Family and cultural contexts of parental discipline and children’s adjustment

Within academic circles, it is now widely accepted that corporal punishment is detrimental to children’s development and a violation of children’s rights (Gershoff, 2013). Yet, the majority of parents in some countries continue to use corporal punishment (Lansford & Deater-Deckard, 2012). Eliminating parents’ use of corporal punishment and helping parents to use non-punitive discipline have been major targets of international efforts both in parenting interventions (Britto, Ponguta, Reyes, & Karnati, 2015) and in legislation to outlaw corporal punishment (see Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children, 2017). The aims of this Special Section include enhancing understanding of how family and cultural contexts affect which types of discipline parents use (including, but not limited to, corporal punishment), how these types of discipline are related to children’s adjustment, and how interventions can promote parents’ use of positive discipline.

The Special Section includes one conceptual article and six empirical studies that collectively advance the field through quantitative and qualitative inquiry; longitudinal and intervention designs; and inclusion of research participants and authors from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, North and South America. A brief description of each of these articles is presented below to foreshadow the contributions each makes to the literature.

Grusec, Danyliuk, Kil, and O’Neill (2017) articulate a conceptual model of discipline that recognizes the importance of situating discipline within a holistic understanding of the parent–child relationship as well as cultural and historical contexts that shape parent–child relationships. Their framework explains how parents use discipline as a way to achieve children’s willing compliance with parents’ goals and values during the socialization process. Consistency, autonomy support, perspective taking, and parental acceptance of the child are regarded as key features of successful discipline.

Fung, Li, and Lam (2017) conducted in-depth, open-ended interviews with mothers in Taiwan and Hong Kong to understand mothers’ responses to common child misbehaviors depicted in hypothetical vignettes. They found that mothers prioritized different types of discipline depending on the setting (a private home vs. in public), social distance (among immediate family members vs. in the presence of strangers vs. in the presence of an acquaintance), rules involved (safety, health, social-conventional, or moral), possible consequences (e.g. harm to self, inappropriate behavior), and degree of conflict involved. In addition, depending on the specific situations, mothers endorsed either a single disciplinary approach, simultaneous approaches that involved more than one form of discipline at a time, contingent approaches with a given response depending upon mothers’ evaluation of extenuating circumstances about the child or situation, or ratcheting-up when an initial discipline attempt failed and the mother indicated she would either become harsher or more encouraging in a follow-up attempt. These findings contribute a rich understanding of how Chinese mothers reason about and use a diverse array of disciplinary approaches.

Holden, Hawk, Singh, Smith, and Ashraf (2017) examine the concept of metaparenting (i.e. parents’ thoughts about their parenting), in relation to their use of corporal punishment as well as non-coercive forms of discipline. In interventions that attempt to change parents’ discipline behaviors, parents are encouraged to engage in more reflection about the appropriateness of particular forms of discipline and to become more aware of their children’s responses to parental behavior. The assumption is that if parents think more about their parenting and children’s reactions to discipline, they will be less likely to use coercive discipline. Holden and colleagues’ findings in a sample of European American, African American, and Mexican American mothers did not demonstrate associations between metaparenting and actual behavior, suggesting that changing discipline behaviors would benefit not just from increasing metaparenting but also from changing beliefs about discipline and giving explicit attention to the behaviors the parents are using.

Alampay et al. (2017) tackle what has been a controversial issue in public debates about links between corporal punishment and children’s adjustment. The literature to date has been mixed regarding whether parental warmth or other features of parent–child relationships moderate the association between corporal punishment and worse child adjustment. Using data from China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Thailand, and the United States, Alampay et al. found that parents’ perceptions of the severity and justness of their use of corporal punishment do not moderate the link between corporal punishment and child adjustment. That is, even if mothers and fathers believe that their use of corporal punishment is not too severe and that they are justified in using corporal punishment, more frequent corporal punishment is associated longitudinally with more child externalizing problems.

Rebellon and Straus (2017) tested whether adult antisocial behavior differs across individuals with different exposure to childhood corporal punishment. In particular, they focus on corporal punishment “dyadic concordance types,” operationalized as whether corporal punishment was used by neither parent, just the mother, just the father, or both parents. Controlling for retrospective reports of childhood misbehavior and childhood parental abuse, adults’ retrospective reports of experience with corporal punishment during childhood were related to adult antisocial behavior in Belgium, Canada, China, Greece, Italy, Poland, Russia, Scotland, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, particularly if mothers and fathers both used corporal punishment. These associations were partially mediated by self-control and social concern. This article is a posthumous publication for Murray A. Straus and serves as a tribute to his lasting legacy to protect children and prevent family violence.

Perrin, Miller-Perrin, and Song (2017) present an evaluation of an intervention that addresses one of the biggest barriers to eliminating corporal punishment among certain religious groups: namely, the “spare the rod, spoil the child” interpretation of the Bible. Through an intervention that involves explicit reinterpretation of the biblical passages that have been cited as supporting corporal punishment, they demonstrate greater reduction in endorsement of corporal punishment when students at a conservative Christian university are exposed to both a research-based intervention and a progressive biblical reinterpretation of the corporal punishment passages in the Bible. Both the research-based intervention and biblical reinterpretation intervention decreased endorsement of corporal punishment compared with a no-intervention control group, but their findings suggest the importance of understanding why parents use corporal punishment to be able to tailor interventions to address those reasons directly.

Finally, Durrant et al. (2017) describe the development of an intervention that aims to increase positive discipline (and thereby eliminate corporal punishment) in low- and middle-income countries. They operate within a framework that recognizes that interventions developed in high-income countries may not translate well to other settings, so explicitly examine parents’ perceptions of the utility of the Positive Discipline in Everyday Parenting (PDEP) Program in 13 countries: Australia, Canada, Gambia, Georgia, Guatemala, Japan, Kosovo, Mongolia, Palestine, Paraguay, Philippines, the Solomon Islands, and Venezuela. Beyond the specific findings reported about the PDEP program, Durrant and her colleagues’ article provides valuable insight into considerations that are needed when trying to develop a parenting intervention that will decrease punitive parenting in a wide variety of national contexts.

In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Sustainable Development Goals to set priorities for guiding the international agenda through 2030 (United Nations, 2017). Target 16.2 prioritizes the prevention of all forms of violence against children. Thus, the articles in this Special Section are timely and important not only for their advancement of the scientific literature but also for their potential to inform understanding of how best to promote parents’ use of effective and non-punitive forms of discipline as nations strive to meet international goals for child protection.