Physical Punishment of Children in Urban African American Neighborhoods
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Physical Punishment of Children in Urban African American Neighborhoods Michael Friedson 1 Accepted: 6 November 2020/ # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Use and support of physical punishment are known to be elevated among individuals who are African American. Less is known about the association between a neighborhood’s racial composition and the frequency with which its children experience physical discipline. This study aims to (a) determine if children in mostly Black urban neighborhoods are subjected to spanking and other physical punishments more commonly than those living elsewhere and (b) assess the degree to which neighborhood characteristics (besides racial makeup) account for associations between neighborhood racial composition and physical punishment use therein. Ordinary least squares regression models are used to analyze data regarding 3-year-old children from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which is designed to be nationally representative of births in US cities with at least 200,000 residents. It is found that greater proportions of mothers in mostly Black neighborhoods than in other neighborhoods reported any past-year use of spanking, hitting with a hard object, and slapping, as well as more than 20 past-year occurrences of hitting with a hard object and slapping. Furthermore, a direct association is found between the percentage of African American residents in a neighborhood and an index of physical punishment usage, which is robust to controls for a variety of characteristics of the mother’s household and neighborhood. It is important to account for greater exposure to physical punishment as a factor that may disadvantage children growing up in mostly Black communities. Keywords Physical punishment . Race . Socioeconomic disadvantage . Inequality .
Parental stress . Neighborhoods
* Michael Friedson [email protected]
1
Department of Sociology, Criminology, & Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, 800 West Main Street, Whitewater, WI 53190, USA
International Journal on Child Maltreatment: Research, Policy and Practice
Past studies have extensively demonstrated that use of spanking and other physical punishments1 predicts a variety of problems over the course of children’s development (Berlin et al. 2009; Gershoff et al. 2012; MacKenzie et al. 2012) and into adulthood (Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor 2016). A recent meta-analysis found that spanking was significantly associated with “more aggression, more antisocial behavior, more externalizing problems, more internalizing problems, more mental health problems, […] more negative relationships with parents, [… ] lower moral internalization, lower cognitive ability, and lower self-esteem” in childhood, as well as greater antisocial behavior and mental illness in adulthood (Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor 2016, p. 463). Research has shown, furthermore, that frequent spanking (e.g., more than once per week) is especially harmful (MacKenzie et al. 2014; Taylor et al. 2010). Many Black children in the urban US grow up a
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