Despite a slight decline in the last 30 years, two-thirds of U.S. parents in 2016 still agreed with the statement, “It is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking,” according to the federally funded General Social Study. Spanking is legal in all 50 states. Some states have restrictions on how parents can spank, and some states have outlawed spanking in schools, but no state has completely banned spanking at home.

Spanking is in the news again, thanks to a popular singer and a Texas psychologist.

Singer Kelly Clarkson took heat from spanking critics last week for an off-the-cuff comment during a radio interview acknowledging she occasionally spanked her 3-year-old daughter. The 35-year-old mother said, “I’m not above a spanking, which people aren’t necessarily into,” adding, “I don’t mean like hitting her hard, I just mean a spanking.”

The comment came a few weeks after the release of yet another highly publicized study contending that spanking causes long-term harm in children. The study’s author, University of Texas at Austin professor and developmental psychologist Elizabeth Gershoff, has studied spanking for two decades. She believes the verdict is in: Spanking is bad for kids.

But parents are either unconvinced, or they are not listening. Despite a slight decline in the last 30 years, two-thirds of U.S. parents in 2016 still agreed with the statement, “It is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking,” according to the federally funded General Social Study.

Spanking is legal in all 50 states. Some states have restrictions on how parents can spank, and some states have outlawed spanking in schools, but no state has completely banned spanking at home.

Gershoff and her co-authors contend corporal punishment causes long-term misbehavior. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, looked at data from 12,000 U.S. children surveyed for the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Researchers asked parents of 5-year-olds if they had ever spanked their child and if they had spanked them in the last week. They then looked at reports filed by teachers for those same children at ages 5, 6, and 8 and found the spanked children were more likely than their unspanked peers to have reported behavioral problems, like arguing, fighting, getting angry, and acting impulsively.

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