Physical discipline as a normative childhood experience in Singapore
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The cultural normativeness theory posits that specific parenting behaviors can be interpreted as displays of appropriate parenting in contexts where they are deemed normative. Previous studies suggest high acceptance of physical discipline in Singapore, where strict parenting could be interpreted as care for the child. However, there is a lack of studies on the local prevalence and implications of physical discipline. This study aimed to investigate the prevalence of Singaporean children experiencing parental physical discipline, longitudinal changes in this prevalence, and how exposure to physical discipline relates to children's evaluation of their parents' parenting. METHODS: Participants were 710 children with parental reports of physical discipline at one or more assessments at ages 4.5, 6, 9, and 11 years in the Growing Up in Singapore Towards healthy Outcomes birth cohort study. Parental reports of physical discipline were obtained using the Parenting Styles and Dimensions Questionnaire or the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire across the four assessments. Child reports of their parents' care and control were obtained using the Parental Bonding Instrument for Children at the age 9 assessment. Prevalence was specified as being exposed to at least one physical discipline at any frequency. A generalized linear mixed model was performed to examine whether children's age predicted their exposure to physical discipline. Linear regression analyses were conducted to investigate whether children's exposure to physical discipline predicted their evaluation of their parents' parenting. RESULTS: The prevalence of children experiencing at least one physical discipline was above 80% at all ages. There was a decrease in this prevalence from age 4.5 to 11 years (B = - 0.14, SE = 0.01, OR = 0.87, p < 0.001). The more frequent the paternal physical discipline children were exposed to, the more likely they were to report lower levels of care (B = - 1.74, SE = 0.66, p = 0.03) and higher levels of denial of psychological autonomy by fathers (B = 1.05, SE = 0.45, p = 0.04). Maternal physical discipline was not significantly associated with children's evaluation of their mothers' parenting (ps ≥ 0.53). CONCLUSIONS: Physical discipline was a common experience among our Singaporean sample, consistent with the notion that strict parenting could be regarded as a form of care. However, exposure to physical discipline did not translate to children reporting their parents as caring, with paternal physical discipline being negatively associated with children's evaluations of paternal care.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".