European American and African American Mothers' Beliefs About Parenting and Disciplining Infants: A Mixed-Method Analysis

SYNOPSIS

Objective. Parenting is a response to and supported by parents' cultural and personal beliefs about what they should do to promote their children's development. Our goal was to explore the belief systems that appear to motivate some mothers to be more negative or use physical discipline in infancy and to determine whether those beliefs are related to observed parenting styles. Design. Using a mixed-methods approach, we first examined this issue qualitatively (n = 25) and then tested the qualitative findings using quantitative analyses (n = 134). Participants were mothers and their infants between the ages of 2 and 18 months. Results. Ethnographic interviews revealed that mothers primarily held 1 of 2 contrasting beliefs about why children misbehave and how parents should respond to bad behavior. Many mothers said they avoid using physical punishment with their infants because infants are not able to clearly understand right and wrong. In contrast, some mothers believed that infants can misbehave intentionally and need to be punished to stop the bad behavior and learn to respect the mother's authority. Subsequent quantitative analyses supported this finding. Mothers who expressed concerns about bad behavior and spoiling interacted less positively with their infants during free-play interactions at 6 and 12 months of age, but this trend was stronger among European American than among African American mothers. Conclusions . Findings suggest possible race differences in beliefs about spoiling and infant intentionality that apparently support the use of physical punishment with young children, and that efficacious parenting education programs might focus on parents' beliefs about whether infants can intentionally misbehave and concerns about spoiling in efforts to reduce physical punishment and increase responsive parenting styles.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was funded by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (R40 MC 04293) and the National Science Foundation (Durham Child Health and Development Grant-BCS-0126475). The authors thank Sarah Henderson for her assistance preparing the manuscript; they especially thank the families who let them into their lives.