Discipline in Families

A broad definition of discipline, which derives from the Latin disciplinare, or to teach, would encompass the whole of socialization, the process by which children develop values and capacities for self-regulation, self-direction, and competence. More narrowly, discipline refers to the training of children with the purpose of fostering some form of correspondence or conformity to the requirements of parental authorities.

Prior to the 1970s, research on discipline was guided by an implicit unilateral framework of assumptions. Parents were considered to be active causal agents, and influence was assumed to flow in a unidirectional manner from parent to child. Children were considered to be passive recipients [Page 424]of parental influence, and their resistance or failure to conform was interpreted as deviance. Moreover, research tended to ignore the larger context in which discipline occurred. For instance, parents and children were considered interacting as separate individuals rather than in an interdependent relationship context, and the meaning of the interactions for parents or children was disregarded. Thus, research on socialization tended to focus on correlations between isolated parenting techniques and presumed outcomes such as children's compliance or values and transformed a dynamic longterm interactive process into a one-sided analysis of isolated parenting techniques. The prototypical example of a unilateral perspective is traditional authoritarianism, according to which discipline is equated with parental application of force, including corporal punishment, in order to obtain the child's compliance with the parent's directives.

In recent decades, research on socialization has increasingly incorporated a bilateral perspective where parental influence occurs in a relationship context in which children also contribute their own influences. The four contemporary perspectives on parental discipline and children's conformity that are reviewed in this entry show an increasing integration of several assumptions. These assumptions include that the ideas that influence between parents and children is inherently bidirectional, that parents and children are equally active agents, and that the dynamics of parent-child interactions take place in a distinctive long-term interdependent relationship context.