Do child disciplinary practices differ between Cuba and the Dominican Republic?

Background

Cross-country comparisons of disciplinary practices may be problematic for at least two reasons. They may rely on questionable composite measures, i.e., combining substantially different individual disciplinary practices into a single measure, and compare vastly different countries increasing risk of unmeasured confounders.

Objective

This study aimed to determine whether individual disciplinary practices differed between two countries that share many characteristics, Cuba and the Dominican Republic (DR).

Participants and setting

Caregivers in the home (85.6% probable biological mothers) participating in nationally representative household surveys in 2019 from Cuba and the DR, N=7,374 and 14,772, respectively.

Methods

Caregivers were asked whether randomly selected children in the household were exposed to any of 11 disciplinary practices. Prevalence of each practice across two age groups (1-4 and 5-14 years) were compared across country. Binomial logistic regressions were used to determine whether country was an independent predictor of practices.

Results

Across both age groups, a higher proportion of children in the DR were exposed to three of six types of physical punishments (“spanked”, “hit with object”, “hit on head”), whereas prevalence of being “hit on limb” was higher in Cuba. For both age groups, “psychological aggression” practices (“yelling” and “name calling”) were more prevalent in the DR as were two of the three “non-violent practices”. All the same relationships remained significant in the same direction in adjusted logistic regression models.

Conclusions

Given the differences in specific disciplinary practices between these similar countries, additional investigations to understand what contextual factors may underpin these variations are warranted.