The Association between Paternal Job Stress and Maternal Child Corporal Punishment: Evidence from a Population-Based Survey in Metropolitan Japan

Corporal punishment (CP) of children is associated with an elevated risk for child abuse and numerous negative effects on children’s long-term health and behavioral development (Ferguson 2013; Paolucci and Violato 2004). Recent work in child welfare research has proposed that CP should be considered an adverse childhood experience (Afifi et al. 2017). However, despite calls to eliminate child CP, this practice remains a normatively accepted disciplinary practice in many Asian countries, including Japan (Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children 2017; Save the Children Japan 2018). To design effective interventions for use in the Asian context requires a better understanding of the risk factors for parental use of child CP. This study focused on paternal job stress as a potential risk factor related to parental use of child CP in Asian families.

Several societal and parental factors are known risk factors for parental use of child CP (Chiocca 2017; Gershoff 2002). At the societal level, legal tolerance and social norms allowing the parental use of disciplinary CP are strongly associated with the prevalence of child CP (Straus 2010). At the individual level, parents who are more likely to use CP for disciplinary purposes are those with low educational attainment, younger age, low household income, their own history of adverse childhood experiences, and high levels of mental stress (Combs-Orme and Cain 2008; Gebara et al. 2017). These research findings, mainly from studies in Western countries, provide a useful basis for the design of preventive strategies against parental use of CP such as social campaigns aimed at raising awareness of the risks of CP or psychoeducational programs to help high-risk parents choose non-coercive discipline strategies (Horno Goicoechea et al. 1999). Although these strategies are likely to be effective in Asian countries, researchers may need to consider other attributes that affect the well-being of families following Asian norms of childrearing and adhering to gender-bound family values (Kumagai and Ishi-Kuntz 2016; Lu and Cooper 2015).

The traditional family system in Asian societies considers children the property of the family; a male provider is the head of the family and mothers are under social pressure to discipline children (Kumagai and Ishi-Kuntz 2016). Recent household composition changes in favor of nuclear families and the increased participation of women in the labor force have not fully emancipated mothers from their traditional role obligations, but have instead increased pressure on parents caught between the demands of work and family life (Lu and Cooper 2015).

Against this cultural background, our research focused specifically on fathers’ job stress as a potential risk factor for maternal use of disciplinary CP, for three reasons. First. long working hours remain the norm in Asian countries (Lee et al. 2007), and the negative effect of high job stress on the work–life balance is one of the most prevalent stressors for parents (Lu and Cooper 2015). According to a 2010 national survey of Japanese households, job-related stress was ranked above other stressors such as low household income, dissatisfaction with family relationships, and family illness, and was the top stressor for both men and women in their thirties and forties (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2010). Another governmental survey showed that at the household level, fathers spent limited time on childcare and maintained long working hours (Statistics Bureau 2016), whereas mothers were obliged to manage dual role obligations of supporting their male partners working outside the household and to discipline children in the household (Yamaguchi 2009). However, previous studies on the risk factors for parental disciplinary use of CP have not examined paternal job stress.

Second, existing studies that examined risk factors for parental use of child CP have mainly explored individual parental traits (e.g., low educational attainment) and societal factors (e.g., legal allowance for disciplinary use of CP by parents). Recent publications have called for more research on the contextual and situational factors of CP such as work and/or family-related stress (Peltonen et al. 2014). Our aim in this study was to draw attention to the significance of the family system in the Asian context and to examine risk factors that may affect family well-being. We believe that this line of research could facilitate the examination of social policies to reduce CP in the Asian context, which in turn may help to promote interventions aimed at the social environment surrounding families as a complement to education and welfare programs targeting individual parents.

