Speaking of discipline: The nexus between discipline, parental type, parental role strain and achievement

My dissertation deals with the relatively unexplored linkages between discipline, types of families (with a particular focus on adopted children), and academic achievement. Due to a lack of data there has not been enough material available to look at this topic broadly. The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study from the National Center for Education Statistics provides the data necessary to explore these issues. My contribution to the literature on discipline includes a more nuanced measure of discipline. This contribution is important given that most previous research tends to oversimplify discipline into dichotomies such as uses corporal punishment or not rather than a more detailed description of how parents discipline. Latent class analysis allows for a more robust, inclusive, and realistic assessment of the types of discipline parents are willing to use when disciplining young children. With latent class analysis I identified three categories of parental disciplinarians: gentle, laissez faire, and harsh.;I employed secondary data analysis to investigate linkages between the family, discipline and academic performance. In the first segment of the analysis I find that substitute parents (adoptive and stepparents) are no more or less likely to be gentle, laissez faire or harsh disciplinarians. Parental role strain however is a strong predictor of being a harsh disciplinarian. Initially, in the second segment I find that harsh disciplinarians have children with lower reading and science scores than gentle and laissez faire disciplinarians. However, when all control variables are included the relationship disappears. By injecting each variable independently into the model, I discover that race is the key variable. Ultimately I find that white gentle disciplinarians have children who score higher in reading and than harsh disciplinarians and that harsh disciplinarians score higher than children of laissez faire disciplinarians. However, this relationship does not hold for math nor does it stand for other race and ethnic groups. Race and ethnicity play a pivotal role in types of discipline that parents employed with their children. Not only do some racial categories employ different discipline strategies, in fact, these discipline strategies have different associations depending on race and ethnicity. This finding supports a cultural relativist perspective and adds to the belief that using white middle class as a yardstick for measuring parenting is shortsighted.