Child-Rearing Styles

What makes Mary burst into tears of frustration when she can’t finish a jigsaw puzzle, while Gary will shrug and walk away from it, and Cary will sit with it for hours until he finishes? What makes Polly independent and Molly a clinger? What makes Tim ready to hit out at the slightest provocation and Jim loath to fight? One answer lies in the basic temperament children are born with. A second very important influence on behavioral styles is the early emotional environment—how children are treated by their parents.

The psychologist Diana Baumrind set out to discover relationships between different styles of child rearing and the social competence of children. She reviewed the research literature and conducted her own studies with ninety-five families of children in nursery school. Using a combination of long interviews, standardized testing, and observations at school and home, she identified three categories of parenting styles and linked them to children’s behavior.

Authoritative parents exert firm control when necessary, but they explain why they take a stand and encourage children to express their opinions. They feel confident in their ability to guide their children, while respecting the children’s interests, opinions, and unique personalities. They combine firm control with encouragement and love. Their children know that they are expected to perform well, fulfill commitments, and carry out duties in the family. They know when they are meeting expectations and when it is worth risking their parents’ displeasure to pursue some other goal. They seem to thrive on their parents’ reasonable expectations and realistic standards, and they are most self-reliant, self-controlled, assertive, exploratory, and content.

Authoritarian parents value unquestioning obedience and punish their children forcibly for not conforming to set and quite absolute standards. They are somewhat detached, controlling, and distant. Their children tend to be discontented, withdrawn, and distrustful of others.

Permissive parents make few demands on their children, set few rules, and hardly ever punish. As preschoolers, their children are immature—the least self-reliant, the least self-controlled, the least exploratory.

On the basis of her research, Baumrind has recommended that parents who want to raise competent, socially responsible, independent children should do several things:

• Teach by example; that is, behave the way you want your children to behave.
• Reward behaviors you want to encourage and punish behaviors you want to discourage, giving explanations in both cases.
• Show interest in children.
• Bestow approval only when the child has earned it.
• Demand achievement and the meeting of standards, while being open to hearing the child’s point of view.
• Encourage original thinking.

Baumrind’s work raises important issues about child-rearing practices, but before we conclude that parenting is all that matters, we have to remember what children bring to the family. Through their own inborn temperaments, children influence their parents. It is possible, for example, that “easy” children will elicit an authoritative attitude from their parents, while “difficult” children may make tyrants out of theirs.