Maternal and Paternal Punitive Discipline in Response to Children’s Conflicts with a Baby Sibling

• In Event: Becoming an Older Sibling: The Role of Parents Across Cultures

Abstract

Introduction: The birth of a baby sibling is a significant life event for many young children, yet little is known about how parents manage this transition and what they can do to facilitate a positive sibling relationship. Prior research suggests that there are increases in mother’s punitive discipline (PD) after the birth, as well as decreases in child-mother attachment security, joint play, and affection. Most studies have focused only on mothers, yet fathers may be called upon to provide care (and discipline) for firstborn children while mothers are caring for a newborn infant. PD is also associated with increasing sibling conflict, but the direction of effects is unclear. Do parents respond to sibling conflict with more PD or does PD lead to more sibling conflict? The current study uses longitudinal data to examine parent and child effects between PD and children’s conflict/antagonism with the baby sibling across the first year following the birth.
Methods: The sample included 241 families from the midwestern US recruited during the last trimester of the pregnancy and then followed at 1, 4, 8 and 12 months postpartum. Both mothers and fathers reported on their use of parent-directed discipline (e.g., physical punishment, raising voice, threaten punishment), and the children’s antagonism of the baby sibling at 4, 8, and 12 months. Random-intercept cross-lag panel models (RI-CLPM) were planned to examine the joint contribution of mothers’ and fathers’ PD on sibling conflict, the effects of one parents’ PD on the other parent, and the directional relations between PD and sibling conflict.
Results: There was no significant variance for maternal and paternal PD, indicting no stable between-family differences, so we removed the RI from the model and present the standard CLPM (see Mulder & Hamaker, 2021; see Figure 1). Both mothers’ and fathers’ use of PD and sibling conflict were stable across the three times. Within each time point, maternal and paternal PD covaried and both covaried with sibling conflict. There were no significant cross-lag paths between either parents’ PD and sibling conflict. Only fathers’ PD at 8 months predicted mothers’ greater use of PD at 12 months.
Discussion and conclusion: The results indicate that both mothers’ and fathers’ punitive discipline is positively related to conflict with an infant sibling, so fathers also have an important role over this transition. These relations were only within time and not across time. Maternal and paternal PD were correlated at each time, which may reflect coparenting, where mothers and fathers are either engaging in less PD together or they are both using PD together in response to conflict. Further, paternal PD at 8 months predicted mothers’ PD at 12 months, underscoring the interconnections between mothers and fathers when parenting their children.

Authors

• Brenda L Volling, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
  Presenting Author

• Lin Tan, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Lauren R. Bader, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse

• Richard Gonzalez, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor