How Mothers in Poverty Explain Their Use of Corporal Punishment: A Qualitative Study in Kampala, Uganda

Corporal punishment was seen as essential to child rearing by all mothers, though they all thought a balance is needed between leniency and harshness. In similar settings such as Kenya, physical discipline is used frequently (Oburu and Palmérus, 2003). Although all mothers in our study had a concept of excessive physical punishment, what was considered appropriate was generally far more harsh than might be considered acceptable in Western Europe or America (Lansford and Deater-Deckard, 2012; Lansford et al, 2010), such as two or three strokes with a cane after one warning, especially since in many cases² the children being discussed were between 24 and 36 months.

These findings suggest that it is far too simplistic to dichotomise mothers between those who do or do not endorse corporal punishment, and to attribute to the former all the negative features and poor child outcomes of ‘harsh’ or ‘authoritarian’ parenting (Baumrind, 1967, 1971, 1996). Rather, within this sample, and presumably amongst poor Ugandan mothers in general, there appears to be a wide spectrum of harshness in parenting practices, from highly empathetic mothers whose practices are in line with ‘positive parenting’ to severe parents with little evidence of empathy for their children, and all these mothers see corporal punishment as a legitimate and at times necessary option for maintaining discipline. Thus, the findings are in line with Baumrind’s later work (Baumrind, 1996) in which she moved away from an absolute condemnation of corporal punishment of children and highlighted the importance of, among other factors, the cultural context and the development stage (or level) in which physical discipline occurs.

Although some quantitative studies have shown associations between corporal punishment and poor child outcomes with little differentiation between degrees of harsh parenting (Meinck et al, 2017), other studies have shown that such associations are moderated by parents’ warmth and emotional support for children (Lansford et al, 2005, 2014), reflecting that parent–child relationships are rather more complex, as demonstrated in these findings. In a longitudinal study of approximately 2000 American children, McLoyd and Smith (2002) found that spanking was associated with subsequently increased behavioural problems in the context of low levels, but not high levels, of emotional support, and this pattern held across all three ethnic groups. They hypothesise that: ‘The child may be less likely to view spanking as harsh, un-just, and indicative of parental rejection when relations with the parent are generally warm and supportive’ (McLoyd and Smith 2002, p. 51). Furthermore, a series of multi-country studies led by Lansford and colleagues (Lansford et al, 2005, 2010, 2014) examining parental disciplinary strategies and the effects of physical discipline, have highlighted debates around the orthodox mainstream Western position that corporal punishment is totally inappropriate for the socialisation of young children (Straus et al, 2014). For example, in their 2005 study of mothers and children in six countries - Kenya, India, China, Philippines, Thailand and Italy – Lansford and colleagues found that although high levels of physical punishment were related to adjustment problems in children, specifically child aggression and anxiety, these associations were weaker in those countries in which the practice of physical punishment was more normative, specifically Kenya (Lansford et al, 2005). These studies suggest that cultural normativeness, along with warm and supportive parenting, may mediate the deleterious effects of corporal punishment on child outcomes. Nevertheless, Lansford and colleagues (2014) found that among children whose mothers used corporal punishment and exhibited high levels of warmth anxiety increased over time, leading them to conclude that “corporal punishment may be especially harmful in the context of high warmth” (pp. 14). These contrasting findings highlight the need to pay continued attention to mothers’ positive engagement with their children, in particular their responsiveness and emotional support, and material factors that inhibit such engagement, as well as their punitive behaviour.

The extreme poverty in which most of these mothers brought up their children was frequently referred to in their discussions of managing their children’s behaviour, either explicitly or implicitly. Material hardship was emphasised as one of their greatest challenges as parents, and they frequently alluded to concerns about poverty. Of the three broad rationales for disciplining their children, the two main ones were exacerbated by deprivation. For these children, respectful behaviour involved not betraying the family’s poverty, for instance by begging for food, or by discussing their mother’s occupation, and learning to abide by household rules was largely about the careful use of precious material resources.

The heavy emphasis placed on material poverty by study participants is in many ways reminiscent of Ngwaru’s (2014) account of rural Zimbabwean and Kenyan parents’ perceptions of their role in early childhood education. Reflecting on the findings of three studies around childhood education and literacy, Ngwaru notes that parents were “preoccupied with poverty, socioeconomic insecurity, morbidity (usually arising from the scourge of HIV/AIDS), […] and lack of education” (pp. 67–68). Parents in Ngwaru’s study tended to invoke arguments reflective of Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs: that only after their families’ needs for food, water, warmth and shelter had been satisfied would it be possible to engage in wider school and educational activities. Following Ngwaru, it could be argued that although our participants recognised the importance of their children’s socio-emotional needs, describing the need for counselling and educating children, they too emphasised the imperative to meet material needs such as food, water, warmth and shelter, and the need for disciplinary strategies that supported this endeavour.

