About Parenting.




Perhaps most basically, the refinement we have suggested reduces the ambiguity in the conclusions drawn about the effects of parental control. For example, on the basis of their assessment of parental control as the extent to which key decisions were made by children themselves versus their parents, Fletcher et al. concluded that ‘‘parental control and monitoring are . . . effective deterrents against adolescent misbehavior’’. One might take away the incorrect message that parental control in general, including forms characterized by pressure, intrusion, and dominance, is good for children, but these investigators did not examine such forms of control. The use of the term structure, rather than control, would clearly convey the nature of the findings without creating confusion. This is important given that, as we noted earlier, some investigators have incorrectly described the body of research on parental control as yielding inconsistent findings. A distinction between control and structure would also be useful in clarifying theory and research concerned with more specific issues regarding the effects of parental control. For example, several investigators have concluded that parental control is beneficial to children in dangerous environments. These investigators often cite a study by Baldwin, Baldwin, and Cole in which parents’ restrictiveness (i.e., how numerous and circumscribed the rules are) was associated with positive psychological functioning among children at high risk but not at low risk. However, parents’ democracy (i.e., children have a say in the rules vs. rules are imposed on children) was associated with positive psychological functioning regardless of children’s risk. Baldwin and colleagues concluded that ‘‘restrictive authoritarian’’ family patterns are successful in high-risk situations. This conclusion is misleading because although the number of rules had more positive effects when risk was high, the extent to which these rules were characterized by parents’ domination of children (the opposite of democracy) had negative effects regardless of risk. In fact, a close examination reveals that much of the research leading investigators to conclude that the effects of parental control are moderated by children’s neighborhoods has focused on parenting that is structuring rather than controlling R.

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