A cross-cultural examination of the link between corporal punishment and adolescent antisocial behavior

Several studies with older children have reported a positive relationship b etween parental use of corporal punishment and child conduct problems. This has lend some social scientists to conclude that physical discipline foste rs antisocial behavior. In an attempt to avoid the methodological difficult ies that have plagued past research on this issue, the present study used a proportional measure of corporal punishment, controlled for earlier behavi or problems and other dimensions of parenting, and tested for interaction a nd curvilinear effects. The analyses were performed using a sample of Iowa families that displayed moderate use of corporal punishment and a Taiwanese sample that demonstrated more frequent and severe use of physical discipli ne, especially by fathers. For both samples, level of parental warmth/contr ol (i.e., support, monitoring, and inductive reasoning) was the strongest p redictor of adolescent conduct problems. There was little evidence of a rel ationship between corporal punishment and conduct problems for the Iowa sam ple. For the Taiwanese families, corporal punishment was unrelated to condu ct problems when mothers were high on warmth/control, but positively associ ated with conduct problems when they were low on warmth/control. An interac tion between corporal punishment and warmth/control was found for Taiwanese fathers as well. For these fathers, there was also evidence of a curviline ar relationship, with the association between corporal punishment and condu ct problems becoming much stronger at extreme levels of corporal punishment . Overall, the results are consistent with the hypothesis that it is when p arents engage in severe forms of corporal punishment, or administer physica l discipline in the absence of parental warmth and involvement, that childr en feel angry and unjustly treated, defy parental authority, and engage in antisocial behavior.