Global Day of Parents

Despite significant progress in understanding parenting and its effects for children’s development , there are ongoing debates about how best to conceptualize and measure it . For decades, parenting was characterized in terms of global, consistent, and stable parenting styles. However, studies examining variations along different parenting dimensions now predominate, due to concerns about whether styles accurately capture contextual variations and have the same meaning in different groups. These concerns also have led to new, more granular and ‘domain-specific’ models that are more flexible and situational. These issues are discussed below, along with recommendations for future directions in studying parenting .  Research on parenting is moving towards ever-greater specificity. This has led to a more refined understanding of parenting, particularly regarding different forms of control and their links with adjustment. Research has upended the common wisdom about the importance o...

New ‘domain-specific’ models have begun to describe parenting as multifaceted and situationally determined. That is, parents are seen as flexibly deploying different practices or strategies in various situations. Importantly, children also interpret parenting behaviors , so similar practices may have different meanings depending on children’s developmental status and cultural context. Proponents of these approaches claim that systematic consideration of these factors will lead to better precision both in describing parenting and in understanding its effects. Adopting a behavioral systems approach , Grusec and Davidov described parenting in terms of the different child rearing goals and needs that are activated in different situations. They describe five domains of socialization :   protection (security, protection against harm),  control (acquiring societal expectations,  avoiding threats to autonomy occurring through parental overcontrol), guided learning (mastery of s...

In response to the cultural critiques of parenting styles , current research focuses on discrete dimensions of parenting , providing greater specificity in understanding parenting effects. For instance, behavioral control has been distinguished from psychological control and parental knowledge .  Psychological control  Psychological control, which is characteristic of authoritarian parenting , includes parental intrusiveness, guilt induction, and love withdrawal and is associated across cultures with internalizing and externalizing problems. Barber and his colleagues have identified parental disrespect as the specific mechanism causing these negative effects and have demonstrated that disrespect accounts for more of the variance in maladjustment than psychological control, broadly measured. Other than agreeableness, there is little evidence that personality variables moderate associations between psychological control and problem behavior. Drawing on self-determination theor...

 Authoritarian parentin g is widespread in non-Western cultures and among lower socioeconomic status (SES) and ethnic/racial minority parents in the U.S. Moreover, these factors may converge, as immigrant and ethnic minority families often live in poor communities characterized by dangerous neighborhoods, where authoritarian parenting may have protective effects . This has led to questions about whether authoritarian parenting is necessarily maladaptive in some contexts and to the claim that parenting must be assessed in terms of particular cultural values and indigenous concepts . For instance, although Chinese parenting is often described as authoritarian, punitive, and reflecting Confucian, child-centered, and beneficial concerns with strictness and child training. Chinese mothers also have been popularly described as “tiger moms” who employ fierce discipline to facilitate achievement and development.  Careful empirical research does not support this view, however. Per...

 Harsh or physical discipline, yelling or scolding, expressing disappointment, and shaming, all of which are hallmarks of authoritarian parenting, have detrimental effects on child adjustment in cultures around the world. For instance, parents who spank generally believe that it socializes positive behavior . However, large-scale studies in the U.S. and in cultures varying in their use of these practices show that spanking generally has negative effects for children’s adjustment and social competence , although these practices are less harmful (although still negative) when they are more culturally normative.  A recent study found that parental shaming is more culturally normative in both rural and urban China than in an urban sample in Canada and that it was seen as less psychologically harmful among rural Chinese (where it was more normative) than Canadians, but there were also interesting developmental trends. Across groups, 10–11 and 13–14 year-olds evaluated shaming mor...

 Baumrind’s influential model of parenting styles describes parenting as a gestalt of integrated parenting practices, best studied using pattern-based approaches . Her original description of the authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive parenting styles has been reconceptualized in terms of two orthogonal dimensions of demandingness and responsiveness , leading to the addition of a fourth, rejecting-neglecting style . Proponents claim that authoritative parenting , where parents are highly responsive to their children’s needs but also set reasonable limits and demand mature behavior, is most beneficial for children’s and adolescents’ development across contexts and cultures. This conclusion remains controversial, however. In response to critiques, Baumrind and colleagues have refined the definition of authoritative parenting and clarified the distinction between detrimental (e.g., coercive) and positive (e.g., confrontive) forms of parental power assertion. Parenting styles ...