Child and Adolescent Parenting Styles

Development – • Authoritarian Parenting

Family Influences • This parenting style emphasises control
and unquestioning obedience.
• Parents try to make their children conform
a set standard of conduct and do not
explain why the rules are set in that way.
Dr Sau Yin LAU
The Open University of Hong Kong • They punish their children arbitrarily and
EDU E253F forcefully for violating the rules they set.
Spring Term 2020
• They rarely give affection and praise to
their children.

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Family Influences Parenting Styles

• As one of the microsystems, family is • Authoritarian Parenting
influential on a child’s development. • Authoritarian parents usually do not allow
• Issues around family influences include: their children to make decisions
• Parenting Style themselves.

• Family Structure • Children who grow up with authoritarian

parents tend to obey rules much of the
• Parents’ Employment and Economic time.
Stress
• However, they tend to have lower self-
• Siblings and Birth Order esteem, be more discontented, withdrawn
and distrustful.
• Some of the children may also present to
be hostile.

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Parenting Styles Parenting Styles

• Many research studies suggest that styles
of parenting affect children’s
development.
• There are four types of parenting styles
identified by psychologists:
• Authoritarian Parenting
• Permissive / Indulgent Parenting
• Authoritative / Democratic Parenting
• Neglectful / Uninvolved Parenting
• Permissive / Indulgent Parenting
• This parenting style emphasises self-
expression and self-regulation.
• Parents make very few demands. If they
set rules they will rarely enforce them.
They rarely ask their children to bear any
consequences when their children do
something wrong.
• They give their children lots of freedom.
They allow their children to make choices
themselves and to monitor their own
activities as much as possible.

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 Parenting Styles
• Permissive / Indulgent Parenting
• Children who grow up with permissive
parents tend to lack self-control.
• They tend to be unable to appreciate rules
and authority. They may have behavioural
problems in school.
Parenting Styles
• Neglectful / Uninvolved Parenting
• This is a parenting style that parents focus
on their own needs and neglect their
children’s needs.
• Parents make very few demands.
• They are detached from their children and
are not responsive to their children’s
requests.

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Parenting Styles Parenting Styles

• Authoritative / Democratic Parenting • Neglectful / Uninvolved Parenting
• This parenting style values a child’s • Children who grow up with neglectful
individuality but also stresses social authoritarian parents tend to have lower
constraints. self-esteem and lack self-control.
• Parents encourage their children to be • They tend to display more behavioural
independent but still place limits and problems and have lower academic
controls on their actions. achievement.
• They explain the reasoning behind their
stands and encourage verbal give-and-take.
• They enforce rules and require their children
to bear consequences for wrongdoings in a
gentle and positive way.

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Parenting Styles Parenting Styles

• Authoritative / Democratic Parenting
• Children who grow up with authoritative Parental Control
parents tend to be self-reliant, self-
controlled and self-assertive.
High Low
• They tend to have healthy self-esteem.
• They are independent, but are willing to
seek help when needed. High
Parental
• They are more friendly, cooperative and Warmth
socially competent. Low

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 Parenting Styles Family Structure
• Children from divorced and remarried
families are likely to be less socially
Parental Control
responsible and competent, to think less
of themselves, and to have trouble
High Low relating to parents, siblings, and peers
(Hetherington et al., 1998).
High Authoritative Permissive
Parental
Warmth
Low Authoritarian Neglectful

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Family Structure Family Structure

• Much research has found that children
tend to do better in traditional (intact)
families, those that include two biological
parents or two parents who adopted the
child in infancy (Papalia, Olds & Feldman,
2001).
• Reasons might include:
• Traditional (intact) families have not had to
deal with the stress and disruption caused
by divorce or the death of a parent;
• There are greater financial, psychological,
and time pressures on single parents;
• There is possible need to adjust to a new
household or to remarriage.

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Family Structure Family Structure

