Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Contact information: R. This study examined the prevalence and correlates of spanking and verbal punishment in a community sample of Latino immigrant families with young children, as well as the association of spanking and verbal punishment with child internalizing and externalizing problems 1 year later. Parenting context e. Parent and teacher assessments of child internalizing and externalizing were also collected at baseline and 12 months later.
At Time 1, male child gender was positively correlated with concurrent spanking; familial social support and U. Verbal punishment at Time 1 was associated with externalizing problems at Time 2 among both Mexican and Dominican American children, and this relation was not moderated.
Additionally, verbal punishment was associated with Time 2 child internalizing problems among Mexican American children. There were no significant associations between spanking and later child internalizing or externalizing behaviors. It is important that researchers examine both physical and verbal discipline strategies to understand their unique influences on Latino child outcomes, as well as contextual influences that may elucidate the use and long-term effects of spanking and verbal punishment on Latino children at different developmental stages.
Keywords: Respeto , discipline, early childhood, Latino families, internalizing, externalizing. Much of this literature has focused on African American families in comparison to European American families, and little is known about these associations in Latino families but see Coley et al. To address this gap, the present study capitalizes on longitudinal data from a large community sample of Latino immigrant families of preschool aged children to better understand parental discipline practices and their relation to child functioning in early childhood.
Social learning theory, for example, suggests that exposure to parental aggression can disinhibit aggressive behavior in children, inculcating aggressive problem-solving scripts and modeling aggression as an acceptable form of behavior. Thus, children who interpret punitive discipline as a form of rejection may generalize their negative representations of parent-child interactions to themselves, thereby developing less emotional security and greater levels of insecurity and anxiety.
