The Adjustment of Ethnic Minority and Majority Children Living in Israel: Does Parental Use of Corporal Punishment Act as a Mediator? Rotem Regev a , Noa Gueron-Sela b and Naama Atzaba-Poria b a Department of Psychology, University of Victoria, BC, Canada b Department of Psychology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel This paper examines explanatory mechanisms of differences, in both positive and negative aspects of children’s adjustment, between ethnic minority (i.e., Former Soviet Union—FSU origin) and ethnic majority (i.e., Israeli) children living in Israel. Seventy Israeli children (40 girls) and 75 FSU origin children (38 girls) and their parents constituted the study sample. Both mothers and fathers reported on the children’s prosocial and externalizing behaviours and provided accounts of their use of corporal punish- ment. Analyses showed that FSU origin children displayed lower levels of prosocial behaviour as well as higher levels of externalizing problems and that their parents used more corporal punishment than their Israeli counterparts. In addition, a mediation model was determined in which both maternal and paternal use of corporal punishment mediated the link between ethnicity and the child’s prosocial behaviour. Furthermore, according to the best fitting structural equation model, ethnicity did not have a direct effect on children’s prosocial behaviour. This link was fully mediated by maternal and paternal corporal punishment. No mediation was revealed for the links between ethnicity and externalizing problems. The process of risk is discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Key words: ethnic minority; corporal punishment; prosocial behaviour; externalizing behaviour Background Research on children’s adjustment has traditionally focused on identifying the factors that may be linked to adjustment (Campbell, 1990; Coie & Dodge, 1998). *Correspondence to: Noa Gueron-Sela, Department of Psychology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel. E-mail: gueron@bgu.ac.il Infant and Child Development Inf. Child Dev. 21: 34–51 (2012) Published online 9 October 2011 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/icd.754 Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.