J Abnorm Child Psychol DOI 10.1007/s10802-014-9890-9
Intergenerational Transmission of Corporal Punishment in China: the Moderating Role of Marital Satisfaction and Gender Meifang Wang & Xiaopei Xing & Jinxia Zhao
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract The goal of this study was to examine the intergenerational patterns in the transmission of parental corporal punishment in China and the moderating effects of marital satisfaction (of the second generation: G2) and gender (of three generations: G1, G2 and G3) on these patterns. Six hundred thirty-five father-mother dyads with preschool-aged children were recruited to participate in this survey. The results provided evidence of cross-generational continuity in parental corporal punishment in Chinese society and also supported the hypothesis that same-gender continuity in parental corporal punishment is stronger than cross-gender continuity. Moreover, it was found that marital satisfaction moderated the transmission of parental corporal punishment, and there were some interesting gender differences in the moderator effect. Specifically, marital satisfaction buffered the transmission of corporal punishment from grandmothers to mothers of daughters and to fathers of sons but strengthened the transmission from grandfathers to fathers of sons. The findings broaden our understanding of the factors and processes that account for both discontinuity and continuity in parental corporal punishment, particularly within the Chinese cultural context. Keywords Corporal punishment . Intergenerational transmission . Marital satisfaction . Gender . Chinese Corporal punishment is a strategy for disciplining children that is commonly used by parents (Straus 2001; Tang 2006) and it is defined as the use of physical force with the intention M. Wang (*) : X. Xing : J. Zhao Department of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, No.88 East Wenhua Road, Jinan 250014, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected] M. Wang e-mail: [email protected]
of causing the child to experience pain, but not injury, for the purpose of the correction of the child’s behavior (Straus 2001). There is growing evidence that children exposed to parental corporal punishment are at risk for a number of negative developmental outcomes, including aggression, depression and lower self-esteem (Fine et al. 2004; Gershoff 2002; Morris and Gibson 2012). Because of these findings, many researchers have tried to identify the causes of this discipline, and some of them have concluded that continuity of discipline across generations may have a particularly important influence on parental corporal punishment. Indeed, several large surveys have shown this effect (e.g., Bailey et al. 2009; Lunkenheimer et al. 2006). For example, using data from American parents with 3-year-old children, Lunkenheimer et al. (2006) found continuity in parental physical punishment from grandparents to parents. Similarly, Bailey and colleagues (2009) analyzed prospective longitudinal data from three generations and also found that parents who had experienced harsh parenting (including yelling and spanking) in their families of origin engaged in harsher and more frequent corporal punishment of their young children. Despite such progress, almost all of the studies in this area have been conducted in Western cultures; there is a dearth of research on the transmission of corporal punishment across generations in Chinese society. The overreliance on children and parents from Western families, especially North American families, has led to the criticism that the theories and recommendations developed from North American samples are not universal and may not apply to parents and children in other cultures (Dasen and Mishra 2000; Rogoff 2003). Within the context of traditional Chinese culture, some unique norms about childrearing, discipline, and values may facilitate the intergenerational transmission of parental corporal punishment. Specifically, the traditional Confucian ethic of filial piety is of central importance in traditional Chinese societies, and it emphasizes children’s duty to be obedient
J Abnorm Child Psychol
and attend to the needs of their parents (Ho 1986). Because parental authority is emphasized in traditional Chinese societies, punitive parenting, such as corporal punishment, may be considered relatively normal in Chinese families. Within this traditional context, Chinese children tend to view corporal punishment from their parents as a legitimate expression of parental authority and care. Thus, compared with American children, who tend to perceive high parental control as illegitimate and unfair, Chinese children tend to perceive this method of discipline as more appropriate and reasonable (Simons et al. 2000). From the social-cognitive perspective, individuals have a strong tendency to behave in ways that are consistent with their own attitudes about what is and is not appropriate (Deater-Deckard et al. 2003). Thus, when Chinese children who experienced harsh parenting in childhood become parents, they may be more likely to use hitting or spanking in a manner consistent with their parents compared with their American counterparts. In other words, it is possible that Chinese individuals are at higher risk of repeating the patterns of corporal punishment that they learned from their own parents. However, there are reasons to expect that the strength of transmission is weakening because of the social changes occurring in modern Chinese society. First, in recent decades, the introduction of Western values and ideologies such as liberty and individual freedom might have affected Chinese traditional values, thus possibly changing both parents’ childrearing practices and children’s perceptions of parental discipline. Additionally, independence and individuality in children are encouraged in Western pedagogy and the child has the right to be respected his/her human dignity. Such basic ideologies might have also affected the Chinese parents to some extent. It has been suggested that mainland Chinese parents who have contact with and understanding about Western patterns of child-rearing may be more likely to appreciate inductive reasoning and democratic forms of control rather than power assertion in their interactions with children (Xu et al. 2005). Meanwhile, research also suggests that Chinese children’s perceived normativeness of physical punishment is now lower than that in other European, Asian, and African nations (Lansford et al. 2005). Second, the implementation of the one-child policy has also created a “child-centered” democratic parenting approach that involves flexible and reasoned control, rather than restrictive and power-assertive methods, especially among the urban and well-educated population (Chang et al. 2003). Given the evidence that social changes have reduced the East–west differences in how parents socialize their children and how children interpret and respond to parental discipline (Chang et al. 2003), one might wonder whether the changes in modern China might make it impossible to discern the Chinese character of the transmission of parental corporal punishment. To date, however, only one study, conducted by Ho and Kang (1984), has provided preliminary insight into the
continuity and changes in Chinese parental practices over time. By comparing the child-rearing attitudes and behavior of Hong Kong Chinese grandparents and parents, they found that although filial piety no longer commanded the same degree of absolute observance as it once did and that paternal attitudes toward child rearing showed a greater departure from the traditional pattern, there was still a high degree of intergenerational agreement in maternal attitudes and behavior related to childcare (e.g., controlling child aggression). However, the results from a study in Hong Kong, the most Westernized city in China, may not generalize to mainland China considering that there are both variance versus invariance across geopolitical location and continuity versus change over a period of time (Ho 1986). Mainland China and Hong Kong differ greatly in political-social environment (e.g., “one country, two systems” principle in Hong Kong; the one-child policy in mainland) although they share the same Confucian ideology; therefore, Chinese people in two regions may have different parenting practices in their families due to the great impacts of social institution and social policies on family functioning. Given this, it is reasonable to suspect that there would be some disparity in the transmission of parental corporal punishment between Hong Kong and mainland China. More importantly, there is growing evidence about the negative consequences of corporal punishment in Chinese families (Chang et al. 2003; Xing et al. 2011; Xing and Wang 2013) and understanding the factors that influence Chinese parental corporal punishment, such as family-of-origin factors, is essential for preventing deleterious outcomes and promoting healthy child development. Given this, we were compelled to determine the degree to which parental corporal punishment is transmitted across generations in mainland China.
