Week 6: Discussion – Writing assignment Draft
Jennifer Gadoury
Kaplan University
04/06/2015

Parents are a huge part of a child’s life. However they act, whatever they say, anything that they do largely impacts a child’s development from that moment they are born. According to psychologist Diana Baumrind’s research, she found that there are four types of parenting styles. Besides naturalistic observation, parenting interviews, and other research methods, Baumrind identified the following four parenting styles and how they affect children.
Authoritative parenting style ensures healthy development because children is taught to follow rules. Ask questions and have their own opinions. Parenting styles influences cognitive abilities found authoritative parenting in both fathers and mothers to be positively correlated with cognitive development in children. Social development also benefits from this parenting styles, because communication is welcomed and children feel more comfortable with peers and in other social situations.
Authoritative are those parents demand total cooperation from their children and have no tolerance for questions or breaking rules. This parenting styles expect high degrees of maturity from the child with low levels of parent-child communication. Children disciplined stays out of trouble and make good grades but their social development is negatively affected due to not being encourage to have opinions, being shy and constantly worrying about disappointing their parents. Permissive Indulgent- parents focus more on being their child’s friend than a disciplinary figure. There is extensive amount of parent- child communication, but very low levels of maturity and demands requires of the child. Children raised by indulgent parents have higher self-esteem, better social skills and lower levels of depression, which aids in positive social development. The decreased maturity and independence associated with parental indulgence harms a child’s emotional development because he is not required to grow in these areas.
Authoritative Uninvolved are those parents who are ambivalent to their children’s wants and needs are considered uninvolved parents. Often, this parenting style is associated with neglect and abuse. While there are no demands or rules to follow for the child, there is also no communication and no encouragement from the parent. When parents are psychologically or physically unavailable to their children, all elements of development are negatively affected. Social development is stunted because the child is never taught how to act around people and, therefore, feels awkward in social situations. Because of the lack of emotional and psychological connections between parent and child, cognitive development also suffers.
These parenting styles affect the children in many different ways, for example, the use of punitive and forceful measures to enforce proper behaviors causes anger, resentment, and deceit and impairs whole some parent-child relationships. Baumrind’s 1971 research shows girls to be dependent and lacking motivation and boys much more likely to be angry and defiant. In Addition, Children of authoritarian parents are less likely to internalize (accept as their own standard) society’s unacceptable behavior and are more likely to have low – self-esteem and the children is withdrawn and unhappy.
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