The relationship between children's self-regulation and parental negative discipline practices

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between preschool children's self-regulation and negative disciplinary practices of their parents. The children's gender were also examined in determining this relationship. A correlational research model was used as a quantitative research design. The study was conducted with 144 children aged between 48 and 72 months who enrolled preschool education in Çukurova and Sarıçam distrist of Adana province, and 144 parents. The sample was determined by maximum diversity sampling method and was contained of parents and children at different socioeconomic levels. The demographic information of the participants was collected by the Personal Information Forms prepared by the researcher. Parental negative disciplinary practices were measured by Parenting Scale which was adapted to Turkish by Kapcı, Tazeoğlu ve Arkun (2011) and the children's self-regulation skills were measured by Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment (PSRA) which was adapted to Turkish by Fındık Tanrıbuyurdu ve Güler Yıldız (2014). In the analysis of the obtained data, Pearson Moment correlation analysis was applied to determine the relationship between children 's self regulation, behavior / attention regulation, emotion regulation and parental disciplinary practices. Independent Groups t test and Mann Whitney-U test were used as children's self-regulation and negative disciplinary practices of their parents were examined according to children's gender. Findings revealed that there is an negative relation between children's self regulation, emotion regulation, behavior/attention regulation and negative parental disciplinary practices. Accordingly, as parents' negative disciplinary practices increase, children's self-regulation, emotional regulation, and attention/behavior regulation decrease. It was also found that children's self-regulation and attention/behavior regulation differed by gender. However, this difference was not found in children's emotion regulation. According to this findings, girls demonstrated higher self-regulation and behavior/attention regulation than boys. Finally, it was found that negative disciplinary practices of the parents are significantly higher for boys than girls.