A new international study examining parenting practices and young children’s behaviour across 14 countries has found that mothers who report more frequent shouting, physical punishment or withdrawal of privileges also report more behavioural and emotional difficulties in their toddlers. The research links these disciplinary methods to both outward-directed problems such as aggression and inward-directed issues like anxiety.
The study, conducted with mothers and their toddlers as part of the Joint Effort Toddler Temperament Consortium, looked at five disciplinary techniques: telling a child to reflect on their actions, shouting or swearing, spanking or hitting, withdrawing privileges, and separating the child through time-outs. The researchers aimed to understand how coercive parenting practices relate to early behavioural problems across different cultures.
Involving 865 children aged between 17 and 40 months (with an average age of about 27 months) and their mothers, the sample spanned Belgium, Brazil, Chile, China, Finland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Romania, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Turkey and the United States. Countries contributed between 49 and 112 families, with clinical diagnoses excluded.
Mothers completed a routine questionnaire on daily parenting practices and also filled out the Child Behavior Checklist, which measures internalising and externalising problems as well as total behavioural difficulties. The researchers found that mothers who reported higher use of shouting, hitting and withdrawing privileges tended to report more overall behavioural problems in their children.
Of the three practices, shouting showed the strongest association with total problems. A one standard deviation rise in shouting was linked to a 0.34 standard deviation increase in total problems, compared with 0.25 for hitting and 0.14 for withdrawing privileges. All three practices were connected with internalising problems, while only shouting and withdrawing privileges were associated with externalising problems.
Practices such as telling children to reflect on their actions and time-outs did not show a link to behavioural problems, though they did not demonstrate a clear reduction in problems either.
The researchers were surprised to see the link between withdrawing privileges and behavioural problems, noting it is a technique often recommended in parent-training programmes. They suggested that this approach might be used in relation to existing problems, delivered with an aggressive tone, or may simply be unsuitable for toddlers at such a young age.
The study also observed cross-country variation in how these practices related to internalising problems. The associations were strongest in the Chinese sample and weakest in the United States and Finland, leading researchers to speculate that cultural norms surrounding shame and socialisation could influence the impact of such disciplinary methods. Externalising problems appeared to be more consistently related to the practices across the countries studied.
Frequency data showed that shouting was most common in Russia, China and Brazil and least common in Chile and the United States. Hitting peaked in Brazil and was least frequent in Finland, while withdrawing privileges occurred most often in Spain and least often in Russia.
The authors emphasised that the findings point to actionable components of parenting that could be addressed through education and behavioural interventions, potentially reducing or preventing emotional and behavioural issues in early childhood. They also noted that the results should be interpreted with caution, given the cross-sectional design, the possibility that children’s behaviour shapes parental responses, and potential reporting biases. The measures relied on single questionnaire items, and the country samples were relatively small, which limited statistical power to detect differences between cultures.
Written as “Links between Discipline Practices and Early Childhood Behavior Problems: Universal or Culture-Specific?”, the study lists Ela Sehic as lead author, alongside a broad group of colleagues, with the Joint Effort Toddler Temperament Consortium contributing to the cross-national analysis.
