Smacking Sounds

Slate just had an article on why parents aren’t hitting their kids anymore. The article found that the big divide in hitting or not appears to be socio-economic class. The article states:

Plenty of spanked children may grow into well-adjusted adults, but this is one reason why, for example, corporal punishment on average correlates with lower measures of cognitive ability, such as IQ.

It turns out we’ve been running our own little experiment on this, since I’ve been hitting GoofBoy a lot lately. Not as a disciplinary measure. We were hanging out and I playfully slapped the back of his neck. GoofBoy looked up with a start at the wonderful loud sound it made. I’ve been trying to reproduce it since.

GoofBoy does not love being used as a percussion instrument. He assures me it doesn’t hurt, but it is just a bit annoying having someone sneaking up on you and smacking the back of your neck all the time when you are innocently reading the paper, building Legos, studying, or taking a shower (it really echoes in the bathroom.)

So, quite reasonably, he has taken to slapping me on the back of the neck in response. So now the two of us are running around the house trying to sneak up on one another and smack each other on the back of the neck in order to make an amusing sound. We even compare notes.

“Too much cupping on that one dad!”

“Good job boy, nice reverb through my ears! But a little more speed and less force, my head jerked forward, so you lost a lot of sound.”

Naturally the lady Goofs want no part of this.

The question is will our continuing little drum circle lower GoofBoy's IQ - or does it show that I just started out with a pretty low IQ?