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A study of mothers and toddlers in 14 countries found that mothers who reported more often shouting at their children, hitting them, or taking away their privileges tended to report that their children had more behavioral and emotional difficulties. Shouting and taking away privileges were linked to both outward-directed problems, such as aggression, and inward-directed problems, such as anxiety, while hitting was linked to inward-directed problems only. The paper was published in Child Psychiatry & Human Development.
Behavioral and emotional problems in early childhood can have long-lasting consequences, adversely affecting children’s education, social relationships, and mental health. These difficulties are often divided into externalizing problems, which are directed outward (such as aggression, hyperactivity, and disruptive behavior), and internalizing problems, which are directed inward (such as anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal). Both types of problems can persist into adolescence and adulthood, although some children experience changes in the types of difficulties they exhibit as they grow older.
Research has found that harsh parenting practices, including physical punishment, shouting, humiliation, and psychological aggression, are associated with increased risks of behavioral and emotional problems in children. These associations can extend into adulthood, with harsh childhood discipline linked to depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, substance use problems, and antisocial behavior. In contrast, parenting characterized by warmth, clear expectations, consistent boundaries, and respect for children’s autonomy is generally associated with fewer behavioral and emotional difficulties.
Nonviolent disciplinary techniques, such as time-outs and temporary withdrawal of privileges, have also been incorporated into parenting interventions designed to improve children’s behavior. Although parenting practices and attitudes toward discipline vary across cultures, research involving 62 countries found that more coercive parenting was associated with poorer social and emotional development in 95% of the countries examined. However, the relationship between parenting and children’s behavior is bidirectional, meaning that parenting practices can influence children’s behavior while children’s behavioral difficulties can also influence how parents respond to them.
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Study author Ela Sehic of Washington State University and colleagues wanted to explore how links between discipline practices and behavior problems vary within and between cultures, using data from 14 countries in the Joint Effort Toddler Temperament Consortium. They focused on five disciplinary practices: telling the child to think about what they did, shouting or swearing, spanking or hitting the child, withdrawing privileges, and separating the child from others (time-out). The researchers hypothesized that more coercive parenting practices would be associated with greater behavioral and emotional problems.
Study participants were 865 children between 17 and 40 months of age (about 27 months on average) and their mothers from Belgium, Brazil, Chile, China, Finland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Romania, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, and the United States. The number of families per country ranged from 49 in Chile to 112 in the Netherlands. Children with clinical diagnoses were excluded.
Mothers completed a questionnaire about their family’s daily routines that included five items asking how often they used each disciplinary technique, rated from “never” to “very often.” They also completed the Child Behavior Checklist, a widely used measure of children’s behavioral, social, and emotional difficulties that produces scores for internalizing problems, externalizing problems, and total problems.
Mothers who reported shouting more often, hitting, and taking away privileges tended to also report that their children had more behavior problems overall. Shouting showed the strongest link: a one standard deviation increase in shouting was associated with a 0.34 standard deviation increase in total problems, compared with 0.25 for hitting and 0.14 for taking away privileges. All three practices were linked to internalizing problems, while only shouting and taking away privileges were linked to externalizing problems.
Telling children to think about what they did and using time-outs were not linked to behavior problems. However, these practices were also not linked to fewer problems.
The link between taking away privileges and behavior problems was somewhat surprising to the researchers, since this technique is often recommended in parent training programs. They suggest that parents may use it in response to existing behavior problems, may deliver it in an aggressive tone, or that toddlers may be too young to benefit from it.
The links between shouting and hitting and internalizing problems varied across countries. They were strongest in the Chinese sample and weakest in the U.S. and Finnish samples. The researchers speculate that in China, these practices may serve to induce shame, which is emphasized in Chinese socialization practices and has been linked to internalizing symptoms there, but they note that this explanation requires further research. In contrast, links with externalizing problems appeared more consistent across countries.
The frequency of these practices also differed across countries. Among participating families, shouting was most common in Russia, China, and Brazil, and least common in Chile and the United States. Hitting was most frequent in Brazil and least frequent in Finland, while taking away privileges was most frequent in Spain and least frequent in Russia.
“The present findings highlight actionable components of parenting (i.e., discipline practices) that can be mitigated through education and behavioral interventions, which may in turn allow for the reduction or prevention of emotional and behavioral issues. Our results provide support for existing research indicating that parental guidance to abstain from coercive disciplinary approaches yields protective effects, suggesting these can be expected across countries,” the study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the psychological correlates of parental disciplinary practices. However, the study was cross-sectional, so it cannot show that these practices cause behavioral and emotional problems. It is also possible that children’s behavioral problems make parents more likely to use coercive practices, or that other factors explain the associations.
Additionally, mothers reported both their own disciplinary practices and their children’s problems, leaving room for reporting bias. Discipline was measured with single questionnaire items whose reliability has not been established, and the samples from individual countries were relatively small. With only 14 countries, the study also had limited statistical power to detect differences between cultures.
The paper, “Links between Discipline Practices and Early Childhood Behavior Problems: Universal or Culture-Specific?,” was authored by Ela Sehic, Christie Pham, Eric E. Desmarais, Brian French, Katri Raikkonen, Kati Heinonen, Carmen Gonzalez-Salinas, Zhengyan Wang, Roseriet Beijers, Carolina de Weerth, Blanca Huitron, Emine Ahmetoglu, Oana Benga, Mirjana Majdandžić, Helena Slobodskaya, Elena Kozlova, Rosario Montirosso, Annalisa Castagna, Maria Beatriz Martins Linhares, Soile Tuovinen, Seong-Yeon Park, Sae-Young Han, Eun Gyoung Lee, Felipe Lecannelier, Sara Casalin, Ibrahim Acar, Samuel P. Putnam, Magen Lowe, and Maria A. Gartstein.
