A vicious or auspicious cycle: The reciprocal relation between harsh parental discipline and children’s self-regulation

Abstract

Children’s ability to exercise self-regulation is a key predictor of academic, behavioural, and life outcomes, but the developmental dynamics of children’s self-regulation are not adequately understood. We investigated how children’s self-regulation skills and harsh parental discipline reciprocally predict each other across 12,474 children at ages three, five, and seven in the U.K. (Millennium Cohort Study). Cross-lagged structural equation models indicated that high initial levels of harsh parental discipline predicted lower subsequent self-regulation, which then reciprocally predicted higher levels of harsh parental discipline. Conversely, high initial levels of child self-regulation predicted lower subsequent harsh parental discipline. Implications for policy and interventions are discussed.

Keywords:

• Self-regulation
• parenting
• self-control
• parent-child relations

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to The Centre for Longitudinal Studies at the Institute of Education for the use of these data. We are also grateful to the U.K. Data Archive and Economic and Social Data Service for making them available. However, they bear no responsibility for the analysis or interpretation of these data.