ABSTRACT
Parents’ responses to children's misbehavior have both short-term and long-term implications for child development. The parenting and child development literatures differentiate at least three common categories of responses to children's misbehavior: nonviolent discipline, psychological aggression, and physical violence. This chapter focuses on the nonviolent discipline, psychological aggression, and physical violence by exploring parents’ nonviolent discipline, psychological aggression, and physical violence toward 3-year-old to 5-year-old girls and boys in 51 low-income and middle-income countries (LMIC) in relation to specific domains of early childhood development. It describes the parent discipline strategies across child gender and LMIC at different levels of national development. The findings suggest that most countries still have considerable room to improve to meet the United Nations’ goal of ending all forms of violence against children by 2030, as the indicator of whether a country has met this goal is the proportion of children who experienced any physical punishment and/or psychological aggression by their caregivers in the past month.
