Parenting Styles and Children’s Social, Emotional and Academic Development

Parenting Styles and Children’s Social, Emotional and Academic Development

Fall 2014

After hearing the sound of fast footsteps running toward him from behind. Mike turns around and suddenly his toy car is gone from his hand. Toby continues running to his room after snatching the car. He laughs out loudly and says “this is mine now”. Mike starts crying and screaming. His voice reaches every inch of the house. Rushing into the living room, the mother yells “Mike, baby what happened?” Mike doesn’t respond, but he points at Toby’s room instead. The mother understands and calls Toby. He comes out holding Mike’s car. She gets what happened, and she acts sensitively, but firmly and says: “I understand that you would like to play with this car too, but Mike is playing with it now. Maybe you can take turns in playing or wait until he gets bored of it”. Some other parents may handle the same situation in a different way; however, being understanding and solving the problem reasonably helps in reducing the tension. This behavior is practiced by authoritative parents. Parents should adopt the authoritative parenting style because it is the best for children socially, emotionally and academically, in contrast to the authoritarian and permissive parenting styles.

The first psychologist to talk about parenting styles was Diana Baumrind in 1973. She defined parenting style as the patterns of behaviours and attitudes which the parents practice to interact and communicate with their children and teenagers through two dimensions: demandingness and responsiveness (Marsiglia, Walczyk, Buboltz, & Griffith-Ross, 2007). Demandingness is concerned with the effort of parents to merge the children into the family by maturity demands, supervision and discipline. Responsiveness on the other hand refers to the degree in which parents encourage individuality, self-regulation and self-assertion by having enough awareness of children’s needs and demands. Baumrind divided parenting styles into three styles based on the level of responsiveness and demandingness practiced on a child by his parents. Those three parenting styles are: Authoritative, Authoritarian and Permissive (Marsiglia, Walczyk, Buboltz, & Griffith-Ross, 2007). Authoritative parents are warm and firm. They can balance between responsiveness and demandingness, direct the child in a rational way, and they explain the reasons behind their rules. Therefore, their children tend to have unique social and emotional skills, and they achieve better in school (Gota, 2012).

Authoritarian parents are very different in their style of parenting. They are very strict and not warm. They mostly have high control over their children and low levels of communication with them. Authoritarian parents want their children to follow their rules without explaining them, and they threaten their children with punishments (Gota, 2012). This parenting style creates children with social and emotional problems, and children with lack of social, emotional and academic skills. Emotionally and socially they are unhappy, anxious and withdrawn. They have high levels of depression and low self-esteem. They also face problems when dealing with others due to their poor social skills. Moreover, children of authoritarian parents might achieve well in school, but compared to the authoritative style, they achieve less in academic performance (Marsiglia, Walczyk, Buboltz, & Griffith-Ross, 2007; Grobman, 2008; Gota, 2012). Permissive parents, on the other hand, are on the opposite side of the authoritarian parents. They are very warm and not firm at all. It is a careless style in which parents make few rules and orders, give their children the freedom of behaving, and they barely take control over their children (Gota, 2012). As a result of these behaviours, permissive style children have poor emotion regulation. They are rebellious when desires are not fulfilled. They tend to have antisocial behaviors and more involved in problem behaviors. They are less motivated to do learning tasks, and they perform less well in school because of lack of parental control and monitoring (Grobman, 2008; Hong, 2012).