Gender Differences in Transmission The intergenerational transmission of parental corporal punishment is often explained using social learning theory, which argues that children may initiate and emulate aggressive discipline in their family of origin through social learning or identification processes and then display similar disciplinary techniques when the opportunity arises later in life (Bandura 1973). It is noteworthy that the studies that have evaluated the second generation (G2) gender have reported different patterns of transmission for mothers and fathers, although the results have been mixed. For example, using data from 888 intact American child-rearing families, Cappell and Heiner (1990) found an association between exposure to corporal punishment during childhood and the current use of such practices for mothers but not for fathers. However, Muller and colleagues found that both mothers’ and fathers’ use of physical punishment, as reported by the parents and their college-aged children, was predicted by their own disciplinary
J Abnorm Child Psychol
experiences in childhood, but the predictive power was stronger for mothers than for fathers (Muller et al. 1995). Expanding on previous studies, Lunkenheimer et al. (2006) examined the relationships between mothers’ and fathers’ current endorsement of physical punishment and their retrospective accounts of how they were disciplined by their own mothers and fathers in childhood and reported that the patterns of transmission differed by gender for both the first generation (G1) and the second generation (G2). Specifically, the mothers who were physically punished by their own mothers were more likely to endorse the use of physical punishment with their children, whereas it was exposure to paternal physical punishment in the original families that was positively related to the fathers’ current use of physical punishment with their children. These findings align with the gender-specific social learning model, which posits that the role modeling effect is facilitated by gender identification, and individuals thus tend to model the role played by their same-gender parent (Kwong et al. 2003). Of note, G2 parents’ physical response to their children’s misbehavior was not only associated with their childhood disciplinary experience from the same-gender G1 grandparent (Lunkenheimer et al. 2006), but also related to the gender of the third generation child (G3; Smetana 1989). For example, it has been found that mothers of 2-year-olds often responded to their daughters’ moral transgressions by reasoning, whereas they primarily responded to their sons’ moral transgressions with assertive discipline (Smetana 1989). Thus, more complete analyses should simultaneously consider the roles of G1, G2 and G3 gender as possible moderators of intergenerational transmission. Based on the gender-specific social learning model, it is possible that fathers may be more likely to look to grandfathers as models of appropriate parenting when disciplining their sons; however, mothers may be influenced more by the practices of grandmothers when disciplining their daughters. Unfortunately, these hypotheses have rarely been subjected to empirical testing. To date, only one study conducted by Simons and colleagues (Simons et al. 1991) has examined the roles of G1, G2 and G3 gender in the intergenerational transmission of harsh parenting, but the study did not provide strong support for the gender-specific model. In their study, exposure to maternal harsh parenting in childhood (including yelling, spanking, slapping, etc.) was associated with mothers’ harsh discipline of children of both genders and with fathers’ harsh discipline of their sons, whereas exposure to paternal harsh parenting in childhood was only related to fathers’ harsh discipline of their daughters. Traditional Chinese culture and child-rearing practices may create interesting gender differences in the intergenerational patterns of parental corporal punishment. In most traditional Chinese families, sons are often expected to continue the family line and the family business after their fathers. Thus, fathers are especially concerned that their sons are socialized
properly and therefore exert more control over their sons (Berndt et al. 1993; Ho 1986). However, given the centrality of the parenting role in the life course of women, fathers tend to leave the parenting of their daughters to mothers (Simons et al. 1991). Moreover, daughters are more often than sons expected to help their mothers with household chores in Chinese families (Berndt et al. 1993). More involvement and more time spent with their daughters would lead mothers to discipline their daughters more frequently. It is thus conceivable that in traditional Chinese culture, sons may be more likely to pay particular attention to their father’s style of parenting, while daughters may be more likely to learn or imitate their mother’s behavior. Given this traditional cultural background, we might expect that the current study would confirm the gender-specific modeling hypothesis that samegender continuity in parental corporal punishment would be stronger than cross-gender continuity in Chinese families. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that China is undergoing significant social and cultural changes. For example, in recent decades most mothers in mainland China have been employed outside the home and the joint responsibility of fathers and mothers are emphasized. Meanwhile, the enforcement of the one-child policy since 1979 may have dramatically increased gender equality and lessened gender differences in parental expectations for daughters and sons (Berndt et al. 1993). Thus, it is possible that fathers and mothers in contemporary Chinese society tend to adopt more equal caregiving roles and share similar practices in disciplining daughters and sons. Given this, it is important to test whether these changes could have weakened the presumed superiority of same-gender continuity over cross-gender continuity in Chinese parental corporal punishment.
Marital Satisfaction as a Moderating Factor Parental corporal punishment presents an interesting paradox. Although experiencing corporal punishment in one’s family of origin increases the likelihood of practicing these methods as a parent, not all parents who were exposed to corporal punishment during childhood repeat these patterns with their own children. Indeed, the results of previous studies have confirmed that parenting in the family of origin only accounts for a small to moderate proportion of the variance in the parenting practices of the subsequent generation (Conger et al. 2009; Kerr et al. 2009). Consequently, there is a need for more studies to investigate the intergenerational continuities and discontinuities in parenting. According to attachment theory, studying individuals’ interpersonal relationships (e.g., marital relationships in adulthood) may help to explain the discontinuity in the cycle of parental corporal punishment (Belsky et al. 2005; Egeland et al. 1988; Lunkenheimer et al. 2006). Specifically, children
J Abnorm Child Psychol
who experience harsh discipline from their parents may become insecurely attached to their parents (Egeland and Sroufe 1981). In adulthood, insecure attachment tends to influence many aspects of psychological functioning in these individuals, including parenting (Bowlby 1982). Although individuals’ internal working models are assumed to be quite resistant to change, it has been proposed that their internal representation of past attachment experiences could be restructured (e.g., through therapy or a positive new relationship after childhood) (Egeland et al. 1988). Indeed, empirical research on abusive or extreme practices has supported this proposition (Egeland et al. 1988; Putallaz et al. 1998). For example, evidence from high-risk mothers showed that abused mothers who broke the cycle of abuse were more likely to have had an emotionally supportive and satisfying relationship with a spouse or partner compared with the mothers who succumbed to the intergenerational cycle (Caliso and Milner 1992; Egeland et al. 1988). However, there is currently a major gap in our knowledge about the role of marital satisfaction in the transmission of less extreme but more common forms of parenting behavior, such as corporal punishment. Within the Chinese family systems, this issue is believed to be particularly important to study. Although the divorce rate in China has risen rapidly in recent years (Wang and Zhou 2010), Chinese couples generally regard the family unit as a whole, including relationships involving all members, especially children, as more important than the dyadic spousal relationship (Lu and Lin 1998). As a result of this inclusive and childcentered family socialization, many Chinese couples may not divorce even they have marital problems. This particular view on divorce may result in a further increase in marital dissatisfaction and couple conflict, which in turn, would be more likely to strengthen the transmission of corporal punishment in Chinese families. Also, it is important to note that despite the growing evidence that corporal punishment can be transmitted across generations for both mothers and fathers (Lunkenheimer et al. 2006; Simons et al. 1991), few studies of the transmission mechanisms have involved fathers. Moreover, as noted above, when examining the gender differences in the moderating mechanism, it is also necessary to include the gender of G1, G2 and G3 simultaneously in the analysis. In the current study, therefore, we attempted to explore the gender-related differences in the moderating effects of marital satisfaction on the intergenerational transmission of corporal punishment in Chinese families.
The Present Study To address these gaps in the literature, the present study examined the intergenerational patterns in the transmission of parental corporal punishment and the moderating effects
of marital satisfaction and gender on these patterns in a large sample of Chinese parents of preschool children. First, we expected that the parents who experienced corporal punishment in childhood would be more likely to use such discipline with their own children and that same-gender continuity in parental corporal punishment would be stronger than crossgender continuity in Chinese families. Second, it was expected that a satisfying marital relationship would prevent the experience of parental corporal punishment in the family of origin from being transmitted to the next generation, whereas dissatisfaction in the marital relationship would exacerbate the transmission. However, given the relative paucity of previous research on the gender differences in the moderating mechanisms, we did not draw strong hypotheses about gender differences but aimed to explore the possible relationships.
