Parenting Styles and their Effects on Children's Behavior

Parenting Styles and Their Effects on Children's Behavior
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Parenting Styles and Their Effects on Children's Behavior
Every parent aspires to raise their children to be morally upright. While several factors influence a child's development, parenting styles play a significant role. Parenting style refers to a psychological construct representing parents' various standards to raise their children. A parent's parenting style must promote their children's positive growth and healthy development because how one interacts with and discipline their children has a lifetime impact. Four primary parenting styles exist depending on how parents raise their children. They include authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, and neglectful parenting styles. Each of these parenting styles influences a child's behavior in their early and future life. This piece discusses these four parenting styles and how each affects a child's behavior from childhood to adulthood. The parenting styles are better explained based on the parent's demandingness and responsiveness. Demandingness is the degree to which parents control their children's behavior and demand their maturity. On the other hand, responsiveness is the extent to which parents accept and the level of sensitivity to their children's developmental and emotional needs.
The authoritarian parenting style is one of the most used globally. It is characterized by high demandingness and low responsiveness. Parents using this parenting style are too controlling and less responsive to their children's emotional and developmental needs. According to Morin (2019), authoritarian parents demand blind obedience from their children using the "because I said so" attitude. This attitude demand that the parents are always right, and thus, their children should not question them. This shows that authoritarian parenting involves one-way communication through strict orders and rules. They view any efforts to negotiate with them as talkback amounting to rudeness and lack of ethical behavior. As such, authoritarian parents use stern discipline and harsh punishments to obtain behavioral control. These parents use coercive disciplinary efforts characterized by peremptory, arbitrary, domineering, and constantly worried about marking status distinctions (American Psychological Association, 2017). Such strictness and harsh punishment of their children make authoritarian parents unresponsive to the needs of their children, failing to nurture them. Authoritarian parents justify their actions towards their children by using mean treatment to make their children tough.
The authoritarian parenting style negatively affects a child's behavior which they carry on to adulthood. Children are likely to have low self-esteem, poor judgment, and rebellious. They experience low self-esteem because their parents do not allow them to make their decisions, and every time they question their parents, they are punished for being defiant. Because parents make all the decisions for their children, they are likely to be poor in judging various situations. For example, they may not know whether to allow strangers to shelter in their homes or send them away during rising insecurity cases. This makes the children struggle when needed to think on their own. Trautner's (2021) research shows that children raised by authoritarian parents perform poorer in academics than those raised in the other styles like permissive and authoritative. The children's rebellious behavior also contributes to their poor performance. Most children rebel against the orders from their parents when they do not like the commands and demands from their authoritarian parents. In the long run, such children become rebellious against authorities when they grow up because they are used to it. They might rebel against orders from police officers and other authorities because they view everything from their parents' authoritarian parenting.
The second and common parenting style is authoritative, characterized by high demandingness and high responsiveness. Parents exercising the authoritative parenting style have high expectations of achievements and maturity from their children but are also warm and responsive (Li, 2022). Such parents enforce boundaries and set rules through open discussions with their children and providing guidance through reasoning together. They explain to their children why they implement the rules and actions. This makes the children aware of their parents' actions, teaching them values, goals, and morals. Parents using the authoritative parenting style use confrontative disciplinary methods where they reason and negotiate with their children. This disciplinary method is outcome-oriented, meaning the parents are more focused on regulating their children's behaviors. According to Li (2022), authoritative parents are supportive and affectionate of their children, thus the confrontative disciplinary approach. As a result, such parents encourage independence among their children, provide freedom and respect their autonomy. The authoritative parenting style allows for negotiation and two-way communication thus can also be called the democratic parenting style.
Authoritative parents are likely to raise independent, socially accepted, well-behaved, and academically successful children. These children are more likely to report anxiety and depression to their parents and less likely to engage in antisocial behaviors like drug abuse. They also carry these behaviors into adulthood (Kuppens & Ceulemans, 2019). The freedom parents give to their children ensures they can open up about anything that affects their development. For example, a child may be struggling to relate w...