What's Your Parenting Style?

When it comes to disciplining children, each parent follows different activities and practices. It is often said that the quality of parenting is more important than the quality of time spent with the child. Parenting styles usually represent how parents demand and respond to their children. Thus parenting practices are behaviours and parenting styles represent the larger picture of parenting practices.

In 1960, Diane Baumrind showed interest in the different ways that parents used to discipline their children. She conducted a study on about 100 preschoolers and using interviews of parents, natural observations and other research methods she came up with four dimensions of parenting. These were warmth and nurture, discipline strategy, communication style and expectation of control and maturity. It was then that Baumrind based on the dimensions suggested the following parenting styles:

• Authoritarian parenting – This style practices stern discipline, obedience and control of children through punishments.
• Permissive parenting – This style has warmth and indulgence but lack of rules
• Authoritative parenting – This is a balanced style where parents expect children to follow some rules along with an encouragement towards the children to think for themselves. There is open communication in this style.

Later a fourth style was added by Maccoby and Martin in 1983. This was:

• Uninvolved parenting – This style is very similar to permissive. The parents provide needs, food and shelter but no warmth and nurturance.

What is the impact of the parenting styles on children?

In addition to the study of the 100 preschool children, researchers have done more studies on the various impacts of different parenting styles. The effects of these styles are:

• Authoritarian parenting raises children who are proficient and obedient but display low self esteem are shy and misbehave when not in parental care. This is also considered a good parenting style.
• Authoritative parenting produces happy and successful children who have the ability to make their own decisions and are very responsible.
•  Permissive parenting results in children who are insecure and lack poor developmental skills and motivation and perform poorly in academics. These children usually have problems with authority.
• Uninvolved parenting is considered to be the worse parenting style. These children have low self esteem, lack self control and have difficulty in trusting people, mingling with other children of their age and display poor academic performance.

Why authoritarian parenting is considered better than the other styles

Authors Hockenbury and Hockenbury have explained in their text Psychology two reasons for the success of authoritarian parenting. Firstly, when children recognize that their parents are making reasonable and fair requests, they are more likely to abide with them. Secondly, children tend to make their own reasons for behaving themselves to attain self control.

Parenting styles definitely raise children with different outcomes ... but other factors which play a role in a child’s behaviour are social influences, culture, and child’s identification of the parental treatment.

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