Third, the Spillover-Crossover Model of job stress (Shimazu et al. 2009) provides a plausible mechanism to link paternal job stress with the likelihood of maternal disciplinary use of CP. This model posits that job stress experienced by a father outside the family can be transmitted to the family context and shape the father’s interpersonal reactions and relationships. The theory further holds that a father’s stress that spills over to the household can influences the psychobehavioral status of cohabitants, which is known as the cross-over effect (Shimazu et al. 2013). Thus, a father’s spillover job stress is likely to induce maternal psychological distress, which may trigger maternal use of CP. Another possibility is that the father’s spillover stress directly induces the child’s behavioral reactions and problems, which in turn, affect the risk of the mother using CP (Connell and Goodman 2002; Mezulis et al. 2004).

Given the high prevalence of job stress among adults who are also rearing children and the general acceptance of disciplinary use of CP in Asian families, the population-attributable risk of CP associated with paternal job stress could be as large as the risk of the known factors. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the association between paternal job stress and maternal use of CP to discipline children among households in a metropolitan city in Japan.

Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics for participant characteristics (n = 522). The mean age of the children was 33.5 months, 17% of mothers had low educational attainment, and 12% of mothers reported having their own history of adverse childhood experiences (i.e., abuse or neglect). In all, 14% of fathers had high job stress, and 24% of mothers exhibited psychological distress. Among the mothers, 16% (81/522) reported frequent use of child CP.

Compared with their counterparts, parents who frequently used CP had older children (age in months), more children in the household, more male children, lower maternal education, lower household income, higher paternal job stress, and higher maternal psychological distress. In addition, mothers who more frequently used child CP were also significantly more likely to be working mothers and to report their own history of adverse childhood experiences.

The left column of Table 2 shows the results of the regression of predictors of frequent use of CP by mothers before the inclusion of the maternal psychological distress variable. Greater child age (in months) was associated with a higher risk of frequent CP use, whereas higher maternal educational attainment was significantly associated with a lower CP risk. Child female sex and higher household income was associated with a lower CP risk, but these associations did not reach statistical significance. Similarly, higher risk for mothers’ frequent use of CP was associated with a higher number of children in the household, maternal non-working status, and maternal adverse childhood experience, but these associations were not statistically significant. Including all the covariates above, paternal job stress was significantly associated with a higher risk of mothers’ frequent use of child CP (odds ratio [OR] = 3.06, 95% confidence intervals [CI] [1.13, 8.30]). After adding maternal psychological distress to this model (Model 2, right column of Table 2), the point estimate for the OR of paternal job stress was attenuated but remained significant (OR = 2.81, 95% CI [1.03, 7.69]). Maternal psychological distress by itself was significantly related to higher odds of frequent use of CP by mothers (OR = 2.38, 95% CI [1.05, 5.36]). After inclusion of maternal psychological distress, the ORs of household income were nullified.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the association between paternal job stress and likelihood of maternal frequent use of child CP. Our main findings were that paternal job stress was significantly associated with maternal frequent use of CP, and that association remained significant after including maternal psychological distress. These findings indicate that a parent’s experiences of social stress caused by the environment outside the family can be transmitted to the household, and thus, affect their partner’s parenting behavior choices. Such stress may also impact children’s health and development through CP experiences.

Our results confirm findings from previous studies in Western countries, and suggest that known risk factors such as lower maternal educational attainment, parental adverse childhood experience, and psychological distress are associated with higher odds of maternal frequent use of CP in Japanese urban settings. The significance of maternal psychological distress is particularly noteworthy because this finding highlights the need for psychoeducational support for mothers experiencing high stress to help prevent CP and harsh parental discipline in this population.

In addition to maternal risk factors, the study findings provide evidence of the importance of paternal job stress as a risk factor for parental CP use. Moreover, the study findings indicate that the mechanism linking paternal job stress with maternal CP use was not substantially mediated by the known risk factors. It is possible that paternal job stress affects fathers’ own psychological distress and induces distressed fathers to resort to using CP (Davis et al. 2011). However, because we restricted our sample to maternal respondents who completed a questionnaire on CP, we can assume that it was mothers who used CP.

