Disciplining children: Parental concerns and strategies

Abstract

The process of socialization in family starts with disciplining the child at a nearly age. Discipline is often associated with nouns like control, regulation, order, authority, restriction, punishment, and verbs like train, drill, teach, coach, educate, indoctrinate. Oxford dictionary defines discipline as “the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of a behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience”. The definition entails disciplinary practices are aimed at undesirable behavior. Disciplinary practices can be categorized under power assertion and induction disciplinary practices. Corporal punishment, which is the dominant aspect of power assertion, includes slapping, spanking and paddling (UNICEF,2014) are used as corrective means to control the mal adaptive patterns of behavior of the child. The disciplinary practices in Asia predominantly make use of corporal punishment, but it has been proved different by studies done on Vietnamesem others and mother from Singapore who were found to be using more of reasoning (induction) as corrective measures (Papps etal.,1995;Lee etal.,2004). Very few Indian studies have been there reflecting clear disciplinary practices employed by the parents with no significant differences in mothers’ and fathers’ disciplinary practices (Dhanya & Sukumaran,2013). The current study hence, is an attempt to understand the parental concerns and the strategies adopted to discipline their children. From among 55 volunteers, 43 parents (either father or mother) were selected following an inclusion-exclusion criteria. Out of the 43 parents,19 fathers with an average age of 47. 42 years and 24 mothers with an average age of 38. 73 years completed an ‘online survey on disciplinary practices’. Among other causes, the five most prevalent causes of concern for parents are, when children do not eat healthy food and indulge in eating junk/fast food(16.03%), do not maintain cleanliness of the house and personal rooms (15.09%), when they spend too much time on mobile phones and computers watching obscene videos and playing games (12.26%), when they answer back and argue (11.32%), and when they do not show the gesture of respect to elders as strained (9.43). The three most frequently used strategies by the parents are discussing the matter and telling them not to repeat the same mistake with justifications (67.44%),avoiding talking to the m for sometime(11.62%), finally the most interesting is that, they adopt other methods which they do not want to disclose(6.97%). Next,parents were given 13 different situations where they were asked to choose a particular option of disciplining their children. The situations include greeting someone, following instructions, night stay at friend’s place, study regime, excessive TV watching, interrupting adult’s conversations even after repeated warnings, watching obscene videos in mobile phone and insisting on driving despite being underage etc. The responses however,are having high social desirability effect. Next, most parents did not answer about the methods of disciplining their children. Parental interviews revealed that they are pressurized to prove that they are good parents and are raising highly disciplined kids, so that the society would respect them.