9 Inductive discipline (e.g. reasoning) is believed to help children to develop empathic skills, appealing to the child’s sense of reason and fairness.10 Conversely, punitive discipline (e.g. psychological aggression, corporal punishment) is believed LBH589 concentration to foster anger and unwillingness to comply, besides providing a model of aggression.11 In the field of child disciplinary practices, none is as controversial

as corporal punishment. Vitolo et al.12 found that 11.9% of Brazilian parents regarded corporal punishment as educational, and 43.3% used it as a child disciplinary practice. A broader and more recent study, with low and middle income countries (LaMICs) and the United States, observed that in Brazil, although nearly all parents Selleck Everolimus use some form of nonviolent discipline, 55% had spanked their children in the previous year, 15% had hit them with an object, and 19% had used forms of psychological violence, such as name-calling.13 While the association between physical abuse and bullying14 is well accepted, to the authors’s knowledge, no study has yet demonstrated an association between bullying and mild forms of corporal punishment, such as spanking. The present study sought to verify associations between different types of child disciplinary practices, especially mild forms of corporal punishment, and children and adolescents’ bullying behavior in a Brazilian sample. Participants

were children and adolescents from six public schools belonging to the catchment area of Reverse transcriptase the primary care unit of the Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre, Brazil, assessed between October of 2010 and

March of 2011. In order to be eligible, participants needed to be between 10 to 15 years of age, since corporal punishment, an important variable in this study, is rarely used on adolescents older than 15 years of age.15 The only exclusion criterion inability to obtain passive consent from parents and active student assent. This study was approved by the Research and Ethics Committee of Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre (n° 100010). On the day of the data collection, students were evaluated in their classroom by two research assistants. Students were asked to sit separately, to prevent conferring or talking while completing the questionnaire, which took approximately one teaching period (50 minutes). Bullying. A modified version 16 of the Olweus Bully Victim Questionnaire 17 was used to measure the frequency of bullying behavior. Students were asked to indicate how often they bullied others at school. Physical bullying was assessed with questions regarding how often they physically hurt other or took their property. Verbal bullying included name-calling, teasing in a hurtful way, or threatening. Indirect bullying included spreading rumors, not talking to someone on purpose, or excluding them from their group of friends.