SOUTHERN PARENTS SPANK CHILDREN MORE
 THAN NORTHERN PARENTS, STUDY FINDS

	CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Feb. 9 -- Southern parents use more
physical punishment on their young children than Northern parents.
	They also tend to reason less and use fewer behavior
modification techniques, such as time-out, with their children than
Northern parents, according to a study at the University of
Virginia.  
	The investigation into cultural and individual differences
in how U.S. parents discipline young children also showed that
African-American parents use more physical punishment, such as
spanking, and employ fewer behavior modification strategies than
Euro-American parents.  The study of 720 families with children,
aged one to five years, also revealed that parents who use harsh
ways of dealing with children have lower education levels and have
an authoritarian attitude toward children.
	"They tend to believe parents' authority is paramount and
that children should be obedient no matter what," said Sandra Scarr,
Commonwealth Professor of Psychology, who reported the study's
findings at an international conference of social scientists in
Sweden in December.		
	Scarr and graduate student Relana Pinkerton led an
investigation of families with children enrolled in 120 child care
centers in three states, Massachusetts, Georgia and Virginia.  
	During the research, the largest U.S. study of parental
discipline conducted to date, parents were presented with
descriptions of five typical child misbehaviors, such as refusing to
get dressed, and asked to describe how they would react to the
child's actions.  	
	Responses were assigned to six discipline areas that
included use of physical punishment; behavior-modification
strategies; reasoning; physical restraint, such as holding a child
in a chair; coercive verbal control, such as yelling; and
low-authority strategies, such as ignoring.  Parents were also asked
how they would punish children who repeated the inappropriate
behaviors.
	Northern parents rely more on low-authority strategies, such
as distracting the children, asking them to stop or bribing them,
than Southern parents.  African-American parents, when controlling
for regional and individual differences, employ less physical
restraint and low-authority strategies than Euro-American parents,
the study found.  Discipline practices used by fathers do not differ
significantly from mothers in the same region. 
	Children who were described as being difficult to manage by
parents and teachers received more physical forms of discipline and
less reasoning, according to the study supported by the National
Institutes of Health.  "A surprising finding is that parents
reported using the same amount of physical punishment for all ages
of young children, from infancy to late preschool," Scarr said.
Parents also indicated that they administer physical punishment
equally to both girls and boys.
	Scarr, who directs the Child Care and Family Project at
U.Va., first became interested in researching parental discipline in
the 1980s when she found Bermuda families use a great deal of
physical punishment on children.  In contrast, last year when she
was living in Sweden--a country that in 1979 banned parents from
physically punishing children--she found that parents there employed
coercive verbal commands and low-authority discipline strategies
instead of spanking.  The same discipline interviews were used in
the U.S., Sweden and Bermuda.
	"In the English-speaking world, physical punishment is
generally considered a proper, effective means of disciplining
children, and a parental right," she noted.
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February 8, 1995
FOR MORE INFORMATION, contact Scarr at (804) 924-0653.