Focus on Parenting styles.

 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 were originally conceptualized as transactionally associated with social competence, but studies have mostly focused on parent-to-child effects. Advances in statistically modeling have led more rigorous tests of bidirectionality. One recent study found that adolescent behavior had a much stronger effect on parenting styles than the reverse, whereas another found that effects varied by parenting style. Significant child effects were found for permissive-indulgent parenting, no bidirectional effects were found for authoritative parenting, and bidirectional effects were observed for mother but not child-rated authoritarian parenting.

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