Different Parenting Styles And How They Affect Your Child

Quite often because they’ve been raised by different parents themselves who had

different styles of raising children , today’s new parents often disagree on how to bring

their offspring up. This is nothing new to experts in the field, who have long been

suggesting there are three general categories parenting styles fall under.

 

• Permissive: Where there are few guidelines or hard and fast rules since parents

don’t want their children upset.

• Authoritarian: Here the parent sets down a definite set of benchmarks the child

needs to be obedient to.

• Authoritative parenting which is more or less a hybrid that blends a gentle tone

with a set of clear limits on behavior.

 

Psychologist Diana Baumrind is considered a pioneer on the subject and it was her

studies on 100 preschool-age children in 1967 that laid the groundwork for the modern

templates used today. Along with the three categories of parenting, Baumrind furthered

there were dimensions that were blended in. These included various disciplinary

strategies, communication styles, warmth and nurturance capabilities and finally the

expectations of maturity and control parents had of their children.

Baumrind’s studies were the foundation for numerous others and today parents have a

body of research to look to when deciding which parenting styles best suit their children.

Research over the years has found that:

 

• Permissive parenting creates children that are unhappy and don’t have a lot of

the self regulation that’s needed to do well in school. These children often have

ongoing problems with authority.

 

• The child that’s grown up under an authoritarian system has some advantages and

drawbacks. For example, they tend to be proficient and obedient but are lacking in

self esteem, social competence and happiness.

 

• Authoritative parenting often results in children that are the most well rounded

and capable according to research conducted by Maccoby in 1992.

 

So, parents that blend these styles don’t need to be at odds with each other. There are

ways to get around the different approaches that can actually lessen friction between

Mom and Dad. First and foremost, you need to keep any disagreements out of the little

one’s ear shot. All the professionals in the field agree that arguing in front of your

children over different parenting styles can be highly destructive and thwart the original

intentions of bettering their behavior.

Remember that counselling is a great way to arrive at a template that will be equitable for

everyone involved. This will help both parents to understand how their own upbringing

will drive their current parenting focus. Although authoritative parenting clearly has some

advantages that are of benefit, other factors like culture and a variety of social influences

can mix together to create a myriad of hybrid parenting styles. In the end, there is really

no universal style of parenting that has blanket approval from all the professionals in the

field so parents need to be flexible and willing to work with each other.

 

For more interesting articles like this, visit All My Children Daycare.

Author: Rob Starr