iMedPub Journals ht tp://journals.imedpub.com Health Science Journal ISSN 1791-809X 2015 Vol. 9 No. 3:3 1 © Copyright iMedPub | This article is available in: www.hsj.gr/archive Disciplining the Children: Mothers’ Percepions from a Rural Sri Lankan Community Deepani Siriwardhana 1 and Manuj Weerasinghe 2 1 Faculty of Medicine University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka 2 Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka Correspondence: Manuj C Weerasinghe  manujchri@gmail.com Department of Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, 25, Kynsey Road, Colombo 8, 00800, Sri Lanka Abstract Background: Disciplining is a major component of parening. Studying the percepion on disciplining children provides informaion to reduce harmful pracices in communiies. The aim of this study was to develop an instrument and assess maternal percepion towards the physical and psychological disciplinary pracices in a rural community of Sri Lanka. Methods and Material: Vignetes based interviewer administered quesionnaire incorporaing a visual analog scale was developed to capture the percepions. Sixty seven mothers of children aged 11-16 years paricipated. Mothers were asked to categorize the vignetes into three groups and to rate the percepion on three domains; severity, approval and harm. Mean scores and standard deviaion was calculated for each disciplinary act. Then weighted mean scores were calculated for total physical and psychological disciplinary acts in three domains. Pearson correlaion co eicient was calculated and signiicance of the correlaion was tested between the percepion of severity and approval, percepion of severity and harm, percepion of harm and approval for each of the disciplinary acts. Results: The mean scores for percepion of severity for eight individual physical disciplinary acts varied from 4.57 to 7.93 and for harm from 3.24 to 7.72. For percepion of approval it varied from 2.91 to 7.34. The mean scores for percepion on severity of psychological disciplinary acts varied from 4.29 to 7.52 and for harm from 4.43 to 7.39. For approval of the act it was from 3.06 to 5.43. Negaive correlaion was observed for the percepion of approval with percepion of severity and harm. Posiive correlaion was seen between the percepion of severity and harm. Conclusion: The study demonstrates that mothers in this community favour physical disciplinary pracices compared to the psychological disciplinary pracices. Even though the perceived culpability of the child is low in the psychological disciplinary acts they perceive those acts as comparaively severe, harmful and less approved. Keywords: Maternal percepion; Disciplinary pracices; Child Maltreatment; Vignete Introducion Disciplining is a major component of parening. The word discipline origin from ‘disciplinare’ and it means ‘to teach’ or ‘to instruct’. The formal deiniion of disciplining refers to the system of teaching and nurturing that prepares children to achieve