Disciplinary practices, metaparenting, and the quality of parent–child relationships in African-American, Mexican-American, and European-American mothers

Abstract

Coercive responses to children’s behavior are well recognized to be problematic for children’s adjustment. Less well understood is how parental social cognition is linked to discipline. In this study we sought to link metaparenting — parents’ thoughts about their parenting — to the use of coercive discipline. We predicted that mothers who engaged in more metaparenting, thus reflecting more deliberate parenting, would use corporal punishment less frequently and instead engage in non-coercive discipline. We also expected that mothers who engaged in more metaparenting would report closer relationships with their children. In order to assess a diverse sample, data were collected from approximately equal numbers of African-American, European-American, and Mexican-American mothers. Participants included 113 mothers with target children in three age groups, ranging from 2 to 12 years. The results indicated reports of corporal punishment as well as non-coercive discipline did not significantly differ across child sex and child age groups, but did differ significantly across race/ethnicity. Reports of frequency of metaparenting also differed across racial/ethnic groups; African-American mothers reported more metaparenting than European-American mothers on three of four subscales. Metaparenting was significantly related to reports of the mother-child relationship but in the opposite direction than predicted. Based on these results, future research directions linking parental social cognition to discipline are proposed.

“There’s Not One Way to Do It:”: Latina Mothers’ Discipline Techniques

“…The mothers did not mention the child’s gender as a factor for different discipline choices. While Barajas-Gonzalez et al (2018) found male children to be spanked more often than female children, Holden et al (2017) found gender not to be a contributing factor to choice of discipline.…”

“…This misconception has been debated by scholars that state that Latino families with strong cultural values such as familismo are less likely to resort to harsher discipline strategies (Coohey, 2001;Lee & Altschul, 2015). Furthermore, some researchers have found that Latino families are less likely to spank their children compared to African American or Caucasian families (Holden et. al., 2017;Slade & Wissow, 2004).…”

Meta-Parenting, a New Concept in the India Context

“…When parents were compared on the subscales of the Meta-parenting questionnaire, there was no significant difference between the mothers and fathers though it can be seen from Table 2 that mothers have scored slightly higher on the subscales assessing, anticipation, reflection, rumination, and total score whereas the fathers have scored slightly higher on the subscale problem solving of MPQ. [14]. It is important to note that scores of the Indian parent population are notably less as compared to the above-mentioned population which may be indicating that Indian parents are engaging in meta-parenting a lot less as compared to Western parents.…”

Análisis de las campañas contra el castigo físico a menores en España. Contenido y propuesta de estrategias para el cambio de actitudes

“…A menudo los padres se muestran ambivalentes hacia el uso del castigo físico y es frecuente que manifiesten actitudes negativas hacia este pero continúan utilizándolo a pesar de no creer en su efectividad (Bunting, Webb and Healy, 2010). Otras variables más dinámicas como el estrés parental (Fráchette y Romano, 2015), cuestiones étnicas o culturales (Holden, Hawk, Smith, Singh y Ashraf, 2017; Khoury-Kassabri, Attar-Schwartz y Zur, 2014) son también importantes.…”