Kids & Parenting

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The Importance Of Parenting Style
© 2014

by

Stephen A. Peterson

Over the last fifty years, behaviorists have been involved in intense research to learn those socializing agents influential in early childhood moral and social development. A consistent finding was children with parents/caregivers a child could model and identify with are much more likely to display helpful, cooperative behavior if the child has observed their parents/caregivers display, helpful, cooperative ways. This is especially the case if the parents/caregivers are warm and nurturing. By being nurturing (teaching and listening to their child), parents/caregivers teach their child consideration, empathy and sympathy.

Long time child behaviorist, Diana Baumrind, identified three parenting styles—authoritarian, authoritative and permissive. Since Dr. Baumrind’s presented her findings, other behaviorists have added their views with respect to childhood moral and social development. Dr. Baumrind has been determined appropriate towards understanding childhood moral and social develop for nearly half a century.

Most parents/caregivers, she observed, do not fit precisely into one style or another but reflect one style primarily plus another or both as the circumstance or the particular culture or society dictates. She did find certain consistencies to emerge between parenting style and a child moral and social development.

Both strict (authoritarian) and permissive parents/caregivers tend to have unrealistic expectations about children. For example, such parents/caregivers do not seem to understand their role as moral and behavior models. Nor do they understand that young children are unable to comply with certain demands due to their cognitive limitations. Authoritarian parents/
caregivers are strict, controlling and detached; permissive parents/caregivers tend to be loving but lax and non-directing/non-teachers of their child. Moral and socially developing children, in Dr. Baumrind’s view, require reasonable structure and direction in order to be become well rounded teens and later adults. Children of authoritarian and/or permissive parenting were found to be immature, lacked the ability to make socially appropriate decisions for themselves and lacked the ability to be self-reliant.

Authoritative parents/caregivers, Dr. Baumrind found, combined the warmth of the permissive adult with the firm expectations of the authoritarian while exhibiting flexibility, tolerance and respect for their child’ opinions and abilities as they proceed through the stages of childhood through adolescence. Authoritative parents/caregivers are more likely to use reason and fairness when they set limits or what some refer to as discipline. Children with authoritative parents/caregivers tend to be more sociable, creative, and secure in their relationship with their parents as well as with their peers and persons in authority.

In summary, parenting styles have important implications for a child’s moral and social development into their adult years. In exhibiting certain styles, parents/caregivers encourage children to develop moral-social-problem solving orientations and to interact in a socially appropriate-moral manner in social settings.

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