Family discipline practices with infants at six months of age

ABSTRACT

Objectives: To determine the frequency of 14 discipline strategies used by mothers (n = 564) and fathers (n = 335) in caring for their six-month old infant. Methods: Data on discipline practices were obtained from families participating in an obesity prevention trial (Prevention of Overweight in Infancy). Each parent was asked to indicate the frequency of using 14 different discipline strategies during the previous week with their infant. Associations between the use of these strategies and parity, deprivation, parental ethnicity, depression symptoms and infant sex were investigated. Results: Parents reported using both positive (mean: 8.8 for mothers and 7.9 for partners) and negative (0.7 for mothers and 0.7 for partners) strategies over the past week. At six months, positive strategies such as smiling, praising and distraction were most commonly reported (≥87% for both mothers and partners), negative strategies such as smacking, time out and shouting being reported infrequently (≤8% for all). Discipline requiring a level of cognitive understanding not developed at six months was reasonably common, including reasoning (17.7% for mothers, 23.4% for partners), negotiation (6.2%, 11.7%) and ignoring (26%, 19%). Multivariate analysis demonstrated that mothers with more than one child had a lower positive discipline index than those with only one child (difference, 95% C.I.: 1.05 (0.57, 1.54). An increase of one point on the 10-point hostile parenting scale was associated with an increase of 0.18 (0.04, 0.31) for the mothers and 0.47 (0.23, 0.70) for partners on the negative strategy index. Conclusions: Discipline strategies emerge early in infancy and are associated with family size and parental hostility.

KEYWORDS:

• Family discipline
• infants
• parenting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Julie Lawrence is a research fellow at the University of Otago with a background in social work. Her research interests include parental incarceration; vulnerable families; family functioning; parenting practices and styles—in particular, family discipline and guidance of children.

Rachael W. Taylor is the Karitane Fellow in Early Childhood Obesity. She leads or co-leads several large randomized controlled trials and observational studies investigating different aspects of weight management during growth.

Barbara Galland is a research associate professor at the University of Otago. She has been engaged in many aspects of paediatric sleep and respiratory research since the early 1990s with main research interests in sleep development, sleep-disordered breathing, cardiorespiratory control, and obesity in infants and children.

Sheila Williams is a biostatisician and associate professor with a wealth of experience in designing and analysing observational and experimental studies.

Andrew Gray is a biostatistician at the University of Otago, where he has worked as a researcher since 1995, with a particular interest in education-based interventions, at individual and community levels, around improving health outcomes. He is an author on over 200 journal articles and over 200 other publications.

Rachel Sayers is an assistant research fellow at the University of Otago. As a registered nurse, she has been involved in various infant sleep research projects over many years, including the POI study. She has completed the Sleep Technologists Course at Sydney University (1999) and a Master of Health Sciences (2005).

Barry Taylor’s research interests have spanned paediatric endocrinology, sudden infant death syndrome and the development of national mortality review for child and youth deaths. With the rapidly increasing child obesity rates, a significant part of Barry's research now focuses on prevention and management of this issue.

Additional information

Funding

POI was funded by the Health Research Council of New Zealand (08/374) and the Southern District Health Board. Rachael Taylor is supported by a Karitane Products Society Fellowship. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.