Method Participants Participants were 635 father-mother dyads (G2) with preschool-aged children (G3; 53.9 % boys, mean age= 4.69 years, SD=0.91, age range=2.92–6.42 years) in the current survey. All G2 parents came from two-parent households (G1). The mean ages of the fathers and mothers were 35.29 (SD=4.03; age range=27–53 years) and 33.05 (SD= 3.35; age range=25–50 years), respectively. Because of China’s single child policy, nearly 94 % of the children were reported to have no siblings. Most fathers and mothers were highly educated: 16.7 % of the fathers and 23.3 % of the mothers had a high school education, 67.6 % of the fathers and 63.6 % of the mothers had a college education, and approximately 13.0 % of the fathers and 9.6 % of the mothers had a postgraduate education. In terms of employment, 28.7 % of the fathers and 47.8 % of the mothers were employed in working-class jobs (e.g., factory workers), whereas 70.8 % of the fathers and 51.2 % of the mothers held a professional, managerial, or technical position (e.g., teachers, doctors, civil servants). The sample was mostly a middle-class sample. Procedure The children and their parents were recruited from two public kindergartens in the city of Jinan, located in Shandong Province in Eastern China. After obtaining parental informed consent, two packets (one for the mother and one for the father) containing the parental questionnaires were sent home with the participating children. In the attached instructions, the parents were made aware of the voluntary and confidential nature of this research. They were also instructed to complete the questionnaires separately at home and return them to
J Abnorm Child Psychol
school in sealed envelopes. Finally, the members of the research team collected the questionnaires from the classroom teachers. The data collection procedures were approved by the Institutional Review Board at Shandong Normal University. Measures Corporal Punishment Experiences in Childhood The adultrecall form of the Parent–child Conflict Tactics Scale was used to assess the parents’ disciplinary experiences in childhood (CTSPC, Straus et al. 1998). Twenty-two items are grouped into five subscales: Nonviolent Discipline (four items; e.g., “explaining why something was wrong”), Psychological Aggression (five items; e.g., “shouting, yelling, or screaming at me”), Corporal Punishment (six items; e.g., “spanking me on the bottom with hand”), Severe Physical Assault (three items; e.g., “hitting me with a fist or kicking me hard”), and Very Severe Physical Assault (four items; e.g., “burning or scalding me on purpose”). Of these subscales, the Corporal Punishment subscale was the primary focus of this study given the continuing controversy over the use of corporal punishment in contemporary Chinese societies and the wide variability in its use across families. Both fathers and mothers responded to the CTSPC items to indicate how often their parents (i.e., the child’s grandparents) engaged in each strategy during the year that they were 10-year-olds. Each item was repeated to capture the behavior of both grandmothers and grandfathers. The parents responded using the following scale: never (0); once (1); twice (2); 3 to 5 times (4); 6 to 10 times (8); 11 to 20 times (15); more than 20 times (25). The total scores for corporal punishment inflicted by grandmothers and by grandfathers were computed separately by summing the frequency scores of the subscale items for each parent. Cronbach’s α for the CTSPC-parent report in the previous studies based on Chinese samples has been found to range from 0.64 to 0.79 for the Corporal Punishment subscale (Tang 2006; Wang and Xing 2014) and Cronbach’s α in previous western studies has been reported from 0.41 to 0.66 (Fine et al. 2004; Straus et al. 1998; Straus 2001). In the present study, the alphas for the fathers’ and mothers’ reported exposures to paternal corporal punishment were 0.80 and 0.48, respectively. The alphas for fathers’ and mothers’ reported exposures to maternal corporal punishment were 0.73 and 0.68, respectively. Although not particularly high, these alpha coefficients are generally similar to those reported above. The reliability of CP subscale is relatively low for mothers’ report of their fathers’ (i.e., the grandfathers’) corporal punishment, probably because fathers were less engaged in daughter-rearing before China has undergone recent and significant social and cultural changes. Furthermore, fathers who engaged in one harsh resolution strategy did not necessarily engage in others (Straus et al. 1998). The skewed distributions drastically lower correlations between items and reduce alpha because alpha is
a function of the size of correlations between items (Straus et al. 1998). Current Use of Corporal Punishment The corporal punishment subscale of CTSPC (Straus et al. 1998) was also used to assess mother-to-child and father-to-child corporal punishment. Separately, the fathers and the mothers rated how often they applied specific behaviors toward their children in the past year on a scale from 0 (never) to 6 (more than 20 times a year). The current use of corporal punishment was scored separately for mothers and fathers by summing the frequency scores of the subscale items. In the present study, the alphas for the fathers’ and the mothers’ reported use of corporal punishment were 0.57 and 0.72, respectively. These alphas are consistent with those obtained in previous research (Fine et al. 2004; Straus et al. 1998). Marital Satisfaction The fathers and the mothers reported their overall marital satisfaction on the 15-item Marital Adjustment Test (MAT; Locke and Wallace 1968). The 15 items (e.g., “Do you and your mate engage in outside interests together?”) are answered on a variety of response scales. This scale is among the most widely used measures of marital relationships in the Chinese culture (e.g., Tang 2006). A high score on this scale represents a high level of marital satisfaction. For the present study, the internal reliability of this scale was 0.72 for the fathers and 0.73 for the mothers. These alphas are also consistent with those obtained in previous research (Tang 2006). Demographic Characteristics Demographic information was collected from both the fathers and the mothers. This study included items related to the child’s age and gender, paternal/ maternal education and current paternal/maternal occupation. The information about the parents’ educational attainment and current occupations was used to calculate an index of socioeconomic status (Shi and Shen 2007). Paternal/maternal education was coded on a 6-point scale ranging from 1 (uneducated) to 6 (master's or doctoral degree) and occupation was coded on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (unemployed) to 5 (professional/executive). For each family, the responses on educational attainment and current occupation of both mother and father were summed and SES scores ranged from 4 to 22, with higher scores indicating higher family SES.