The spillover stress of working fathers is likely to reduce their partner’s relational satisfaction (Lavner and Clark 2017), which may further increase the likelihood of the partners’ use of child CP. A previous study in China reported that marital dissatisfaction was a significant risk factor for mothers’ harsh parenting, independent of maternal mental health status (Liu and Wang 2015). Unfortunately, marital satisfaction was beyond the scope of the present study, and therefore, we could not test for this mechanism in our sample. The present findings show that fathers’ job stress was related to maternal CP use, independent of mothers’ psychological distress.

Another potential mechanism is that paternal job stress increases fathers’ psychological distress, which then increases the risk of the child developing behavioral problems, which is a known risk factor for harsh parental punishment (Connell and Goodman 2002; Mezulis et al. 2004; Ramchandani et al. 2005). We conducted an ad hoc analysis but found no meaningful correlation between paternal job stress and child internal and external behavioral problems, as measured by the Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach 1999), for children 2 years and older (data not shown).

Although we are unable to specify which explanatory pathway is the most plausible owing to the cross-sectional nature of the study design, the possibility of an association between paternal job stress and maternal use of CP is notable for several reasons. First, following previous studies (Gershoff 2002; Peltonen et al. 2014), this study provides evidence that the situational and contextual factors surrounding the family system constitute a promising new research area that could elucidate the parental use of child CP in Japan and perhaps other Asian countries. Second, these findings may contribute to broad efforts to improve children’s well-being and safety in the household through policy interventions at worksites, psychoeducational programs for highly stressed mothers, and welfare policies to support households in need. Third, these results have research implications for the assessment of parental risk factors for CP. Existing assessments have mainly focused on child-level factors (e.g., psychobehavioral problems), parent–child dysfunction, and parental distress (Abidin 1995). The current findings suggest that causes of parental distress could include stressors outside the household, particularly stressors in the work environment.

The study findings suggest that, in addition to policy supporting welfare programs and psychoeducational support for primary high-risk caregivers and households in need, public policy interventions that target the wider social environments surrounding the family could be used to prevent child CP. Hot topics on the policy agendas of Japan as well as several other countries include long working hours and the subsequent work–family imbalance. However, policy discussions of these have generally been limited to “reform of working styles” (Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare 2015) that primarily aims to enhance labor productivity and to formalize workforce participation for women. Notably, the findings of this study indicate that improvements in parents’ labor conditions may contribute to the enhancement of children’s security and health in the household in the context of Asian family and work life. Therefore, policy discussions of labor reforms should be broadened to consider the ways in which improved workplace environments can benefit the health and well-being of children.

Several study limitations must be considered when interpreting the study findings. Because of the cross-sectional nature of the study, we could not specify causality between paternal job stress and maternal use of child CP. Nevertheless, reverse causality (e.g., job stress caused by CP) is unlikely, and the association between paternal job stress and maternal use of child CP was observed independent of other known risk factors such as low income, low educational attainment, and (particularly) maternal psychological distress. Further, other potential confounders (e.g., social support within and outside of parental couples and neighborhood social capital) could explain the association. As Gershoff (2002) noted, identifying the causal direction and mediational processes of multiple contexts to explain the mechanism and impact of child CP use in the household remains a research challenge.

Second, the generalizability of our findings needs to be carefully considered because the participants were limited to residents of the greater Tokyo metropolitan area. The sample demographics in terms of age, gender, and school attainment were representative of the general population in the region (Takada et al. 2014). This region has a women’s labor participation rate close to the national average (67.5% as of 2010; Statistics Bureau 2010). However, differences might exist between urban and rural populations regarding traditional family values, gender norms, and childrearing practices; therefore, this study needs to be replicated in a rural setting to determine the generalizability of the present findings. Finally, to confirm the findings of the present study, replication of this study is needed in another Asian country with family norms and related values similar to those in Japan, especially regarding gender roles and childrearing.

This study indicates that paternal job stress is associated with maternal frequent use of child CP, independent of maternal psychological distress. The results suggest the need for workforce policies that consider the effects of employees’ stress on their household environments and the health and development of children.