Separating Dimensions of Parenting From Targets of Parenting.

 




The distinction between parental control and structure has the potential to facilitate appropriate empirical evaluation of the full range of children’s experience at which parenting is directed. The multiple-forms approach often conflates dimensions of parenting with the target of parenting. For example, psychological control involves the pressuring, intrusive, and dominating dimension of parenting in regard to what children think and feel, whereas behavioral control involves the guiding dimension—what we have described as structure—of parenting in regard to children’s activities. Such a framework does not allow researchers to examine parental control in terms of children’s behavior or parental guidance (i.e., structure) in terms of children’s thoughts and feelings. In contrast, as we noted earlier, the distinction between control and structure is not tied to the target of parenting, thereby making it is possible to examine the full range of children’s experience with respect to both dimensions of parenting. For example, investigators can measure structure as the extent to which parents enforce rules and control as the extent to which rules are enforced in a parent-oriented manner (e.g., parents do not consider children’s input). In addition to dealing with the exclusion of key areas of children’s experience, differentiating control and structure facilitates the examination of the idea that several investigators have put forth that there are interactive effects of different dimensions of parenting. 

Despite the viability of such effects, there is little empirical evidence for them. Although this may be due in part to the compounded unreliability of interactions between continuous measures, it may also be due to a focus on different dimensions of parenting in regard to different targets—for example, how parents’ control of children’s thoughts and feeling interacts with their structuring of children’s behavior as manifest in parents’ monitoring of children’s after-school activities. As a consequence of such a focus, research may not capture the interaction of different dimensions of parenting in parents’ interactions with children. Separating parenting dimensions from their targets as we have done in distinguishing parental control and structure makes this possible. For example, investigators can examine whether the effects of parents’ monitoring of children’s after school activities depend on whether such structure is controlling, as manifest in parents’ use of threats of love withdrawal to obtain information from children.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Core Dimensions of Parenting.

Image
 Over the past several decades, parenting researchers have repeatedly suggested that three dimensions can be considered as a set of core features of parenting style . These are warmth versus rejection, structure versus chaos, and autonomy support versus coercion. As can be seen in the historical overview in Table 1, these dimensions have appeared in assessments of parenting for children from preschool age to late adolescence and have been tapped using a variety of methods, most notably parent- and child-report questionnaires, but also including open-ended interviews, rating scales, and observations in vivo and in the laboratory. Indeed, these very three features of parenting, referred to as Acceptance versus Rejection , Firm Control versus Lax Control , and Autonomy versus  help and attention , or it can be initiated by the parent, independent of the child’s behavior.   Structure and chaos . When it first appeared in the parenting literature in discussions of disciplin...
Read more

Focus on the impact of Cultural influences.

 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...
Read more

Focus on the Dimensional approaches on Parenting.

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...
Read more