The Parental Discipline-Child Behavior Problems Puzzle: Some New Pieces

Abstract

As a well-respected researcher in the field of developmental psychopathology, Dodge already has offered to the field a model of the social cognitive mechanisms in the development of child conduct problems that is widely accepted as having uniquely integrated otherwise disparate constructs, for example, socialization and social information processing. With bold and innovative research designs and thoughtful theorizing, he has a track record of important contributions. Thus he, with Deater-Deckard, is particularly well situated to offer this further advancement on our understanding of how harsh parenting is associated with the development of children's conduct problems. Before exploring the environmental effects, DeaterDeckard and Dodge tackle the issue of the associated influences of genes and environment. Relying on data showing remarkable stability in externalizing behavior problems across time (from mother, father, and teacher reports) but only modest cross-situational correlations (school to home), they argue that the pattern of findings is inadequately explained by solely genetic hypotheses and requires the inclusion of environmental considerations. Because the field seems finally to have moved toward integrative models of environmental and genetic effects, few would argue for an exclusive influence of genetics or environment. However, it should be noted that cross-situational variability is not, in itself, an argument for less genetic contribution, because what might be inherited is the situationally specific aggression (as evidenced in other animal species). A more important contribution is their intriguing idea, following Scarr (1993), that genetic influences would be stronger than environmental influences inside of the normal expected environmental range and reversed at the extremes of either parent or child behavior. Unfortunately, neither their own nor others' studies have been designed to test this notion. A contribution of this article would be the prompting of such research, which promises to contribute significantly to a model of the association between discipline and externalizing behavior problems. However, the research would need to be designed to rule out simple behavioristic explanations, apart from genetic contributions, given that the extremes of parental punitiveness provide different contingencies than moderate levels. Moving on to the environmental side of the equation, each of the questions raised by Deater-Deckard and Dodge addresses an aspect of the nature of environmental effects. Thus the focus is on moderators of the association between discipline practices and children's development of aggressive behavior problems. In addressing the criticism that effect sizes in the association between these two variables have been found to be small, they propose that the effect will be stronger when the discipline is severe enough to be considered abuse, in cultural groups that consider physical discipline to be poor parenting rather than normative, when the parent-child relationship is cold rather than warm and accepting, and when the abusive parent is of the same gender as the child. Although Deater-Deckard and Dodge do an excellent job of presenting the logic of, and evidence for, each of their four hypotheses, readers are left to extrapolate beyond their specific concerns. For example, for their nonlinearity hypothesis, Deater-Deckard and Dodge rely on physical punishment as the key aspect of parenting in association with children's conduct problems. Given little if any consideration are other aspects of inadequate parenting, such as inconsistent discipline, low supervision or monitoring, and verbal aggression. Even in calling on Patterson's (1982) work as supportive of their position, they describe Patterson's finding on the associated acceleration between parental physi-