Talking about corporal punishment: nine low-income African American mothers’ perspectives

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Abstract

Qualitative interviews conducted over the course of 5 years with nine young low-income African American mothers were analyzed in order to gain understanding of their perspectives on corporal punishment. All used corporal punishment with their children. Results pertain to the vocabulary mothers used to describe corporal punishment (pop, tap, whup, spank, hit, and smack), the circumstances in which different levels of corporal punishment were used, the criteria mothers used when deciding whom to allow to administer corporal punishment to their children, and the reasons they supported the use of (non-abusive) corporal punishment.

Section snippets

Participants

Nine mothers participated in the current qualitative study. All had applied for acceptance into a Midwestern inner-city Early Head Start program that was one of 17 research sites participating in the national Early Head Start evaluation. All nine had been randomly assigned to the program group. [For purposes of the national evaluation, 193 families were assigned to either the program group (N = 98), which was to receive Early Head Start services, or a comparison group (N = 95), which was to

Types of corporal punishment and the misbehaviors that elicit them

During our interviews, mothers used several words to describe corporal punishment: popping, tapping, whupping, spanking, hitting, and smacking. Not all mothers used all of these words. Popping, tapping, and whupping were terms that seemed to have agreed-upon definitions understood by all of the mothers. Popping and tapping were used as synonyms and their meaning was clearly differentiated from whupping. The definitions of spanking, hitting, and smacking were looser and more variable.

Mothers’

Discussion

For the current study, we analyzed qualitative data collected over the course of 5 years of interviews with nine young low-income African American mothers. Our purpose was to gain understanding of their perspectives on corporal punishment. Our findings are consonant with ecological systems, social learning, and social information processing theories and have important implications for practitioners such as home visitors, social workers, and early childhood education teachers. They also suggest

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Kathy Thornburg, Mark Fine, Elizabeth Sharp, Michelle Mathews, Miriam Wolfenstein, and Sheila Brookes for their roles in developing and conducting interviews and coding data. We also want to thank Kathy Thornburg for commenting on an earlier draft of this article. We owe special and very great gratitude to our participants.

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  • Cited by (0)

    The findings reported here are based on research conducted as part of the national Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project funded by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services through Grant DHHS 90YF0011/05 to the University of Missouri-Columbia. The research is part of the independent research the University of Missouri-Columbia conducted with one of 17 programs participating in the national Early Head Start study. The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Department of Health and Human Services, nor does mention of trade names, commercial products, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.

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