The Effects of Parenting Styles on Child Outcome

2086 Words5 Pages

“There is no way in which parents can evade having a determining effect upon their children’s personality, character, and competence” (Baumrind, 1978). It is amazing that children who are raised in completely different environments can go on to possess similar characteristics later in life. But why is this the case? The functions that parents perform greatly influence how children develop. A tremendous amount of research has been done on the effects of parenting styles since 1966 when Diana Baumrind first published her three prototypes of parenting styles, but many parents fail to understand the power they possess in shaping the future lives of their children and the need for a responsible strategy regarding the rearing of their children. Baumrind (1967) observed more than one hundred preschool age children and their parents and noted that responsiveness of the parents to their child’s needs in a supportive way would increase the child’s performance. There are two central elements regarding parenting style: parental responsiveness and parental demand (Maccoby & Martin, 1983). From these building blocks, Baumrind identified three prototypes: authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive. In 1983, the work of Maccoby and Martin would be published and reconceptualize Baumrind’s work by adding a fourth category; neglectful. All four of these parenting style prototypes are a combination of these basic elements. Authoritative parenting combines responsiveness with demandingness for what many people believe to be the best approach to parenting (Timpano, Keough, Mahaffey, Schmidt, & Abramowitz, 2010). The authoritarian style fuses unresponsiveness with demandingness to form a totalitarian view of child rearing. The inverse o... ... middle of paper ... ...ferences between washers and checkers. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 23,197-201 Strage, A., & Brandt, T. S. (1999). Authoritative parenting and college students’ academic adjustment and success. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91, 146-156. Timpano, K. R., Keough, M. E., Mahaffey, B., Schmidt, N. B., & Abramowitz, J. (2010). Parenting and Obsessive Compulsive Symptoms: Implications of Authoritarian Parenting. Journal Of Cognitive Psychotherapy, 24(3), 151-164. Weiss, L.H., & Schwarz, J.C. (1996). The relationship between parenting types and older adolescents’ personality, academic achievement, adjustment, and substance use. Child Development, 67(5), 2101-2114. Wolfradt, U., Hempel, S., Miles, J. N. V. (2003). Perceived parenting styles, depersonalization, anxiety and coping behaviour in adolescents. Personality and Individual Differences, 34,521-532.

Open Document