• Much research has found that children
tend to do better in families that include
two biological parents or two parents who
adopted the child in infancy (Papalia, Olds
& Feldman, 2001).
• Studies showed that children living with
single or remarried mothers were more
likely to have repeated a grade of school,
to have been expelled, to have health
problems, or to have been treated for
emotional or behavioural problems in the
previous year (Dawson, 1991).
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• Parental separation has been reported as
being associated with a wide range of
adverse effects on children’s wellbeing,
including adverse impacts on:
• cognitive capacity (Fergusson, Lynskey &
Horwood, 1994)
• schooling (Evans et al., 2001)
• physical health (Dawson, 1991)
• mental and emotional health (Chase-
Lansdale et al., 1995)
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Family Structure
• social conduct and behaviour (Morrison &
Coiro, 1999)
• peer relations (Demo & Acock, 1988)
• criminal offending (Hanson, 1999)
• substance use (Fergusson, Horwood &
Lynskey, 1994)
• teenage pregnancy (Woodward et al., 2001)
• Research studies suggested that, in the
presence of other exacerbating factors,
parental separation bears down heavily on
children and blights their lives to a
significant degree across all domains of
functioning (Mackay, 2005).
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Parents’ Employment and Economic
Stress
• Parents who have poor working
conditions, such as long hours, overtime
work, stressful work, and lack of
autonomy at work, are likely to be more
irritable at home. They are more likely to
engage in less effective parenting
(Crouter, 2006).
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Parents’ Employment and Economic
Stress
• Families suffering from economic
stresses may experience:
• housing instability
• lower school quality
• poor health care
• risky neighborhoods
• Parents under economic stress may also
experience emotional stress, which in turn
harm children’s development.
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Parents’ Employment and Economic
Stress
• The economic stresses associated with
poverty have been found to have
multifaceted consequences for children’s
functioning that include:
• stress neurobiology
• poorer cognitive growth and educational
attainment
• behavioral and emotional problems
• poorer health outcomes
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Parents’ Employment and Economic
Stress
Early Impacts of Family Socioeconomic
Status (SES) on Cognitive and Learning Skills
High SES
Cumulative Vocabulary (Words)
1200
600
Middle SES
Low SES
200
months
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Child’s Age (Months) Source: Hart & Risley (1995)
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Siblings and Birth Order
• In non-industrialised societies, it is found
that older girls are responsible to take
care for their younger siblings. Parents
also train children early to teach younger
siblings how to help with the family work
such as gathering firewood and growing
food (Cicirelli, 1994).
• In industrialised societies, parents
generally try not to put too much burden
on older children’s shoulders in taking
care of younger ones (Weisner, 1993)
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p.4
 Siblings and Birth Order
• Children’s development is influenced by
their sibling relationships.
• Children usually experience the earliest,
most frequent and most intense disputes
among siblings are over the rights to own
or to play with toys.
• Disputes among siblings can provide an
opportunity for children to acquire skills
in conflict resolution.
• Children also experience competition with
their siblings in gaining parents’ attention.
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Siblings and Birth Order
• Psychologist Alfred Adler suggested that
birth order and the number of siblings
affect a child’s personality development.
• Adler contended that it is a common
fallacy to imagine that children of the
same family are formed in the same
environment. He believed that the psychic
situation of each child is individual and
differs from that of others because of the
order of their succession.
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Siblings and Birth Order
• First-Born Children
• First-born children receive undivided
love and attention from their parents for
a period of time. They are more likely to
develop a sense of security and self-
confidence.
• Their inexperienced parents often have
very high expectations for them. They
may feel very pressured to succeed.
They are prone to perfectionism and
need for affirmation.
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Siblings and Birth Order
• First-Born Children
• First-born children experience feelings
of loss when their parents have new
babies and are not able to provide them
with undivided attention anymore.
• They may also be expected to set an
example and be given responsibility for
younger siblings.
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Siblings and Birth Order
• First-Born Children
• Adler argued that first-born children
would become intellectual,
conscientious, helpful to adults and
dominant in social settings so as to get
back their parents’ love and attention.
• Some first-born children may equate
love with success.
• They may also feel that power is his/her
right and become authoritarian or strict.
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Siblings and Birth Order
• Second-Born Children
• Second-born children grow up sharing
the attention from their parents with the
first-born siblings. Adler believed that,
the second-born children are more
likely to cooperate and they are usually
pacemakers.
• Second-born children have a set
example from their first-born children to
follow. Some second-born children
would try to be the followers.
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 Siblings and Birth Order
• Second-Born Children
• However, since there is always
someone who was there first, some
second-born children may try to
overtake the first-born children. They
may grow to be more competitive and
rebellious.
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Siblings and Birth Order
• Middle-Born Children
• They may struggle with figuring out
their place in the family.
• They may experience their parents busy
taking care of the eldest siblings and of
the youngest siblings. They may
develop a feeling of being left out.
• They are eager for parental praise and
thus tend to develop their gifts to
accomplish this goal.
• They tend to be very flexible and
diplomatic.
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Siblings and Birth Order
• Last-Born Children
• They tend to get more attention from
their parents because they are never
dethroned by another sibling.
• They may possess positive traits of
confidence, ability to have fun and
comfort at entertaining others.
• However, they tend to be dependent and
may not be very considerate since they
are always being taken care of by family
members.
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Siblings and Birth Order
• The Only (Single) Children
• They do not have to share their parents'
attention. They tend to have higher self-
esteem and feel more comfortable
around adults.
• They can be over-protected and spoiled.
They may have a hard time when they
are told no, and school may be a
difficult transition as they are not the
sole focus of the teacher.
• On the other hand, the only children can
also be highly motivated and mature.
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Siblings and Birth Order
• Some studies on sibling relationships
showed that negative changes were most
often described as happening when one
sibling was between 7 and 9 and
completing the primary grades. Both
mothers and children often attributed
these changes to outside friendships
which led to jealousy and
competitiveness or loss of interest in, and
intimacy with, the siblings (Dunn, 1996).
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Parents’
Employment
Parenting
and Economic
Style
Stress
Family
Influences
Siblings
and Birth
Order
Family
Structure
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