Question

How do you raise a healthy child? 1. What is the most effective parenting styles to help your child develop socially, emotionally and physically? 2. Which style is best for helping children develop social- emotional skills?

Answer 1

There are four major parenting styles: permissive, authoritarian, authoritative, and hands-off. But out of these four styles the authoritative parenting style is the most successful in raising children who are both academically strong and emotionally stable.The authoritative approach to parenting has been shown to lead to the best outcomes in kids, including better emotional health, social skills, more resiliency, and more secure attachments with their parents.

Authoritative parenting is a parenting style characterized by high responsiveness and high demands. Authoritative parents are responsive to the child’s emotional needs while having high standards. They set limits and are very consistent in enforcing boundaries

2.

authoritative parenting, where parents balance demandingness and responsiveness, with higher social competencies in children. Thus, children of authoritative parents possess greater competence in early peer relationships, engage in low levels of drug use as adolescents, and have more emotional well-being as young adults. Although authoritarian and permissive parenting styles appear to represent opposite ends of the parenting spectrum, neither style has been linked to positive outcomes, presumably because both minimize opportunities for children to learn to cope with stress. Too much control and demandingness may limit children’s opportunities to make decisions for themselves or to make their needs known to their parents, while children in permissive/indulgent households may lack the direction and guidance necessary to develop appropriate morals and goals. Research has also uncovered significant associations between parenting styles across generations; bad parenting appears to be “passed on” as much as good parenting.

Even though these kinds of results appear to be robust, their applicability across cultures and environments is questionable. Many studies focus on white, middle-class children and families, but children with different ethnic/racial/cultural or socioeconomic backgrounds may fare better under different types of guidance. Recent controversy concerns the outcomes of different parenting styles for child social development in low-SES, high-risk, inner-city families. While some research has suggested that more authoritarian parenting styles may be necessary in high-risk areas, other research has shown continued benefits of authoritative parenting. Factoring into this research is the idea that parenting may actually “matter less” among low-SES families due to the greater force of environmental factors, such as financial difficulties and higher crime rates.

Ethnic and cultural differences must also be taken into account in studying the effects of parenting styles on child social development. It is difficulty to escape social pressures that judge some parenting styles to be better, usually those that reflect the dominant culture. Authoritarian parenting, which is generally linked to less positive child social outcomes, tends to be more prevalent among ethnic minorities. In Asian ethnic families, authoritarian parenting is linked to positive social outcomes and academic success, due in part to parenting goals and training specific to Asian-origin families.