Mother’s discipline practices and social norms of early development

The Theory of Planned Behavior suggests that parents’ perceived social norms and expectations regarding corporal punishment (CP) use might be linked to their attitudes and disciplinary choices. Research supports this prediction as so perceived norms regarding CP use are associated with parents’ attitudes. The focus of this study is mothers' discipline practice and its relation to perceived social norms of early childhood parenting. Other studies from Serbia show the first use of CP is around the child’s second year. Therefore, early childhood is a high time for prevention attempts toward changing parents’ attitudes and practices. The sample includes 413 mothers of 18-35 months old children from six Serbian municipalities. This research is a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodological approach. Mothers have reported which of 13 discipline practices, they used in the last month (for example, explaining, yelling, spanking, shaking) when children misbehave. Also, after a focus group with parents, we identified social norms of parenting practice during early development. A ten-items fivedegree scale was constructed to assess mothers’ perceived social norms of other parents and their agreement with them. Cluster analysis (Ward’s method, squared Euclidean distance) shows three existing clusters that fit with the data study of discipline practices. Chi-square analysis was used to define the extracted group. The first group of mothers used only explanations as discipline practice in the situation of misbehaving. Most of the respondents in the second group agreed with the statement that their child is too little for any form of discipline (64% compared to 6-3% in other groups). Finally, the third group used explanation but also inclined more than others toward violent verbal, such as yelling (93%) and physical disciplining, such as spanking (45%). These mothers perceived two descriptive norms as more available in their surrounding compared to the others: 1. the