A qualitative study on corporal punishment and emotionally abusive disciplinary practices among mothers of children with ADHD

OBJECTIVES: The present study aimed to investigate actual disciplinary behaviours of Turkish mothers’ in the context of relational environment and to investigate ADHD as a risk factor on abusive disciplinary practices.

METHODS: Totally 120 children (children with ADHD; study group and healthy controls; control group) – and their mothers were interviewed with this aim. The interviews were qualitatively coded and analysed. T-test and Odds ratio were used for descriptive statistics with the aim of supporting the qualitative results.

RESULTS: According to the results of the study, emotionally abusive disciplinary behaviours (81% of all mothers 58% of all children) and corporal punishment (76% of all mothers and 65% of all children) were commonly used as a disciplinary method. Nevertheless, children with ADHD was shown to be at higher risk for both abusive disciplinary practices. The present study has also shown that children with ADHD and their mothers shared less positive activities compared to the control group. In addition to this, emotionally abusive disciplinary practices were found to be at least as hurtful as corporal punishment.

CONCLUSIONS: To our knowledge, the present study was the first one investigating Turkish mothers’ actual abusive disciplinary acts together with the relational environment between them and their children (including their relationship, positive sharing, problematic issues) by gathering information from both mothers and children of both study and control groups and then comparing these groups in terms of all these aspects. Qualitative nature of the study gave the opportunity of determining the actual disciplinary methods and the actual relational risk factors rather than attitudes and questionnaire scores about mother–child relationship. Therefore, it can be suggested that the results of the study provide important information about the abusive disciplinary behaviours of Turkish mothers and also provide the opportunity of predicting risk factors – keeping cultural context in mind – of these behaviours.