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Open Access: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2018.11.003

Citation and Abstract

Pace, G., Lee, S., Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2019). Spanking and young children’s socioemotional development in low- and middle-income countries, Child Abuse and Neglect, 88, 84-95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2018.11.003

Spanking is one of the most common forms of child discipline used by parents around the world. Research on children in high-income countries has shown that parental spanking is associated with adverse child outcomes, yet less is known about how spanking is related to child well-being in low- and middle-income countries. This study uses data from 215,885 children in 62 countries, which includes children from nearly one-third of the world’s countries, from the fourth and fifth rounds of UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) to examine the relationship between spanking and child well-being. In this large international sample, 43% of 3- and 4-year-old children were spanked, or resided in a household where another child was spanked, in the past month. Results from multilevel models show that reports of spanking of children in the household were associated with lower scores on a 3-item socioemotional development index among 3- and 4-year-old children. Country-level results from the multilevel model showed 59 countries (95%) had a negative relationship between spanking and socioemotional development and 3 countries (5%) had a null relationship. Spanking was not associated with higher socioemotional development for children in any country. While the cross-sectional association between spanking and socioemotional development is small, findings suggest that spanking is consistently harmful for children on a more global scale than was previously known.

Child Trends News Service has released a well done video summarizing this research.

Interactive Globe

Interactive Map

Static Map

Credits

Data Visualizations Created By

Andrew Grogan-Kaylor @ agrogan@umich.edu.

Libraries

We are grateful to be able to make use of the following R libraries to build these maps:

  • Arel-Bundock, Vincent, Nils Enevoldsen, and CJ Yetman (2018). countrycode: An R package to convert country names and country codes. Journal of Open Source Software, 3(28), 848, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00848
  • Lamstein, Ari (2018). choroplethr: Simplify the Creation of Choropleth Maps in R. R package version 3.6.3. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=choroplethr
  • Plotly Technologies Inc. Title: Collaborative data science Publisher: Plotly Technologies Inc. Place of publication: Montreal, QC Date of publication: 2015 URL: https://plot.ly

Creative Commons License
Spanking and young children’s socioemotional development in low- and middle-income countries by https://agrogan1.github.io/MICS1/ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0145213418304095?via%3Dihub.