Verbal threats are nothing to worry about either, the researchers maintain

Apr 19, 2013 12:11 GMT  ·  By

Neither the occasional smack nor verbal threats can be held accountable for causing kids to develop antisocial behaviors once they become teenagers, a team of researchers writing in the journal Parent: Science and Parenting say.

Still, there is one catch: said behaviors only do nothing to negatively influence a child's development as long as they go hand in hand with signs of affection and love.

What these Albert Einstein College of Medicine researchers are basically saying is that one can afford to be a strict mother only if one is ready and willing to combine harsh discipline with warm and affectionate behaviors.

The researchers reached their conclusions following their looking into the behavior of nearly 200 Mexican-American children, sources say.

By the looks of it, strict discipline is both common and approved of in the context of the Latino culture.

Thus, it was discovered that, provided that the youth were aware of the fact that both the smacking and the verbal threats came from “a good place,” their behavior was unlikely to turn into an antisocial one.

“Maternal warmth protected adolescents from the negative effects of harsh discipline such that, at higher levels of maternal warmth, there was no relation between harsh discipline and externalizing problems after controlling for baseline levels of externalizing problems and other covariates,” the researchers write in their paper.

“At lower levels of maternal warmth, there was a positive relation between harsh discipline practices and later externalizing problems,” they further explain.

As was to be expected, the findings of this study sparked quite a controversy.

This is because several other specialists have argued time and time again that smacking and verbal threats do no more and no less than foster aggressive and hyperactive behavior.

Furthermore, it has been said that children who are subjected to such treatments by their parents are likely to turn into violent teenagers.