Moral Internalization
Although immediate compliance may be a salient goal when parents initiate discipline, promoting the development of children's internal controls is more important to long-term socialization than immediate compliance (
Grolnick, Deci, & Ryan, 1997;
Hoffman, 1983;
Kohlberg, 1969;
Lepper, 1983;
Piaget, 1932/1965).
Moral internalization is defined by
Grusec and Goodnow (1994) as “taking over the values and attitudes of society as one's own so that socially acceptable behavior is motivated not by anticipation of external consequences but by intrinsic or internal factors” (p. 4), and it is thought to underlie the development of children's social and emotional competence (
Kochanska & Thompson, 1997). Children's internalization of morals is thought to be enhanced by parental discipline strategies that use minimal parental power, promote choice and autonomy, and provide explanations for desirable behaviors (
Kuczynski & Hildebrandt, 1997). Attribution theorists emphasize that power-assertive methods such as corporal punishment promote children's external attributions for their behavior and minimize their attributions to internal motivations (
Dix & Grusec, 1983;
Hoffman, 1983;
Lepper, 1983). Additionally, corporal punishment may not facilitate moral internalization because it does not teach children the reasons for behaving correctly, does not involve communication of the effects of children's behaviors on others, and may teach children the desirability of not getting caught (
Hoffman, 1983;
Grusec, 1983;
Smetana, 1997).
Aggression
The association between corporal punishment and children's aggression is one of the most studied and debated findings in the child-rearing literature (
Coie & Dodge, 1998;
Steinmetz, 1979). Over the years, several reviews of the literature have concluded that corporal punishment is associated with increases in children's aggressive behaviors (
Becker, 1964;
Patterson, 1982;
Radke-Yarrow, Campbell, & Burton, 1968;
Steinmetz, 1979). Corporal punishment has been hypothesized to predict increases in children's aggression because it models aggression (e.g.,
Aronfreed, 1969;
Bandura & Walters, 1959;
Eron, Walder, & Lefkowitz, 1971;
Walters & Grusec, 1977); promotes hostile attributions, which predict violent behavior (
Dodge, Pettit, McClaskey, & Brown, 1986); and initiates coercive cycles of aversive behaviors between parent and child (
Dishion & Patterson, 1999;
Patterson, Reid, & Dishion, 1992). Early experiences with corporal punishment may model and legitimize many types of violence throughout an individual's life (
White & Straus, 1981), particularly violence in romantic relationships (
Simons, Lin, & Gordon, 1998). Indeed, in one longitudinal study, parents' use of corporal punishment in childhood was the strongest predictor of adolescents' aggression 8 years later, whereas permissive parenting was not a significant predictor (
P. Cohen, Brook, Cohen, Velez, & Garcia, 1990). It was my expectation that corporal punishment would be associated in the meta-analyses with aggression in childhood as well as in adulthood.
Although aggression is often combined with antisocial behavior to constitute what are typically referred to as externalizing behavior problems (
Achenbach, 1991), antisocial behaviors such as stealing are nonviolent and may be related to corporal punishment in different ways than aggression (
Huesmann, 1997). In the present meta-analyses, the extent to which children engage in delinquent or illegal behaviors are separated from the extent of their aggressive behaviors.
Delinquent, Criminal, and Antisocial Behavior
Across decades of research, corporal punishment has been implicated in the etiology of criminal and antisocial behaviors by both children and adults (e.g.,
Burt, 1925;
Glueck & Glueck, 1964;
Hetherington, Stouwie, & Ridberg, 1971;
W. McCord & McCord, 1959;
Patterson & Stouthamer-Loeber, 1984;
West & Farrington, 1973;
Wilson & Herrnstein, 1985). Attribution theory posits that associations between corporal punishment and child delinquent or antisocial behavior result from an inability of corporal punishment to facilitate children's internalization of morals and values (
Hoffman, 1983;
Lepper, 1983). Social control theory suggests that parental corporal punishment erodes the parent-child relationship and in turn decreases children's motivation to internalize parents' values and those of the society, which in turn results in low self-control (
Hirschi, 1969). These same processes may explain the relation between corporal punishment and adult criminality. In
Glueck and Glueck's (1950) longitudinal study of delinquency, whether boys experienced a harsh parental disciplinary style predicted their arrest rates at ages 17 through 45 (see also
Laub & Sampson, 1995).
J. McCord (1979) also found in her longitudinal study that the extent to which parents were aggressively punitive predicted their children's criminal behavior as adults. The connection between criminal and antisocial behavior in childhood and adulthood is examined here in separate meta- analyses.
thumbsup I'll try to stop running around the house with it on.