Researchers exploring child development in SSA have identified that the primary care of children is often shared beyond the biological parents (Serpell and Marfo, 2014a, b; Pence and Nsamenang, 2008). To some extent our findings support this, with mothers’ noting that grandmothers, aunties, older siblings, and to a lesser extent, fathers, all play some role in child care. However, similar to findings from Zalwango et al’s (2010) study exploring Ugandan sex workers accounts of parenting, for participants in this study, caregiving, both materially and in terms of disciplinary practices, was understood primarily as a responsibility of motherhood and they had little expectation of support from either the fathers of their children, or the wider community. It is also important to contextualise discussions of disciplinary practices within women’s accounts of their anxieties around health risks for them, and their children. Mothers’ accounts suggest that they are well aware of health risks, specifically risk of HIV. Their concerns around who would support their children if they could no longer care for them, through illness or death, shaped their understandings of the need for well-behaved, obedient and respectable children, who would be more likely to be cared for by others.

This research is part of larger study intended to inform the development of interventions. All of the mothers drew on their own experiences as children, to a greater or lesser degree, to both point to what constituted good disciplinary practices and excessive corporal punishment. Prompting adults to reflect on their own experience as children is a useful technique to encourage empathy with their own children, already used in programmes intended to reduce harsh parenting, such as Parenting for Respectability (Kazemi, 2016) or to modify norms of masculinity, such as Program H (Promundo, 2017).

The importance of motivation is recognised in many models of behaviour change (Michie et al, 2011) and designing interventions to be ‘culturally compelling’ (Panter-Brick et al, 2006) is one way to harness existing motivation. These findings suggest that appealing to mothers’ desire for their children’s good behaviour and respect, a key hallmark of family respectability, could help ensure that parenting programmes are perceived as relevant to parents, specifically mothers. Interventions are already being developed that appeal to the desire for family respectability while demonstrating disciplinary strategies that help parents move away from ‘harsh’ corporal punishment to a focus on responsiveness and positive reinforcement (Kazemi, 2016; Lachman et al, 2016; Siu et al, 2017). ‘Counselling’, which most mothers reported engaging in, is consistent with such approaches as it implies encouraging children in a supportive way to reflect on the implications of unwanted behaviours.

Since corporal punishment is clearly perceived as socially and culturally appropriate, if not necessary, as a parenting strategy to achieve respectable behaviour, it will require more than individual level interventions to change practices. The Ugandan government recognises this in so far as their expressed intention is to extend the recent ban on corporal punishment in schools to the home. Legislative interventions need to be complemented by work at the cultural and community levels (Frieden, 2010) in addition to parenting interventions, and, very importantly, the material factors that act as barriers to positive discipline strategies need to be addressed.

A key strength of this study is the rich qualitative data generated, which provide insights into the diverse ways that mothers talked about disciplinary practices used in managing difficult child behaviour. Although more research is needed, this study provides insights into the practices of a particular group of women, which may also be applicable in similar contexts (Lewis and Ritchie, 2003), and offers a basis for future large-scale studies. However, several limitations of the study should be acknowledged. These findings come from a small sample, although they are likely to be typical of Kampalan mothers living in conditions of poverty with similar social and occupational positions. It is always challenging to collect rich data on issues that are not salient to one’s interviewees. Some participants were not very forthcoming about the use of corporal punishment presumably because it was not an issue about which they had deliberated much prior to the interviews. The use of repeat interviews was intended to facilitate the development of rapport between the interviewer and participants, and to encourage them to speak openly about their parenting practices. Nevertheless, it is likely that participant’s accounts were shaped by a desire to present themselves in socially desirable manner, aligning their responses with socially and culturally acceptable narratives of how to manage difficult child behaviour.

Indeed, a particularly important methodological limitation is the way social desirability may have shaped women’s accounts. Women were recruited within a context that emphasises the hazardous nature of widespread sexual practices related to their social and occupational positions, and in which they may feel beholden for receiving ongoing health services. In such a context, the social position of interviewees and the researcher is likely to be different, which may generate a strong social desirability bias in the responses of the less powerful respondents. Future research in this area could address such limitations by incorporating the Participatory Ethnographic Evaluation and Research (PEER) approach (Hawkins et al, 2009; Price and Hawkins, 2002; Elmusharaf et al, 2016, 2017), in which members of the group targeted in the research take on an active role, as ‘peer researchers’, in interviewing their peers about their experiences of the issue being explored. The potential benefit of this approach is that peer researchers have already built a relationship of trust with those they interview, which facilitates open discussion. This approach has been used successfully in exploring sexual and reproductive practices in Zambia (Price and Hawkins, 2002), age-disparate transactional sexual relationships in Mozambique (Hawkins et al, 2009), cultural dimensions of maternal health in South Sudan (Elmusharaf et al, 2016, 2017) and in a range of ongoing projects in LMICs around the development of family planning services (Options, 2017).