Results Preliminary Analyses Data were screened for integrity prior to analysis. Mean substitution was used to impute values for any missing items given that the percent of respondents with missing items is
J Abnorm Child Psychol
only 3.05 % (Sawilowsky 2007). Table 1 shows the means and the standard deviations for all of the variables included in the analyses separately for mothers and fathers. As shown, the fathers experienced more corporal punishment from both the grandfathers and the grandmothers and reported higher levels of marital satisfaction than the mothers. However, the mothers engaged in more corporal punishment of their children than the fathers. In addition, the results of the paired-sample t-tests showed that the fathers were equally apt to be corporally punished by grandfathers and grandmothers, t(634)=−0.20, p>0.05, whereas the mothers were more likely to be spanked by grandmothers than by grandfathers, t(634)=6.33, p0.05, or by the age of the child, r(634)= −0.03 and 0.01, ps>0.05. Family SES was negatively associated only with the fathers’ current use of corporal punishment on their daughters, r(293)=−0.16, ps
Intergenerational Transmission of Corporal Punishment in China: the Moderating Role of Marital Satisfaction and Gender Meifang Wang & Xiaopei Xing & Jinxia Zhao
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract The goal of this study was to examine the intergenerational patterns in the transmission of parental corporal punishment in China and the moderating effects of marital satisfaction (of the second generation: G2) and gender (of three generations: G1, G2 and G3) on these patterns. Six hundred thirty-five father-mother dyads with preschool-aged children were recruited to participate in this survey. The results provided evidence of cross-generational continuity in parental corporal punishment in Chinese society and also supported the hypothesis that same-gender continuity in parental corporal punishment is stronger than cross-gender continuity. Moreover, it was found that marital satisfaction moderated the transmission of parental corporal punishment, and there were some interesting gender differences in the moderator effect. Specifically, marital satisfaction buffered the transmission of corporal punishment from grandmothers to mothers of daughters and to fathers of sons but strengthened the transmission from grandfathers to fathers of sons. The findings broaden our understanding of the factors and processes that account for both discontinuity and continuity in parental corporal punishment, particularly within the Chinese cultural context. Keywords Corporal punishment . Intergenerational transmission . Marital satisfaction . Gender . Chinese Corporal punishment is a strategy for disciplining children that is commonly used by parents (Straus 2001; Tang 2006) and it is defined as the use of physical force with the intention M. Wang (*) : X. Xing : J. Zhao Department of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, No.88 East Wenhua Road, Jinan 250014, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected] M. Wang e-mail: [email protected]
of causing the child to experience pain, but not injury, for the purpose of the correction of the child’s behavior (Straus 2001). There is growing evidence that children exposed to parental corporal punishment are at risk for a number of negative developmental outcomes, including aggression, depression and lower self-esteem (Fine et al. 2004; Gershoff 2002; Morris and Gibson 2012). Because of these findings, many researchers have tried to identify the causes of this discipline, and some of them have concluded that continuity of discipline across generations may have a particularly important influence on parental corporal punishment. Indeed, several large surveys have shown this effect (e.g., Bailey et al. 2009; Lunkenheimer et al. 2006). For example, using data from American parents with 3-year-old children, Lunkenheimer et al. (2006) found continuity in parental physical punishment from grandparents to parents. Similarly, Bailey and colleagues (2009) analyzed prospective longitudinal data from three generations and also found that parents who had experienced harsh parenting (including yelling and spanking) in their families of origin engaged in harsher and more frequent corporal punishment of their young children. Despite such progress, almost all of the studies in this area have been conducted in Western cultures; there is a dearth of research on the transmission of corporal punishment across generations in Chinese society. The overreliance on children and parents from Western families, especially North American families, has led to the criticism that the theories and recommendations developed from North American samples are not universal and may not apply to parents and children in other cultures (Dasen and Mishra 2000; Rogoff 2003). Within the context of traditional Chinese culture, some unique norms about childrearing, discipline, and values may facilitate the intergenerational transmission of parental corporal punishment. Specifically, the traditional Confucian ethic of filial piety is of central importance in traditional Chinese societies, and it emphasizes children’s duty to be obedient
J Abnorm Child Psychol
and attend to the needs of their parents (Ho 1986). Because parental authority is emphasized in traditional Chinese societies, punitive parenting, such as corporal punishment, may be considered relatively normal in Chinese families. Within this traditional context, Chinese children tend to view corporal punishment from their parents as a legitimate expression of parental authority and care. Thus, compared with American children, who tend to perceive high parental control as illegitimate and unfair, Chinese children tend to perceive this method of discipline as more appropriate and reasonable (Simons et al. 2000). From the social-cognitive perspective, individuals have a strong tendency to behave in ways that are consistent with their own attitudes about what is and is not appropriate (Deater-Deckard et al. 2003). Thus, when Chinese children who experienced harsh parenting in childhood become parents, they may be more likely to use hitting or spanking in a manner consistent with their parents compared with their American counterparts. In other words, it is possible that Chinese individuals are at higher risk of repeating the patterns of corporal punishment that they learned from their own parents. However, there are reasons to expect that the strength of transmission is weakening because of the social changes occurring in modern Chinese society. First, in recent decades, the introduction of Western values and ideologies such as liberty and individual freedom might have affected Chinese traditional values, thus possibly changing both parents’ childrearing practices and children’s perceptions of parental discipline. Additionally, independence and individuality in children are encouraged in Western pedagogy and the child has the right to be respected his/her human dignity. Such basic ideologies might have also affected the Chinese parents to some extent. It has been suggested that mainland Chinese parents who have contact with and understanding about Western patterns of child-rearing may be more likely to appreciate inductive reasoning and democratic forms of control rather than power assertion in their interactions with children (Xu et al. 2005). Meanwhile, research also suggests that Chinese children’s perceived normativeness of physical punishment is now lower than that in other European, Asian, and African nations (Lansford et al. 2005). Second, the implementation of the one-child policy has also created a “child-centered” democratic parenting approach that involves flexible and reasoned control, rather than restrictive and power-assertive methods, especially among the urban and well-educated population (Chang et al. 2003). Given the evidence that social changes have reduced the East–west differences in how parents socialize their children and how children interpret and respond to parental discipline (Chang et al. 2003), one might wonder whether the changes in modern China might make it impossible to discern the Chinese character of the transmission of parental corporal punishment. To date, however, only one study, conducted by Ho and Kang (1984), has provided preliminary insight into the
continuity and changes in Chinese parental practices over time. By comparing the child-rearing attitudes and behavior of Hong Kong Chinese grandparents and parents, they found that although filial piety no longer commanded the same degree of absolute observance as it once did and that paternal attitudes toward child rearing showed a greater departure from the traditional pattern, there was still a high degree of intergenerational agreement in maternal attitudes and behavior related to childcare (e.g., controlling child aggression). However, the results from a study in Hong Kong, the most Westernized city in China, may not generalize to mainland China considering that there are both variance versus invariance across geopolitical location and continuity versus change over a period of time (Ho 1986). Mainland China and Hong Kong differ greatly in political-social environment (e.g., “one country, two systems” principle in Hong Kong; the one-child policy in mainland) although they share the same Confucian ideology; therefore, Chinese people in two regions may have different parenting practices in their families due to the great impacts of social institution and social policies on family functioning. Given this, it is reasonable to suspect that there would be some disparity in the transmission of parental corporal punishment between Hong Kong and mainland China. More importantly, there is growing evidence about the negative consequences of corporal punishment in Chinese families (Chang et al. 2003; Xing et al. 2011; Xing and Wang 2013) and understanding the factors that influence Chinese parental corporal punishment, such as family-of-origin factors, is essential for preventing deleterious outcomes and promoting healthy child development. Given this, we were compelled to determine the degree to which parental corporal punishment is transmitted across generations in mainland China.
Gender Differences in Transmission The intergenerational transmission of parental corporal punishment is often explained using social learning theory, which argues that children may initiate and emulate aggressive discipline in their family of origin through social learning or identification processes and then display similar disciplinary techniques when the opportunity arises later in life (Bandura 1973). It is noteworthy that the studies that have evaluated the second generation (G2) gender have reported different patterns of transmission for mothers and fathers, although the results have been mixed. For example, using data from 888 intact American child-rearing families, Cappell and Heiner (1990) found an association between exposure to corporal punishment during childhood and the current use of such practices for mothers but not for fathers. However, Muller and colleagues found that both mothers’ and fathers’ use of physical punishment, as reported by the parents and their college-aged children, was predicted by their own disciplinary
J Abnorm Child Psychol
experiences in childhood, but the predictive power was stronger for mothers than for fathers (Muller et al. 1995). Expanding on previous studies, Lunkenheimer et al. (2006) examined the relationships between mothers’ and fathers’ current endorsement of physical punishment and their retrospective accounts of how they were disciplined by their own mothers and fathers in childhood and reported that the patterns of transmission differed by gender for both the first generation (G1) and the second generation (G2). Specifically, the mothers who were physically punished by their own mothers were more likely to endorse the use of physical punishment with their children, whereas it was exposure to paternal physical punishment in the original families that was positively related to the fathers’ current use of physical punishment with their children. These findings align with the gender-specific social learning model, which posits that the role modeling effect is facilitated by gender identification, and individuals thus tend to model the role played by their same-gender parent (Kwong et al. 2003). Of note, G2 parents’ physical response to their children’s misbehavior was not only associated with their childhood disciplinary experience from the same-gender G1 grandparent (Lunkenheimer et al. 2006), but also related to the gender of the third generation child (G3; Smetana 1989). For example, it has been found that mothers of 2-year-olds often responded to their daughters’ moral transgressions by reasoning, whereas they primarily responded to their sons’ moral transgressions with assertive discipline (Smetana 1989). Thus, more complete analyses should simultaneously consider the roles of G1, G2 and G3 gender as possible moderators of intergenerational transmission. Based on the gender-specific social learning model, it is possible that fathers may be more likely to look to grandfathers as models of appropriate parenting when disciplining their sons; however, mothers may be influenced more by the practices of grandmothers when disciplining their daughters. Unfortunately, these hypotheses have rarely been subjected to empirical testing. To date, only one study conducted by Simons and colleagues (Simons et al. 1991) has examined the roles of G1, G2 and G3 gender in the intergenerational transmission of harsh parenting, but the study did not provide strong support for the gender-specific model. In their study, exposure to maternal harsh parenting in childhood (including yelling, spanking, slapping, etc.) was associated with mothers’ harsh discipline of children of both genders and with fathers’ harsh discipline of their sons, whereas exposure to paternal harsh parenting in childhood was only related to fathers’ harsh discipline of their daughters. Traditional Chinese culture and child-rearing practices may create interesting gender differences in the intergenerational patterns of parental corporal punishment. In most traditional Chinese families, sons are often expected to continue the family line and the family business after their fathers. Thus, fathers are especially concerned that their sons are socialized
properly and therefore exert more control over their sons (Berndt et al. 1993; Ho 1986). However, given the centrality of the parenting role in the life course of women, fathers tend to leave the parenting of their daughters to mothers (Simons et al. 1991). Moreover, daughters are more often than sons expected to help their mothers with household chores in Chinese families (Berndt et al. 1993). More involvement and more time spent with their daughters would lead mothers to discipline their daughters more frequently. It is thus conceivable that in traditional Chinese culture, sons may be more likely to pay particular attention to their father’s style of parenting, while daughters may be more likely to learn or imitate their mother’s behavior. Given this traditional cultural background, we might expect that the current study would confirm the gender-specific modeling hypothesis that samegender continuity in parental corporal punishment would be stronger than cross-gender continuity in Chinese families. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that China is undergoing significant social and cultural changes. For example, in recent decades most mothers in mainland China have been employed outside the home and the joint responsibility of fathers and mothers are emphasized. Meanwhile, the enforcement of the one-child policy since 1979 may have dramatically increased gender equality and lessened gender differences in parental expectations for daughters and sons (Berndt et al. 1993). Thus, it is possible that fathers and mothers in contemporary Chinese society tend to adopt more equal caregiving roles and share similar practices in disciplining daughters and sons. Given this, it is important to test whether these changes could have weakened the presumed superiority of same-gender continuity over cross-gender continuity in Chinese parental corporal punishment.
