Early Family and School Negative Experience and Later Life Development: A Prospective Study

Family corporal punishment/physical abuse and school victimization can have serious influences on one’s development. Although studies have shown that these negative experiences have detrimental effects on adolescent development (e.g., delinquency and negative emotions), only a few studies take into account these two incidents simultaneously and how they interact to influence late adolescent and early adulthood outcomes. Furthermore, a life course perspective would expect that early negative experience (e.g., early adolescence) will influence later life stage (e.g., late adolescence), which in turn influences even later stage (e.g., early adulthood). This study employed a longitudinal Taiwanese sample to see how family corporal punishment (wave 1) and school victimization (wave 2 to wave 4) influences one’s mental and behavioral outcome in late adolescence (wave 6) and the same outcome when these adolescents enter into early adulthood (wave 9). We found that only about 4.5% of students had been victimized in school; however, there were about 25% of subjects experience family corporal punishment (e.g., beating up with objects). Family corporal punishment was related to later school victimization, and both experiences were related to high school delinquency and delinquent peer association. Furthermore, these later outcomes were related to both external (e.g., smoking) and internal (e.g., depression) health in early adulthood.