Parenting styles and child outcomes

The American psychologist Diana Baumrind produced some of the most well-known research on parenting styles. Baumrind and many subsequent researchers focused on two important parts of parenting: responsiveness and demandingness. According to their work, parents high in responsiveness are attuned and sensitive to their children’s cues. Responsiveness also includes warmth, reciprocity, clear communication, and attachment. Parents high in demandingness monitor their children, set limits, enforce rules, use consistent and contingent discipline, and make maturity demands. Taken together, these two dimensions create four parenting styles: authoritative (high demandingness, high responsiveness), authoritarian (high demandingness, low responsiveness), rejecting or neglecting (low demandingness, low responsiveness), and permissive or indulgent (low demandingness, high responsiveness).

Children who have authoritative parents tend to show the best outcomes (e.g., school success, good peer skills, high self-esteem). This is generally true across ages, ethnicities, social strata, and many cultures. In contrast, children who have rejecting or neglecting parents tend to show the worst outcomes (e.g., delinquency, drug use, problems with peers and in school).

In the 1980s American psychologist John Gottman began to research parent-child interactions. He identified four parenting styles by focusing on how parents handled their children’s emotional states, especially negative emotions, such as distress and anger. The dismissing parent disregards the child’s emotions, may disengage from or ridicule the emotional child, and wants the negative emotions to disappear quickly. The disapproving parent is similar to the dismissing parent but is more judgmental and critical about the child’s emotions and may punish the emotional child. Both styles are related to children who have difficulty trusting, understanding, and regulating their emotions. In contrast, the laissez-faire parent freely accepts the child’s emotional states and may offer comfort but provides little guidance to help the emotional child solve problems. Children with laissez-faire parents have difficulty regulating their emotions, becoming, for example, overwhelmed by emotional states. Finally, the emotion coach is accepting of and sensitive to an emotional child, respects the child’s emotions without telling the child how to feel, and sees emotional moments as opportunities for nurturant parenting and teaching problem solving. Not surprisingly, children of emotion coaches have the best outcomes: they learn to trust and regulate their emotions and to solve problems. Being emotionally savvy, they get along better with peers and have higher self-esteem.

A third approach to parenting comes out of attachment theory, one of the most influential theories of social and emotional development. The British clinical psychologist John Bowlby, generally regarded as the father of attachment theory, asserted that children develop deep emotional bonds (attachments) to important caregivers during the first few years of life. These attachment relationships, once essential for survival, form the basis of the child’s emerging sense of self and relationship style.

Children with secure attachments have parents who are sensitive and responsive to the child’s attachment-related needs (e.g., holding the distressed child) but who also are supportive of the child’s autonomy, whereas children with anxious attachments have parents who are less sensitive, who may be rejecting of the child’s needs for intimacy and attachment, or who thwart the child’s developing autonomy. Secure children show the best outcomes in virtually every area of development. For example, they have higher self-esteem and get along better with other people, including peers and teachers; they are more persistent on cognitive tasks such as problem solving and know how and when to seek assistance. As adults, individuals who are secure about attachment issues are more likely to provide a secure base for their own children.

Taken together, these various approaches reveal important things about optimal parenting. Not surprisingly, children seem to do best when parents are warm and engaged, are sensitive and responsive to children’s needs, and help children understand and effectively cope with their emotions. It is also important that parents monitor their children, maintain age-appropriate expectations, set and enforce reasonable limits, use consistent discipline, and support the development of healthy autonomy.

When thinking about parenting styles, it is important to remember that other factors, such as the child’s temperament, sex, and social context, interact with parenting. For example, children reared in dangerous environments may benefit from more restrictiveness on the part of their parents. Additionally, certain characteristics of a child (e.g., reactiveness or rebelliousness) may elicit certain parenting responses (e.g., tighter control).

Discipline practices

Discipline and punishment are often confused. Discipline comes from the Latin word disciplina, meaning “instruction, training, or knowledge,” whereas punishment comes from the word poena, meaning “penalty.” Thus, discipline includes techniques parents use to teach children desirable behaviour, whereas punishment involves a punitive action designed to eliminate undesirable behaviour. Scientists of human development agree that discipline is an important ingredient in optimal parenting; there is less agreement on the role of punishment.

The American Academy of Pediatrics identified three components of effective discipline: a loving parent-child relationship, positive reinforcement to increase good behaviour, and strategies for eliminating undesired behaviour. It strongly discouraged the use of physical punishment and endorsed instead the use of time-outs (enforced quiet periods) or the removal of privileges for eliminating negative behaviour.

Physical punishment, such as spanking, especially if used frequently, administered harshly, or used by parents who are also low in warmth and responsiveness, is related to negative child outcomes, such as aggression and depression. In fact, children who are spanked frequently typically show worse, not better, behaviour over time. Additionally, many forms of punishment are unlikely to correct misbehaviour in the long term, even though they may control the behaviour in the short term.

In contrast, positive forms of discipline are related to better outcomes over the long term, such as self-regulation, self-esteem, and the internalization of appropriate standards of behaviour. Child-guidance experts offer a number of suggestions for positive discipline, including setting up the environment for success (e.g., removing off-limits temptations, childproofing); setting clear limits and stating these positively (e.g., “please walk” instead of “don’t run”); attending to, praising, and modeling good behaviour; providing explanations so that children understand why compliance is important; and using natural and logical consequences to correct negative behaviour. Induction, which involves making children aware of the consequences of their actions on others, is especially effective for internalization and self-regulation. For example, children throwing water balloons at cars would be less likely to repeat that behaviour in the future if their parents helped them understand the possible consequences of their actions (e.g., causing a car crash) than if the parents responded by yelling, hitting, or using other forms of punishment.