Marital Satisfaction as a Moderating Factor Parental corporal punishment presents an interesting paradox. Although experiencing corporal punishment in one’s family of origin increases the likelihood of practicing these methods as a parent, not all parents who were exposed to corporal punishment during childhood repeat these patterns with their own children. Indeed, the results of previous studies have confirmed that parenting in the family of origin only accounts for a small to moderate proportion of the variance in the parenting practices of the subsequent generation (Conger et al. 2009; Kerr et al. 2009). Consequently, there is a need for more studies to investigate the intergenerational continuities and discontinuities in parenting. According to attachment theory, studying individuals’ interpersonal relationships (e.g., marital relationships in adulthood) may help to explain the discontinuity in the cycle of parental corporal punishment (Belsky et al. 2005; Egeland et al. 1988; Lunkenheimer et al. 2006). Specifically, children
J Abnorm Child Psychol
who experience harsh discipline from their parents may become insecurely attached to their parents (Egeland and Sroufe 1981). In adulthood, insecure attachment tends to influence many aspects of psychological functioning in these individuals, including parenting (Bowlby 1982). Although individuals’ internal working models are assumed to be quite resistant to change, it has been proposed that their internal representation of past attachment experiences could be restructured (e.g., through therapy or a positive new relationship after childhood) (Egeland et al. 1988). Indeed, empirical research on abusive or extreme practices has supported this proposition (Egeland et al. 1988; Putallaz et al. 1998). For example, evidence from high-risk mothers showed that abused mothers who broke the cycle of abuse were more likely to have had an emotionally supportive and satisfying relationship with a spouse or partner compared with the mothers who succumbed to the intergenerational cycle (Caliso and Milner 1992; Egeland et al. 1988). However, there is currently a major gap in our knowledge about the role of marital satisfaction in the transmission of less extreme but more common forms of parenting behavior, such as corporal punishment. Within the Chinese family systems, this issue is believed to be particularly important to study. Although the divorce rate in China has risen rapidly in recent years (Wang and Zhou 2010), Chinese couples generally regard the family unit as a whole, including relationships involving all members, especially children, as more important than the dyadic spousal relationship (Lu and Lin 1998). As a result of this inclusive and childcentered family socialization, many Chinese couples may not divorce even they have marital problems. This particular view on divorce may result in a further increase in marital dissatisfaction and couple conflict, which in turn, would be more likely to strengthen the transmission of corporal punishment in Chinese families. Also, it is important to note that despite the growing evidence that corporal punishment can be transmitted across generations for both mothers and fathers (Lunkenheimer et al. 2006; Simons et al. 1991), few studies of the transmission mechanisms have involved fathers. Moreover, as noted above, when examining the gender differences in the moderating mechanism, it is also necessary to include the gender of G1, G2 and G3 simultaneously in the analysis. In the current study, therefore, we attempted to explore the gender-related differences in the moderating effects of marital satisfaction on the intergenerational transmission of corporal punishment in Chinese families.
The Present Study To address these gaps in the literature, the present study examined the intergenerational patterns in the transmission of parental corporal punishment and the moderating effects
of marital satisfaction and gender on these patterns in a large sample of Chinese parents of preschool children. First, we expected that the parents who experienced corporal punishment in childhood would be more likely to use such discipline with their own children and that same-gender continuity in parental corporal punishment would be stronger than crossgender continuity in Chinese families. Second, it was expected that a satisfying marital relationship would prevent the experience of parental corporal punishment in the family of origin from being transmitted to the next generation, whereas dissatisfaction in the marital relationship would exacerbate the transmission. However, given the relative paucity of previous research on the gender differences in the moderating mechanisms, we did not draw strong hypotheses about gender differences but aimed to explore the possible relationships.
