Exploring the reciprocal relations between mothers’ and fathers’ use and attitudes of corporal punishment in China: A cross-lagged analysis
Introduction
Previous research has indicated that many children worldwide experience corporal punishment administered by their parents (Bender et al., 2007; Collins, Madsen, & Susman-Stillman, 2002; Straus & Stewart, 1999). According to Straus (1996), corporal punishment (CP) may be defined as the “use of physical force with the intention of causing a child pain, but not injury, for purposes of correction or control of the child’s behavior”. To date, numerous studies conducted in both Western and Eastern societies have demonstrated that there are detailed associations between parental CP and a wide array of negative outcomes in children (Castle, Firmin, & Sally, 2008; Lansford et al., 2005; Xing, Wang, Zhang, He, & Zhang, 2011), including aggression, delinquency, low self-esteem and antisocial behavior. Despite these negative outcomes, many parents continue to use corporal punishment to obtain compliance from their children (Bender et al., 2007; Collins et al., 2002). For example, approximately 50% of American parents (Straus & Stewart, 1999) and 45–87% of European parents (Durivage et al., 2015) physically punished their children in the past year, while 48.29% of Chinese fathers and 53.73% of Chinese mothers administered corporal punishment to their children in the past year (Wang & Liu, 2014). Thus, it is necessary to understand the vital factors that predict parental CP to prevent deleterious outcomes and promote the healthy development of children.
Numerous studies have found that sanctified parental attitudes toward CP were a significant predictor for its use with children (Durrant, Rose-Krasnor, & Broberg, 2003; Pinderhughes, Bates, Dodge, Pettit, & Zelli, 2000; Vittrup, Holden, & Buck, 2006). For example, Holden, Coleman, and Schmidt (1995) conducted daily television interviews for 14 days with American mothers of 3-year-old children and found that mothers reported spanking an average of 2.04 and 1.97 times during the first and second weeks, respectively; moreover, mothers’ attitudes toward spanking, rather than negative affect or child behavior, were the most significant factor of predicting the frequency of spanking. Similarly, in a cross-cultural study, Durrant et al. (2003) found that both Swedish and Canadian mothers’ attitudes toward CP were significantly and positively related to the frequency of CP. These findings may be explained by the following cognitive-instrumental perspective: it is believed that parental attitudes regarding corporal punishment may be viewed as preconceptions of desirable parenting behavior or a generalized model (or several models) of how parents should behave while fulfilling their childrearing duties (Combs-Orme & Orme, 2014). Thus, parents who believe CP is a useful disciplinary technique for teaching a child how to behave are more likely to administer CP than those who consider CP a useless instrument for disciplining (Gagné, Tourigny, Joly, & Pouliot Lapointe, 2007).
Although the previously discussed research from different cultures provided solid evidence on parental favorable attitudes toward CP predicting its use, the inverse was also found to be true: parents were more likely to hold positive attitudes toward corporal punishment if they used it. To be concrete, Jackson et al. (1999) examined the relations between parental discipline practices and attitudes across a nationally representative Gallup survey and found that parents who used physical discipline with their children were more likely to have positive attitudes toward the use of physical discipline. This finding provided empirical support for the hypothesis that parents may construct beliefs to rationalize or justify the way they have previously behaved (Goodnow, 1988). With regard to CP, parents may rationalize their CP behaviors to reduce their guilt or discomfort after they administered CP to their children and subsequently come to favor the use of CP. Furthermore, Fazio (1990) found that individuals can access attitudes from memory, which suggests that individuals may access favorable attitudes of CP from the memory of past CP behaviors they once conducted.
However, several limitations to prior studies should be noted. First, the findings were mostly obtained from cross-sectional data, basically focused on correlations, and failed to clarify the causal relations let alone reciprocal relations between parental use of CP and parental attitudes toward CP. Thus, we aimed to employ cross-lagged modeling techniques of two-wave data to detect the causal relations and reciprocal relations between parental use of CP and parental attitudes toward CP over time. This model considers both the initial levels and the continuity of parental use and attitudes of CP and thus monitors changes in the longitudinal associations. Second, in the majority of the previously described studies, mothers are the sole subject of investigation, neglecting the indispensable role of fathers in parenting. However, there are reasons to expect that paternal parenting is also important for child development. According to the family system theory, a family is a complex system composed of a set of interrelated elements, emphasizing not only mothers’ but also fathers’ important roles in child development, as well as their interrelated relations (Lewis, 2005). Thus, it is necessary to consider the reciprocal relations of both mothers’ and fathers’ CP and their attitudes toward CP.
Moreover, it has been suggested that how parents perceive CP and respond physically to children’s misbehavior are shaped by cultural customs and values (Gershoff, 2002; Lansford et al., 2005). As the conception of Chinese parents’ use of harsh discipline is indicative of caring and loving, punitive parenting, such as CP, tends to be considered relatively normal by parents in Chinese families (Wang & Liu, 2017). Within this traditional context, favorable parental attitudes of CP may be more easily transformed into CP behavior, and vice versa (Wang, Wang, & Xing, 2017). Specifically, Chinese parents who favor CP may more easily use CP to discipline children due to the freedom from external pressure than Western parents; moreover, Chinese parents may come to favor the use of CP more easily after they have administered CP due to the Chinese disciplinary values regarding CP. Therefore, the relations between parents’ use and attitudes of CP may be closer in Chinese families. Thus, we anticipated that there would be reciprocal relations between parents’ CP and their attitudes toward CP in China.
In summary, the current study separately examined the reciprocal relations between mothers’ and fathers’ use and attitudes of CP using a two-wave longitudinal sample of Chinese elementary school-age children in a cross-lagged model. It was expected that reciprocal relations between parental use and attitudes of CP would emerge in Chinese society for both mothers and fathers, with attitude-behavior effects, as well as behavior-attitude effects evident in both the maternal and paternal models. Specifically, we anticipated that after taking into account continuity in mothers’ and fathers’ use and attitudes of CP over time, their use of CP in the given year would predict their attitudes toward CP in the subsequent year and their attitudes toward CP in the given year would also predict their use of CP in the subsequent year for both mothers and fathers.
Section snippets
Participants
The data were collected during two assessments 1 year apart (Time 1: Dec 2014 and Time 2: Dec 2015) as part of an ongoing longitudinal study. We used two time points to model the relations between parental CP and parents’ attitudes toward CP. The participants included 5th-grade children from a public elementary school in Jinan city with their parents at Time 1. Because of a substantial amount of missing data during the longitudinal process, 32 families were excluded from the final data set.
Descriptive statistics and correlations
As shown in Table 1 (measured at Time 1), the mean age of the children was 10.72 years (SD = 0.30), and the ages of the mothers and fathers ranged from 31 to 49 years (M = 39.23, SD = 3.38) and 32 to 55 years (M = 37.65, SD = 2.75), respectively. All participants were Chinese-language speaking and were nearly all of Han ethnicity (98.41%). Approximately 87% of the target children had no siblings. Data on the socioeconomic status indicated that the sample was in large part a working and
Discussion
This study used cross-lagged modeling to examine the reciprocal relations between mothers’ and fathers’ CP and their attitudes toward CP separately, after taking into account the stability in both parental CP and attitudes toward CP over time. The results of the structure equation model (SEM) indicated that reciprocal relations did not emerge in Chinese society, with only attitude-behavior effects being evident in both the maternal and paternal models, while behavior-attitude effects were not
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by National Nature Science Foundation of China (31571133) awarded to Meifang Wang. We are grateful to all the children, parents, and teachers who participated or contributed to this project.
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