Are you a parent wondering if your parenting style impacts your child? Raising a child is a remarkable journey, and you may question if you are doing your best for your child. Building a positive child-parent relationship involves open communication and a supportive environment. Understanding yourself as a parent and recognizing how your parenting style affects your child’s cognitive, biological and socio-emotional development is crucial. Reflecting on your parenting style helps ensure you provide what’s best for your child.
Parenting involves nurturing a child from infancy to adulthood. Parents need to create an ideal environment for their children’s growth, ensuring they develop into independent and responsible individuals. Key aspects of parenting include guiding and supporting the child, fostering a healthy environment, providing love and care, and allowing the child to form their own identity. A crucial element of parenting is the style used to care for the child. Psychologist Diana Baumrind, in the 1960s, identified three primary parenting styles— Authoritarian, Authoritative and Permissive. Here we understand the aspects of Authoritative Parenting Style and how it affects your children.
Authoritative Parenting Style is described by Baumrind as the type that incorporates high demanding nature and high responsiveness. It encompasses parents who have strict rules but also allow a flexible nature if need be at the same time. It is deemed to be the “ideal” type of parenting diving into the very essence of parenting which is demanding but also supportive. One major element of an authoritative parent style is that they strive to control their children’s behaviour by explaining reasonable rules and discussing it with them. While doing so, they also understand the child’s viewpoint but don’t always accept it. Characteristics of the Authoritative parenting style include
- Providing expectations, guiding and encouraging
- Commanding but supportive
- Constructive Engagement and problem-solving
- Love and support while also monitoring the child’s actions
- Significant involvement in the child’s life.
Verbatim most common authoritative parenting style is
“It’s time to sleep, please clean up your toys. I understand you want to play but you also need sleep to grow”
“We don’t hit. Hitting hurts people”
“What you just did is unreasonable. There will be consequences for your actions. I hope you reflect on it”
An example of an authoritative parenting style would be when a child steals something from a shop their reaction would be to ground the child, reprimand them for their mistake, help them understand that they have made a mistake, guide them to reflect and apologise to the owner and own their mistake.
Effects
Most of the effects a child faces being subjected to the authoritative parenting style is positive, these effects include:
Sense of right and wrong
While having a strong demanding environment and realising they can reflect on their own mistakes, these children develop a strong understanding of what is right and wrong in accordance with the situation. While doing so, they also have empathy for themselves and dare to forgive themselves because of the support they receive from their parents. A strong moral compass is hence developed for the children. For example, a child breaks a friend’s toy and the child is taught at a very young age by his authoritative parents that he can fix it if he talks about it with his parents and also acknowledge and apologise to his friend at the same time. Through this experience, the child understands that mistakes do happen and it can be addressed with honesty and empathy therefore building a strong sense of right and wrong in the child’s behaviour.
Emotional regulation
An example of this would be a child assigned a task from school and she has trouble doing it and eventually has an outburst. A parent incorporating the authoritative parenting style would use soothing words so they may finish their work properly but wouldn’t do it instead of them. This signifies the importance of the supportive nature of the parent but also leading the child to do their tasks in turn strengthening their abilities and learning. Emotional regulation becomes quite a crucial effect as it allows for the child to develop over time and the parenting style builds a foundation for the same. Therefore, reaching a stage where the child is not only developing their learning but also emotional reaction at the same time becomes important.
Sense of responsibility
The authoritative parenting style has a clear expectation from their children to follow their rules but they also make sure to provide a flexible and safe environment for their children if they make a mistake and help them understand and learn further. An example of this would be when parents stick to a bedtime routine. While forming a certain timeline, the parents instil consistency, rules, expectations and consequences. It is also important to note that a characteristic of an authoritative parenting style is to provide explanations to help the child understand their perspective. Hence, while creating a bedtime routine, the parents also consider the their needs and formulate it to achieve an ideal middle ground for the child to also develop a sense of responsibility to follow their own rules.
We now understand that an authoritative parenting style can be applied for the betterment of your child, but it is also necessary to acknowledge that it can be hard to reach a degree of ideal parenting. Here are some of the ways you can use to achieve an authoritative parenting style for your child to develop in a healthy, loving and productive environment
Care
One thing we can all agree on is that the time for oneself decreases on the birth of a child but it does not mean that your time for yourself has diminished altogether. It is extremely important to care for yourself and do activities that make you happy to lead a better life in all your other aspects of life. Your dedication to parenthood without giving time for yourself may help you achieve the highest degree of satisfaction but it is also okay to give time for yourself at the same time. It is difficult to do so, and completely understandable to feel like it but even a few minutes of relaxation is what every parent should deserve, especially from the stress parenting brings about as well. For better communication with your child, you also need to have time for yourself to be in a better headspace in doing so and helping your child develop in the most efficient environment possible.
Share
Open communication is essential between the children and their parents to ensure the child’s communication and social skills to be fostered. Sharing what you feel with your child, sharing if you’ve had a bad day or a good day, sharing what you feel about the achievement they’ve had recently, or even their mistake helps them understand you’re being open which enforces them to stay open with their worries and concerns to you as well. Fostering active listening, encouraging expression, and also communicating effectively can help you reach the stage where your child and yourself are happy with the bond you share.
Bear
Being responsible for your actions and helping the child understand the responsibilities you bear may also help them understand the individual you are and also help them develop their own identity. For example, you may not disclose all of you and your child has a certain perception of you and grows to understand you don’t resort to any mistake in your life. This holds them to believe an idealistic version of yourself where they may have a hard time understanding that people can make mistakes. Showing all sides of yourself, be it struggles or happiness in a way that helps them understand effectively and also being commanding of your expectations towards them helps them create a balance that works for them to develop into understanding adults.
In conclusion, we understand that the Authoritarian Parenting Style is THE parenting style to incorporate as one trying to help our children develop into the best possible adults. It helps us recognize our duty as adults to provide a safe environment for our children. The effects of being subjected to this parenting style are mostly positive which include developing a great sense of rights and wrongs, responsibility and also emotional regulation. To reach a stage towards developing this style of parenting you need to make sure to take care of yourself, foster open communication and also bear responsibility for your actions and help your child understand the same.