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Most researchers classify parenting styles based on two factors:
These two factors help determine whether a parent is:
In general, responsive parenting in the early years and authoritative parenting later on, where the parent provides warmth and acceptance but also exerts firm control and sets clear and consistent limits, is linked to the healthiest child development.
But how do parents become responsive or authoritative, controlling or neglectful? What factors help to determine the kind of parent a person will become?
Most parents treat their children the way their parents treated them: in general, parenting styles and behaviours – whether supportive and responsive, or harsh and neglectful – are passed down from one generation to the next. However, this is not inevitable3 and researchers have started to look beyond these factors to examine further influences, including:
Problems in the relationship between parents (or between a parent and a step-parent) can significantly affect how the parents behave toward their children. The emotions caused by a troubled spousal relationship will often spill over to the relationship between parents and children. This sometimes results in more sensitive and involved parenting, where the parents are most likely trying to protect their children from the stress around them, and sometimes in more negative consequences. For example, anger with the other spouse might cause a parent to withdraw from his or her role as a parent, which a child may perceive as rejection, or it might cause the parent to behave in more or less the opposite way, becoming overly intrusive or hostile.[3] (Relationship problems also have additional direct – and negative – effects on children’s behaviour that are not necessarily linked with parenting behaviour.[3])
A parent’s personality also helps to shape what kind of parent he or she becomes. Parents who are extroverted, who enjoy socializing and are generally positive about their lives, tend to be emotionally sensitive and responsive with their children. Parents who are more cynical or vengeful and less trusting or helpful tend to be harsher or overly controlling, particularly when a child misbehaves.3 We can therefore assume that personality influences parenting by also influencing:
In addition, parents who tend to feel depressed, irritable or angry tend to behave less sensitively and less responsively than other parents,3 while the children of parents who experience depression and stress – especially mothers – tend to have more behavioural and emotional problems than other children. (The causes of this connection – whether it is mainly because of parenting or something else – are not yet clear.[4])
Until recently, researchers thought that the link between parenting and child behaviour (good or bad) went one way only: the parent’s behaviour caused the child’s behaviour.
Today, however, most experts believe the link between parenting and child behaviour is, in fact, two-way: the parent influences the child, and the child influences the parent.
Recent studies have shown that the way a child behaves contributes to the kind of parenting he or she receives.[5] For example, negative, irritable or aggressive children tend to receive harsher parenting[3] than children who are more agreeable.
In one study, researchers trained two children to act either as anxious/withdrawn or conduct-disordered (disobedient and defiant) children, and asked women who were not their mothers to play checkers with them. The women who played with the anxious/withdrawn child tended to try to help the child; the women who played with the conduct-disordered child issued more commands and applied more discipline.[6]
Researchers also began noticing that parents do not always behave with their children the way they think they will behave or plan to behave. For example, even a parent who values responsive, warm parenting may become highly controlling when his or her child misbehaves in a certain way. Further study has revealed that what parents think about why they or their children behave the way they do – and how they think they or their children should be behaving – also affect how parents interact with their children.[5]
When a parent is correct about why a child is acting a certain way (for example, “my child is crying because she’s hungry and tired and had a bad day at school”), it can help the parent be a more effective parent. However, if the parent is wrong (“my child is crying only because she’s trying to get my attention”), it can lead to the parent feeling negatively toward the child or about his or her own ability to parent.
