Discipline strategies of Vietnamese and Australian mothers for regulating children's behaviour

The discipline strategies used for regulating children’s behaviour were investigated in Vietnamese and Australian mothers using hypothetical child behaviour vignettes. An online survey was administered to 47 mothers from each cultural group. Mothers rated their likelihood of using a particular discipline technique to the different conventional and moral transgressions made by the child depicted in the vignettes. Parenting daily hassles experiences were also assessed using the Parenting Daily Hassles Scale (Crnic & Greenberg, 1990). The key finding was that mothers from both cultural groups did not differ in the discipline strategies selected; both groups favoured inductive reasoning over power assertion. Moral transgressions had higher ratings for both types of discipline techniques, which reflect the greater perceived importance of moral over conventional transgressions. Mothers employed more reasoning strategies with boys than girls and slightly more power assertion with girls than boys. Mothers from both cultural groups experienced a similar level of parenting daily hassles. These results highlight commonalities in discipline strategies and childrearing goals including a concern for longer term socialization goals held by mothers from both cultural groups.