Corporal Punishment By Parents And Associated Parent-child Relational Qualities In Early Adolescents: Moderation By Perceived Appropriateness And Normativeness

Corporal punishment has long been one of the most controversial topics in the field of parental discipline. Corporal punishment is a kind of physical punishment which is defined as the use of physical force with the intention of causing a child pain, but not injury, for the purposes of correction or control of the child's behavior. It is used as a major method of discipline by parents. Many studies have shown that corporal punishment is a discipline practice commonly used around the world, while research done in this area is mostly in the West, and in our country, research on corporal punishment is still relatively rare. In addition, parent-child relationship is one of the classical topics in psychological research, while studies indicate that corporal punishment would bring bad effects to the quality of parent-child relationship. And the potential for parental corporal punishment to disrupt the parent-child relationship is thought to be a main disadvantage of its use. However, these conclusions are mainly based on theories, and the studies of the parent-child quality are only concerned with parent-child cohesion. What's more, the key to understand children's feelings on corporal punishment is to comprehend how a child perceives and evaluates corporal punishment, whereas there are limitations both on empirical research and research methods, and agreements on conclusions are far from reached. Therefore, this study, as an empirical research about junior high school students, intends to examine the relationship between corporal punishment and parent-child relational qualities. The study concerns with parent-child cohesion and parent-child conflict, conducted by Gershoff's process-context model, mainly to study whether the perceived appropriateness and normativeness toward parental corporal punishment would moderate the above association.This study applies cross-sectional study approach,999 students grade Seven, Eight, and Nine from two middle schools of Jinan City are selected as participants. The study adopts self-report questionnaires, including the Conflict Tactics Scale of Parent-Child(CTSPC), Perceived Appropriateness of Corporal Punishment Questionnaire, Perceived Normativeness of Corporal Punishment Questionnaire, and family background(i.e, family structure, family socioeconomic status), collecting data of parental corporal punishment behaviors, perceptions of appropriateness and Normativeness of corporal punishment and quality of parent-child relationship, The main conclusions are as follows:1 About 47.9% of the middle school students have suffered corporal punishment in the past year, and for those students, the frequency of corporal punishment is about 11.65 per year. The proportion of students suffered from severe corporal punishment is 75.8%. Specifically speaking, in the past year, corporal punishment from father accounts for 32.8%, and it is 39.2% for mother corporal punishment. For those middle school students who suffered from corporal punishment, the average number of being corporal punished by father is 7.70, and it comes to 7.79 for punishment from mother. As to severe corporal punishment, it accounts for 68.3% from father, and 74.7% from mother.2 The prevalence, frequency and severity of boys suffered corporal punishment from father are higher or slightly higher than girls, while it is only higher in the prevalence and severity for mother corporal punishment, and as for frequency of mother corporal punishment, there is no difference of gender. The prevalence of students suffered from father corporal punishment in grade Seven and Eight is significantly higher than that of students of grade Nine, and no difference is seen for grade Seven and Eight students; For students of grade Eight, they receive significantly more corporal punishment from mother than grade Seven and Nine students. There is no difference for grade Seven and Nine students; and there is no difference in frequency and severity of corporal punishment from parents for students of any grades. Family socioeconomic status can not predict how much corporal punishment junior high school students will suffer from father or mother.3 There is a significant negative correlation between father corporal punishment and cohesion for junior high school students and there is a significant positive correlation between father corporal punishment and conflict. It is the same with mother corporal punishment to cohesion and conflict.4 Appropriateness perception of corporal punishment by parents of junior high school students moderate the association between corporal punishment and cohesion both for father and mother, but it doesn't work for easing conflicts between parents and child.5 The perception of normativeness of junior high school students can also moderate the association between corporal punishment and cohesion both for father and mother, and as for easing the parent-child conflict, it does not work.