Household economic hardship as a moderator of the associations between maternal spanking and child externalizing behavior problems

Spanking is associated with detrimental outcomes for young children. Research shows that spanking is more commonly used in low-income households. To examine whether economic hardship, measured by household income-to-poverty ratio at the time of the child’s birth, moderated the longitudinal associations between maternal spanking and child externalizing behavior problems during the first nine years of childhood. Mother-child pairs (N = 4,149) from...