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 inse...