Family Characteristics and Parental Violence of Child-Rearing in Thailand

Abstract

The study entitling “Family Characteristics and Parental Violence of Child-Rearing in Thailand” aimed at studying child-rearing behaviors of parents and examining factors related to children-caregiver characteristics, family structure and economic condition and child-rearing affecting their behaviors. This study reviewed the project of surveying the situation of children and women in Thailand 2015-2016 which was the secondary information gathered by the National Statistical Office of Thailand.
The Multiple regression analysis was employed to analyze the data. 

The findings revealed that the majority of the samples resided outside municipal districts, and most of them were living in Northeastern and Southern regions. Regarding children-caregiver characteristic factors, children from the households were more boys than girls with age between 1-10 years. Most parents were 21-40 years old with primary or below secondary educational level. In terms of family structure and economic condition factors, the majority of the families had similar economic conditions and lived together with 3-6 persons. The Most common parenting style discovered was a couple with only one partner at a time. Referring to the child-rearing factors, most parents devoted themselves to raise their children and resisted parental violence in child-rearing. Based on the results of the study, they showed that the factors of the parental violence in child-rearing both physically and mentally were mostly the same: gender of children, age and education of parents, economic conditions, and a very devoted parenting style which was the serious cause of the violence and subsequently led to the physical violence of child-rearing. Apart from this, the factor with the greatest effect on mental violence of child-rearing was the child’s age. However, it had no impact on the physical violence. In addition, the factor related to the number of family members only brought about physical abuse of child-rearing while the less caring parenting style merely caused mental abuse.