Uncovering the roots of harsh parenting

ongoing

Harsh parenting (HP) is the use of corporal or emotional punishment to discipline children. Despite harming children both physically and psychologically, it is widespread and persistent in certain regions and demographic groups. Why? Existing studies on the causes of HP predominantly focus on individual and family factors, ignoring wider contextual factors influencing childrearing practices. Motivated by an ecological framework, HARSH marks a paradigm shift in understanding HP by explicitly exploring cultural, institutional, and economic causes for the first time. It has four main related objectives: 1) Uncover the ancestral cultural origins explaining long-term HP persistence. 2) Identify the causal impact of economic factors. 3) Assess the influence of institutional structures and policies. 4) Unpack the mechanisms through which these contextual factors shape HP. HARSH reaches its goals in four transformative ways. a) Focusing on Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, leveraging on their differences in socio-economic development, stages of demographic transitions and HP prevalence. b) Utilizing new highly disaggregated data across space and time enabling analysis of HP variations within and between countries, ethnic groups, and cohorts. c) Employing innovative methodologies including spatial analysis, and quantitative economic techniques, which are uncommon in studies on violence against children, but crucial to derive causal pathways. d) Identifying innovative socio-economic mechanisms, as well as the population subgroups most at risk. HARSH pioneers new research avenues by offering unique, hypothesis-driven, empirical insights into the wider factors behind HP needed to fully grasp the reasons why parents adopt it. It offers an interdisciplinary perspective by using novel methods to test hypotheses from demography, psychology, and medicine. It supplies key scientific evidence for devising effective policies to tackle this major yet often hidden public health issue.