Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. The cultural normativeness perspective argues that parenting practices such as spanking are more beneficial for children when they occur in cultural groups within which they are normative.
Research on this issue in the United States has focused on race as a marker of culture, and findings have been mixed. Mean weighted effect sizes for both groups indicated statistically significant associations with detrimental outcomes; they were not statistically significantly different from one another. Contrary to the cultural normativeness perspective, these results demonstrate that spanking is similarly associated with detrimental outcomes for White and Black children in the United States.
Such cross-cultural variation in a variety of parenting practices has been observed in several recent multinational comparisons Bornstein et al. In the United States, the notion of cultural differences in parenting has largely focused on one indicator of culture, namely the race or ethnicity of the parents, and on one indicator of parenting, namely physical punishment.
There is debate about whether race is a true marker of culture. That said, using race to define culture is limiting, as ascribed race likely does not do justice to the diversity of cultural beliefs and practices within a race group. These findings indicate that race is not a strong determinant of spanking attitudes and that the majority of both Blacks and Whites in the United States are supportive of spanking.
In examining race as a marker of culture, several studies have found patterns consistent with cultural normativeness theory. Three additional studies have reported this same pattern of results extending prospectively from 5 to 13 years of age Deater-Deckard et al. However, not all studies of race and physical punishment have been consistent with the cultural normativeness perspective.
