Child physical punishment, parenting, and school readiness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This study explored how physical punishment (PP) and other parenting approaches may predict school readiness outcomes. By using the Canada‐wide representative data, 5,513 children were followed over a 2‐year period. Caregivers reported on their use of PP and other parenting approaches (i.e., literacy and learning activities and other disciplinary practices) when children were 2–3 years old, whereas school readiness was measured at 4–5 years using interviewer‐administered tests of number competence and receptive vocabulary skills. Analyses controlled for PP use at 4–5 years, child externalizing behaviours, and various sociodemographics. Results indicated that PP does not directly predict school readiness; however, the effect of PP was moderated by other parenting approaches. Children's receptive vocabulary was weaker if caregivers used PP together with less frequent explaining/teaching regarding problem behaviour, or PP with less frequent engagement in literacy and learning activities. Children had weaker number competence when PP co‐occurred with more frequent psychological aggression (e.g., yelling/scolding). Results suggest that PP hinders children's school readiness when used alongside other parenting approaches, which reflects the reality of parenting (i.e., PP does not occur in isolation). Findings support early education efforts aimed at promoting early learning and literacy opportunities, as well as positive disciplinary strategies that do not involve PP. Highlights We explored how physical punishment and other parenting approaches may predict school readiness outcomes using Canada‐wide data. Results provided little evidence of positive effects of physical punishment on school readiness across a range of parenting and disciplinary contexts. To promote school readiness, early education efforts should promote early learning opportunities and positive disciplinary strategies that do not involve physical punishment.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".