Method Participants Participants were 635 father-mother dyads (G2) with preschool-aged children (G3; 53.9 % boys, mean age= 4.69 years, SD=0.91, age range=2.92–6.42 years) in the current survey. All G2 parents came from two-parent households (G1). The mean ages of the fathers and mothers were 35.29 (SD=4.03; age range=27–53 years) and 33.05 (SD= 3.35; age range=25–50 years), respectively. Because of China’s single child policy, nearly 94 % of the children were reported to have no siblings. Most fathers and mothers were highly educated: 16.7 % of the fathers and 23.3 % of the mothers had a high school education, 67.6 % of the fathers and 63.6 % of the mothers had a college education, and approximately 13.0 % of the fathers and 9.6 % of the mothers had a postgraduate education. In terms of employment, 28.7 % of the fathers and 47.8 % of the mothers were employed in working-class jobs (e.g., factory workers), whereas 70.8 % of the fathers and 51.2 % of the mothers held a professional, managerial, or technical position (e.g., teachers, doctors, civil servants). The sample was mostly a middle-class sample. Procedure The children and their parents were recruited from two public kindergartens in the city of Jinan, located in Shandong Province in Eastern China. After obtaining parental informed consent, two packets (one for the mother and one for the father) containing the parental questionnaires were sent home with the participating children. In the attached instructions, the parents were made aware of the voluntary and confidential nature of this research. They were also instructed to complete the questionnaires separately at home and return them to
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school in sealed envelopes. Finally, the members of the research team collected the questionnaires from the classroom teachers. The data collection procedures were approved by the Institutional Review Board at Shandong Normal University. Measures Corporal Punishment Experiences in Childhood The adultrecall form of the Parent–child Conflict Tactics Scale was used to assess the parents’ disciplinary experiences in childhood (CTSPC, Straus et al. 1998). Twenty-two items are grouped into five subscales: Nonviolent Discipline (four items; e.g., “explaining why something was wrong”), Psychological Aggression (five items; e.g., “shouting, yelling, or screaming at me”), Corporal Punishment (six items; e.g., “spanking me on the bottom with hand”), Severe Physical Assault (three items; e.g., “hitting me with a fist or kicking me hard”), and Very Severe Physical Assault (four items; e.g., “burning or scalding me on purpose”). Of these subscales, the Corporal Punishment subscale was the primary focus of this study given the continuing controversy over the use of corporal punishment in contemporary Chinese societies and the wide variability in its use across families. Both fathers and mothers responded to the CTSPC items to indicate how often their parents (i.e., the child’s grandparents) engaged in each strategy during the year that they were 10-year-olds. Each item was repeated to capture the behavior of both grandmothers and grandfathers. The parents responded using the following scale: never (0); once (1); twice (2); 3 to 5 times (4); 6 to 10 times (8); 11 to 20 times (15); more than 20 times (25). The total scores for corporal punishment inflicted by grandmothers and by grandfathers were computed separately by summing the frequency scores of the subscale items for each parent. Cronbach’s α for the CTSPC-parent report in the previous studies based on Chinese samples has been found to range from 0.64 to 0.79 for the Corporal Punishment subscale (Tang 2006; Wang and Xing 2014) and Cronbach’s α in previous western studies has been reported from 0.41 to 0.66 (Fine et al. 2004; Straus et al. 1998; Straus 2001). In the present study, the alphas for the fathers’ and mothers’ reported exposures to paternal corporal punishment were 0.80 and 0.48, respectively. The alphas for fathers’ and mothers’ reported exposures to maternal corporal punishment were 0.73 and 0.68, respectively. Although not particularly high, these alpha coefficients are generally similar to those reported above. The reliability of CP subscale is relatively low for mothers’ report of their fathers’ (i.e., the grandfathers’) corporal punishment, probably because fathers were less engaged in daughter-rearing before China has undergone recent and significant social and cultural changes. Furthermore, fathers who engaged in one harsh resolution strategy did not necessarily engage in others (Straus et al. 1998). The skewed distributions drastically lower correlations between items and reduce alpha because alpha is
a function of the size of correlations between items (Straus et al. 1998). Current Use of Corporal Punishment The corporal punishment subscale of CTSPC (Straus et al. 1998) was also used to assess mother-to-child and father-to-child corporal punishment. Separately, the fathers and the mothers rated how often they applied specific behaviors toward their children in the past year on a scale from 0 (never) to 6 (more than 20 times a year). The current use of corporal punishment was scored separately for mothers and fathers by summing the frequency scores of the subscale items. In the present study, the alphas for the fathers’ and the mothers’ reported use of corporal punishment were 0.57 and 0.72, respectively. These alphas are consistent with those obtained in previous research (Fine et al. 2004; Straus et al. 1998). Marital Satisfaction The fathers and the mothers reported their overall marital satisfaction on the 15-item Marital Adjustment Test (MAT; Locke and Wallace 1968). The 15 items (e.g., “Do you and your mate engage in outside interests together?”) are answered on a variety of response scales. This scale is among the most widely used measures of marital relationships in the Chinese culture (e.g., Tang 2006). A high score on this scale represents a high level of marital satisfaction. For the present study, the internal reliability of this scale was 0.72 for the fathers and 0.73 for the mothers. These alphas are also consistent with those obtained in previous research (Tang 2006). Demographic Characteristics Demographic information was collected from both the fathers and the mothers. This study included items related to the child’s age and gender, paternal/ maternal education and current paternal/maternal occupation. The information about the parents’ educational attainment and current occupations was used to calculate an index of socioeconomic status (Shi and Shen 2007). Paternal/maternal education was coded on a 6-point scale ranging from 1 (uneducated) to 6 (master's or doctoral degree) and occupation was coded on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (unemployed) to 5 (professional/executive). For each family, the responses on educational attainment and current occupation of both mother and father were summed and SES scores ranged from 4 to 22, with higher scores indicating higher family SES.
Results Preliminary Analyses Data were screened for integrity prior to analysis. Mean substitution was used to impute values for any missing items given that the percent of respondents with missing items is
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only 3.05 % (Sawilowsky 2007). Table 1 shows the means and the standard deviations for all of the variables included in the analyses separately for mothers and fathers. As shown, the fathers experienced more corporal punishment from both the grandfathers and the grandmothers and reported higher levels of marital satisfaction than the mothers. However, the mothers engaged in more corporal punishment of their children than the fathers. In addition, the results of the paired-sample t-tests showed that the fathers were equally apt to be corporally punished by grandfathers and grandmothers, t(634)=−0.20, p>0.05, whereas the mothers were more likely to be spanked by grandmothers than by grandfathers, t(634)=6.33, p0.05, or by the age of the child, r(634)= −0.03 and 0.01, ps>0.05. Family SES was negatively associated only with the fathers’ current use of corporal punishment on their daughters, r(293)=−0.16, ps
