Objective: Disciplinary practices are a fundamental component of parenting and have the potential to affect children’s immediate and long-term well-being. There is limited knowledge about the strategies parents and other caregivers use during the first six months of a child’s life. We set out to explore the prevalence of a wide range (n=14) of discipline strategies used by mothers and partners in caring for their 6-month old infants, and to assess how various demographic, parenting and behavioural factors might be related.
Methods: Mothers and partners of 802 children participating in a community-based obesity prevention trial (POI.nz) identified positive and negative parenting strategies used during the previous week with their 6-month old infant. Associations were investigated between use of discipline strategies and parity, deprivation, ethnicity, parenting, depression, and infant sex and temperament.
Results: At 6 months, positive strategies such as smiling, praising and distraction were most commonly reported (≥ 87% for both mothers and partners), with negative strategies such as smacking, time-out and shouting reported infrequently (≤8% for all). Discipline strategies that required a level of cognitive understanding not yet developed at 6 months were reasonably common, including reasoning (17.7% for mothers, 23.4% for partners), negotiation (6.2%, 11.7%), and ignoring (26%, 19%). Mothers with multiple children used less reward strategies than mothers of single children (composite score difference, 95% CI: -1.05, -1.55 to -0.56), whereas Asian parents reported significantly more punitive strategies (0.70, 0.30 to 1.10 in mothers, 1.26. 0.54 to 1.97 in partners) than Europeans. Greater use of negative strategies occurred for mothers scoring higher for hostile parenting (P = 0.008) or emotionality of the infant (P = 0.019).
Conclusion: Discipline strategies emerge early in infancy with parents using a variety of strategies that are generally positive by 6 months of age.
