The role of parental control in children’s development.


For as long as scholars have studied parenting, they have considered parents’ exertion of control over children to be a central dimension of parenting thousand scholarly works have been written on the topic The proliferation of theory and research on parental control has yielded a myriad of conceptualizations and operationalizations. Rollins and Thomas in 1979)identified over 15 labels used to describe parental control in more than 220 studies. Although the most common label was the simple one of control sometimes accompanied by the term hostile, also common were authoritarian, discipline, demanding, dominance, protective, punishment, and restrictive. Other terms included authoritative, coercion, power assertion, possessiveness, pressure, and strictness. Notably, the list did not even include some labels that frequently appear in contemporary work, such as behavioral control, psychological control, firm versus lax control, intrusiveness, and forceful control. The plethora of terms has created confusion in the conclusions one can draw about the role of parental control in children’s development.

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