These negative feelings – either about the child or about him/herself – may then impair the parent’s ability to deal effectively with the child’s misbehaviour.[5]
In fact, research has shown that parents of aggressive children are more likely than parents of non-problem children to wrongly attribute their children’s behaviour[4] – to incorrectly blame the bad behaviour on the child’s personality, for example, or to believe that the bad behaviour is planned and deliberate when it is not. This in turn can cause the parents to provide harsher, more controlling parenting.[3]
In addition, recent studies show that mothers who are more knowledgeable about how children develop – for example, when they should be learning to speak or to tie their shoes or follow directions – and therefore have more realistic expectations for their children, generally show better parenting skills than mothers who do not understand the developmental milestones and expect too much from their children. The children of realistic mothers are also usually better in social situations and have greater cognitive (thinking and learning) ability.[4]
Recent studies also show that mothers who perceive themselves as ineffective parents may give up on parenting when it becomes difficult and may become depressed and cold or disengaged with their babies. At the same time, mothers who have unrealistically high opinions of themselves as parents are also prone to poorer parenting skills, and are more likely to be angry with their children and more critical of them.[5] Mothers who perceive themselves as effective parents are, in fact, more effective when they also have a solid understanding of child development. In contrast, mothers who have little knowledge of the milestones in child development, but perceive themselves as effective parents, are least sensitive in their interactions with their young children.[4]
Finally, the better a parent is able to predict how well his or her child will do in learning a new skill, the better the child tends to do at learning that skill – perhaps because the parent is more able to adjust and match his or her teaching to the child’s needs. At the same time, parents who can accurately identify their children’s thoughts and feelings during a conflict – “my child is feeling frustrated because he expected to win the game but didn’t” – are better able to resolve the conflicts.[5]
Parents bring many things with them when they interact with their children. They bring what they learned about parenting from their own parents; they bring their own personalities and problems; they bring their own pre-conceptions about how they should act with their children and how their children should behave.
All of these factors influence what kind of parent a person will become, and how he or she will react to a specific child in a specific situation: with warmth or with harshness, with appropriate control or with too much control.
Parents may improve their parenting skills by examining the factors that may be affecting the way they interact with their children, such as the quality of their spousal relationship, any current emotional difficulties or stresses, and their own personality traits. They may also try to learn more about child development, so they can have more appropriate expectations for their children and make more accurate judgements about why their children behave the way they do.
Parent support and training programs (see Parenting Styles, behaviour and skills and their impact on young children for more information), which currently focus on teaching parents various strategies for managing their children’s behaviour, could also enlarge their focus. This could include teaching parents about the factors that help shape the way they interact with their children, as well as more about the stages of child development. It could also include helping parents change the way they interpret their children’s behaviour, especially when their interpretations are inaccurate and lead to both stressful emotions and impaired parenting.
[1] Baumrind D. Authoritarian vs. authoritative parental control. Adolescence, 1968; 3:255-272.
[2] Maccoby EE, Martin JA. Socialization in the context of the family: Parent-child interaction. In: Hetherington EM, ed. Socialization, personality, and social development. New York, NY: Wiley; 1983:1-101. Mussen PH, ed. Handbook of child psychology. 4th ed; vol 4.
[3] Belsky J. Social-contextual determinants of parenting. In: Tremblay RE, Barr RG, Peters RDeV, eds. Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development [online]. Montreal, Quebec: Centre of Excellence for Early Childhood Development; 2005:1-6. Accessed June 5, 2007.
[4] Sanders MR, Morawska A. Can changing parental knowledge, dysfunctional expectations and attributions, and emotion regulation improve outcomes for children? In: Tremblay RE, Barr RG, Peters RDeV, eds. Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development [online]. Montreal, Quebec: Centre of Excellence for Early Childhood Development; 2005:1-12. Accessed June 5, 2007.
[5] Grusec JE. Parents’ attitudes and beliefs: Their impact on children’s development. In: Tremblay RE, Barr RG, Peters RDeV, eds. Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development [online]. Montreal, Quebec: Centre of Excellence for Early Childhood Development; 2006:1-5.Accessed June 5, 2007.
[6] Brunk, M.A. & Henggeler, S.W. Child influences on adult controls: An experimental evaluation. Developmental Psychology 1984;20(6):1074-1081.
Parents are vitally important throughout a child’s life – as sources of love and security, as teachers and as role models – but they are particularly important in the earliest years.En plus d’apporter à l’enfant affection et sécurité, les parents participent à son apprentissage et font pour lui office de modèles comportementaux. Ils jouent donc un rôle essentiel auprès de l’enfant, particulièrement durant ses jeunes années.
En plus d’apporter à l’enfant affection et sécurité, les parents participent à son apprentissage et font pour lui office de modèles comportementaux. Ils jouent donc un rôle essentiel auprès de l’enfant, particulièrement durant ses jeunes années.