The study found that several cognitive risk factors significantly predicted the risk of parental aggression toward children. A parent’s ability to empathize with a child (assume the perspective of the child’s feelings and circumstances), parental locus of control, and parental level of frustration tolerance were significant predictors of abuse potential and inappropriate discipline practices. These findings confirm much of the SIP model, which proposes that parents’ cognitive processing of events occurs in four stages, leading toward decisions to engage in physical aggression with children. Pre-existing cognitive schemata that exist prior to processing information from new interactions precede the four stages. In the first stage, parents initially perceive a parent-child situation and attend to the interaction. In the second stage, the parent holds expectations, interprets, and evaluates the parent-child interaction. In stage three, parents integrate information about the parent-child situation and choose their response. Difficulties in this third stage result from poor integration of factors that explain the child’s behavior as well as from the choice of inappropriate responses, given limited knowledge of parenting skills and techniques. Stage four focuses on response implementation and parents’ ability to monitor their own behavior. Abusive parents may choose a response that involves physical aggression. The study involved 73 mothers of 5-12-year-old children who were identified by their therapists as having an externalizing behavior problem. The mothers responded to self-report measures that pertained to cognitive risk factors (emphatic perspective-taking, frustration tolerance, developmental expectations, and parenting locus of control), abuse risk, and discipline style and practices. 3 tables and 40 references