is legal in all private schools, except for those in Iowa and New Jersey.

The practice was most common in Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Oklahoma.

That year, public preschool programs, which are often housed within public elementary schools, reported using corporal punishment on a combined 851 children aged 3 to 5 years.

Here are some statistics from the U.S. Department of Education. Note that the data is five years old, which is typical of data that is not popular to track.

(U.S. Department of Education)

(U.S. Department of Education)

Now, a piece of context. Of all of the members of the United Nations, only one, the United States, did not ratify the 1989 treaty that protects children from “all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation.” Most countries adopted it more than three decades ago.

Here is what global research says about physically violent punishment. Some studies found that “normative” physical punishment and child aggression had links to delinquency and spousal assault in later life.
Here are 62 years of research compiled by the American Psychological Association.

America’s interest in spanking, whipping or paddling children hit a high point in 2014 when NFL running back Adrian Peterson was indicted for hitting his son with a “switch.” (After a plea deal, Peterson ended up with 80 hours of community service and a $4,000 fine for misdemeanor assault. )

But, as the Brookings Institute notes, “Perhaps America lost interest because most Americans hit their kids, and most think that that is the way it should be. More than 70% of Americans agreed in 2012 that, ‘it is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking.’”

Brookings notes, “In terms of altering children’s behavior in the short run, physical punishment is mostly effective.” But, “Children spanked frequently and/or severely are at higher risk for mental health problems, ranging from anxiety and depression to alcohol and drug abuse, according to some research studies. Children whose parents hit them regularly may also develop more distant parent-child relationships later on. There is also robust evidence of an increased incidence of aggression among children who are regularly spanked.”

Pediatricians also have taken a strong stance on how and why hitting children is not helpful. The American Academy of Pediatrics said that doctors are often consulted about child discipline. Here is what the AAP found when it surveyed members:

Only 6% of 787 US pediatricians (92% in primary care) who responded to this survey held positive attitudes toward spanking, and only 2.5% expected positive outcomes from spanking. Respondents did not believe that spanking was the “only way to get the child to behave” (78% disagreed) or that “spanking is a normal part of parenting” (75% disagreed).

The (scrubbed) hypersonic launch you have not heard about

There have been a ton of rumors about a secret launch that was scrubbed at Cape Canaveral planned for a couple of days ago. The launch was not on a public schedule, but clearly the Space Force launch site was preparing for something. Observers noted that a hazard zone was established a few days ago — a warning to pilots to stay away — but there was no known launch window of a rocket.

The office of the Secretary of Defense has confirmed that Space Force was preparing to test fly a hypersonic missile on Sunday but the flight was called off.

Hypersonic missiles are the front-edge technology of weapons that the Defense Department hopes will fly at least five times the speed of sound and can be maneuvered to avoid detection. The U.S. is not alone in this technology. The Russians and Chinese are also working on hypersonic systems.

Read more:

• Florida Today: Department of Defense scrubs hypersonic missile test at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station
• Phoenix Business Journal: Raytheon wins hypersonic detection system contract
• DefenseNews: Navy’s hypersonic launcher is headed to flight testing next year
• U.S. Naval Institute News: Recent report to Congress on hypersonic technology (Source: Congressional Research Service)