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Using data collected over a 6-year period on a sample of 1,039 European American children, 550 African American children, and 401 Hispanic children from the children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this study assessed whether maternal emotional support of the child moderates the relation between spanking and behavior problems. Children were 4-5 year of age in the first of 4 waves of dam used (1988, 1990, 1992, 1994). At each wave, mothers reported their use of spanking and rated their children's behavior problems. Maternal emotional support of the child was based on interviewer observations conducted as part of the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment. For each of the 3 racial--ethnic groups, spanking predicted an increase in the level of problem behavior over time, controlling for income-needs ratio and maternal emotional support. Maternal emotional support moderated the link between spanking and problem behavior. Spanking was associated with an increase in behavior problems over time in the context of low levels of emotional support, but not in the context of high levels of emotional support. This pattern held for all 3 racial-ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study on the effectiveness of parental discipline for toddlers at different child distress levels. Forty volunteer mothers of children from 25 to 38 months of age participated in the study. Fifty percent of the working mothers were in working-class occupations, as were 45 percent of the fathers. The effectiveness of a discipline response was measured by the length of time until the next recurrence of the target misbehavior, either disobedience or fighting. Mothers reported the intensity and duration of the child's distress following each discipline incident. The most common levels of child distress for discipline responses were often either too high or too low for optimal effectiveness. Parents of toddlers can use reasoning with greater success when discipline strategies elicit a moderate level of emotional distress in their children. The enhanced effectiveness of reasoning at intermediate levels of child distress was found only for disobedience incidents and not for fighting incidents. Distress caused by fighting could interfere with cognitive processing of the parental reasoning component in three ways.

The article examines the relationship between perceived justness and perceived harshness of corporal punishment, perceived caretaker acceptance-rejection, and children's psychological adjustment. The sample included 281 Black and White school children ranging in age from 8 through 18 years in grades 3 through 12. It was a proportional random sample, stratified for sex, race, and grade in school. The sample represented all socioeconomic levels form middle class to the chronically poor. It is possible that the relationship between harsh or unjust punishment and children's psychological adjustment might be contingent on the child's gender, race, age, or social class. Preliminary analyses revealed that both perceived harshness and perceived justness of punishment are more strongly correlated with children's perception of caretaker acceptance-rejection than they are with children's psychological adjustment. The direct paths from perceived harshness and perceived justness to psychological adjustment were nonsignificant, indicating that these two measures of physical punishment by themselves are not significantly related to variations in children's psychological adjustment. It suggests that relationships among perceived harsh and unjust punishment, perceived caretaker acceptance-rejection, and children's psychological adjustment are not contingent on children's age, gender, race, or social class.