Wounds that parent: Emotion regulation difficulties as pathways for the intergenerational continuity of harsh discipline

Background Harsh discipline (HD) remains common across cultural contexts and is often transmitted intergenerationally. However, the mechanisms underlying this continuity remain underexplored in non-Western contexts. Objective This study examined whether parents' recollections of maternal and paternal HD predict HD with their children, and whether emotion regulation difficulties mediate these associations. Participants and setting The sample included 467 Egyptian parents aged 23–62 years ( M = 37.76, SD = 5.78), and each reported on one child aged 2 to 12.4 years ( M = 7.73, SD = 2.95). Methods Participants completed the Recollection of Parental Harsh Discipline Scale (PHDS), Child Harsh Discipline Scale (CHDS), and Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS-16). Mediation analyses examined both the DERS-16 total score and individual DERS subscale scores using PROCESS (Model 4) with 5000 bootstrapped samples, controlling for parent age, gender, child age, and intention to parent differently from one's parents. Results The DERS-16 total score partially mediated both associations (maternal indirect effect = 0.04, 95% CI [0.02, 0.07]; paternal indirect effect = 0.03, 95% CI [0.01, 0.06]). In parallel mediation models, only impulse control difficulties, a DERS subdimension, significantly mediated the maternal HD-child HD association (indirect effect = 0.02, 95% CI [0.002, 0.05]); all other subdimension effects, including those in the paternal model, were nonsignificant. Conclusions Findings identify overall emotion regulation difficulties and impulse control difficulties as pathways through which HD may be transmitted across generations, highlighting the need for culturally informed interventions targeting caregiver regulatory capacity.