In this video I describe Diana Baumrind’s 3 main parenting styles: authoritarian, permissive, and authoritative. I also describe the addition of neglectful or uninvolved parenting and the outcomes in children associated with each of these parenting styles. Lastly I consider the difficulty of drawing specific conclusions from these outcomes, as children’s personalities and behaviors may influence parenting styles and parents and children may share genes related to social competence.
* Please note that I made an error when describing permissive parenting in this video. I should have said that permissive parents are not demanding but are responsive to the children’s emotional needs. Stating that they are neither demanding nor responsive describes neglectful parenting. This is corrected in the text below the video.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video we looked at attachment and bonding and the importance of this early relationship between mother and child and in this video we’re going to look at the relationship between parents and children over time and how it might shape the children’s development.
This brings us to what’s called parenting style and Diana Baumrind initially proposed three main parenting styles. The first of these at one extreme is what’s called authoritarian parenting and in authoritarian parenting the parents set strict rules for behavior and they also have harsh punishments for when those rules are violated. And so we can think of the child as being powerless in this situation; the child doesn’t have a say in what the rules are and doesn’t have a say in what happens when the rules are broken. And this authoritarian parenting is associated with lower social skills and reduced self esteem in the children. At the other extreme we have what’s called permissive parenting *(see note above) and in this case the parents set few or no rules for the children’s behavior and they have few or no punishments and they’re often described as not demanding but are responsive; which means the parents aren’t setting demands they don’t have clear expectations for the children’s behavior, but they are responding to the children’s emotional needs. This permissive parenting is associated with higher aggression and lower maturity in the children.
Lastly we have the third style, which is somewhere between these two extremes. This is called authoritative parenting. In this case, the parents set rules and they enforce those rules, but we say they’re demanding and responsive. They’re demanding in that they have clear expectations for the children’s behavior, but they also respond to the children’s needs. The way that they do this is by having open discussion with the children and this means that there’s the possibility of compromise. The children are empowered, they’re given a voice over what those rules should be and what should happen if the rules are broken. Now the parents have the final say but they give the children a chance to be involved in how this relationship plays out over time. This authoritative parenting is associated with higher levels of self-esteem in the children with greater self-reliance and with higher levels of social competence in the children.
Now later researchers Eleanor Maccoby and John Martin proposed a fourth parenting style which they referred to as a neglectful parenting, or it’s also called uninvolved parenting, and this is a case where the parents provide the basic needs for the children but they otherwise seem to be too preoccupied with their own lives. They’re not particularly interested in the children and this neglectful parenting or uninvolved parenting is associated with lower social competence and with lower school achievement in the children.
Now we have to be careful when we think about these associations we have to remember that correlation is not causation and these are necessarily correlations. We can’t do, you know, studies where we would manipulate the parenting style and then observe the effects over time. That wouldn’t be ethical but we can see that there are relationships between the style of parenting and certain outcomes in life. And we should keep in mind, however, that it could be the case that children’s traits are influencing the parenting style. There could be something about the child; whether the child’s temperament or certain aspects of the child’s behavior or personality, that are bringing out certain ways of parenting. Maybe some children sort of create situations where it’s necessary to have more strict rules or to enforce those rules more strictly. Or maybe some children bring out this negotiation between parents and they help make it easier for the parents to compromise or work things out with the children.
And this also brings us to the idea that parents and children are often sharing many genes and there could be genes related to social competence that are involved. It could be the case that parents who are not good at managing this relationship with their children. Maybe the children share some of those genes related to social competence and so the children also aren’t very good at negotiating with the parents. And so we have to keep in mind the complexity of this relationship when we have situations where the parents are sharing genes with the children they’re also being influenced and are influencing the children’s behavior.
So we see this is obviously a very complicated relationship for us to understand. We have to be careful about drawing overly-narrow conclusions about the relationship between parenting styles and children’s behavior. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
