Running head: PARENTING STYLES 1

Parenting Styles and Culture

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Parenting Styles and Culture

Children spend most of their time within the family and most parents attempt to foster

certain behaviors in their children. Most parents want their children to develop a sense of

responsibility, fit to family routines and become well-adjusted individuals with healthy social

and emotional development. Each child has a characteristic way of reacting and adapting to the

world and each child has different temperament forms which is the basic core of personality.

Therefore, parents have different views about the values of their children, have different

parenting styles and in combination with culture they live in, all play an important role in their

physical and emotional development.

Each child is different and form different types of temperament like easy, difficult and

slow to warm up. The environment and the parents’ expectations or behaviors affect the

development of temperament. Psychologist Diana Baumrind (1989,2013) examined the ways in

which children gain values and standards and focused on the outcomes of different parenting

styles. Good parenting styles were defined as those which best prepared children to be socially

adaptive. Baumrind classified the different approaches that parents use for raising their children

according to two broad dimensions, warmth–coldness and restrictiveness–permissive. Warm

parents are affectionate toward their children and cold parents may have few feelings of affection

for them. “Warm parents are also less likely than cold parents to use physical discipline.

Frequent spanking tends to produce long-term negative consequences and negative effects, like

disobedience, rebelliousness, and lower levels of cognitive development.” (Holden, 2011).

Based on Baumrind’s study in her 1967 study, examined the relationship between

parental style and the behavior of children. Based on observational and interview studies

identified a grid of four parenting styles. The first parenting style is Authoritative parents.
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Authoritative parents make strong efforts to control their children, they are highly restrictive, and

they make strong demands for maturity. However, they are affectionate, more supportive of the

child’s autonomy and interests and they care of the child’s point of view. Authoritative parents

have a clear vision of what they want their children to do but they also respect their children and

provide them with warmth. Children of authoritative parents are more mature, more independent,

more friendly more active and more achievement oriented. In general, the children of

authoritative parents have self-esteem and are better in academic performance. Authoritative

childrearing styles are associated with more positive adjustment to family trauma such as divorce

and remarriage. (Hetherington & Clingempeel,1992)

The second parenting style refers to Authoritarian parents. Authoritarian parents tend to

score low on measures of warmth and responsiveness and are cold toward the child. They are

controlling and believe in strict guidelines for determining right and wrong. They demand that

children must accept their rules without question and the most common motto is used by them is

“because I say so.” Moreover, authoritarian parents do not communicate well with their

children. They do not show respect for their children’s viewpoints, they are cold and rejecting.

Children of authoritarian parents are happy, less trusting and more withdrawn. They are also less

competent socially and academically than children of authoritative parents. Children of

authoritarian parents also tend to be conflicted, anxious, and irritable. “They are less friendly and

spontaneous in their social interactions,” (Grusec & Davidov, 2015, Shuster et al., 2012). As

adolescents, they may be conforming and obedient or aggressive. The children of authoritarian

parents tend to score less on measures in self-esteem and have poorer peer relations and they

may display high levels of interpersonal aggression.

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The third parenting style is Permissive parents. Baumrind found two types of parents who

are permissive. One type is labeled permissive–indulgent, and the other is labeled rejecting–

neglecting. Permissive–indulgent parents cannot control their children and in their demands for

mature behavior, they are easygoing and unconventional. Their brand of permissiveness is

accompanied by high nurturance with warmth and responsiveness. Rejecting–neglecting parents

also are rated low in their demands for mature behavior and in their attempts to control their

children. But unlike indulgent parents, they are low in warmth and responsiveness. As a result,

children of permissive parents are more likely to show difficulties in adjusting to school, are

more aggressive and in adolescence are more likely to be involved in criminal and other

problematic behavior.

Furthermore, different cultural groups possess distinct beliefs and behave in unique ways

with respect to their parenting. “Each culture has norms and beliefs about which are the valued

skills a child should have and these beliefs shape the goals of parental cognitions as a

consequence their behavior.” (Bornstein and Lansford, 2010) Individuals in different cultures

differ from one another and what counts as “good” parenting style or “good” adaptive outcome

behavior can vary from culture to culture. Parents from different cultures have different goals in

their parenting. Some demands on parents are universal, like parents in all societies must nurture

and protect their young. Communication is also a universal aspect of parenting and child

development. Other demands vary across cultural groups. Parents in some societies play with

their babies and see them as interactive partners but parents in other societies think that it is

useless for parents to play with infants.

Culture influences on parenting begin long before children are born and they shape

decisions about which behaviors parents should promote in their children and how parents
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should interact with their children. For example, the United States and Japan are both child-

centered modern societies with high standards of living but American and Japanese parents value

different childrearing goals which they express in different ways. American mothers try to

promote autonomy, independence, verbal competency and self-actualization in their children

whereas Japanese mothers try to promote emotional maturity, self-control and social courtesy in

their children. On the other hand, in the United States there are some environments where

children gain little from authoritative parenting. Kids that are raised in high-crime neighborhoods

or neighborhoods high in gang activity are not likely to gain warm and fuzzy, but they need a

parenting style that nurtures toughness and aggressiveness.

Also, an authoritative parenting style which includes high warmth and high control leads

to positive outcomes in European American school children, whereas an authoritarian parenting

style that includes low warmth and high control leads to positive outcomes in African American

and Hong Kong Chinese children. (Leung, Lau & Lam, 1998) Many different parenting practices

appear to be adaptive but differently for different cultural groups. In some cultures, authoritarian

parenting provides adaptive advantages for some children, but in some other cultures,

authoritarian parenting generally works against children’s successful transition to adulthood.

Authoritative parents rarely use spanking and their children turn out to be happiest, most

outgoing, more successful, more independent and more socially responsible children.

In conclusion, parenting is one of the most challenging and difficult responsibilities a

person can face. The concept of parenting styles exists universally as each culture exhibited a

pattern of childrearing but the behavior and meaning that constitutes a category of parenting style

differs across cultures and what counts as good for raising in one culture can be regarded as

negative in another culture.

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References

Rathus, S.A. (2017), Childhood voyages in development (5th ed.) (p. 203-211), Belmont, CA:

Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

Rolls, G. (2015), Classic case studies in Psychology (3rd ed.) (p. 117-132), London: Hodder

Education.

Durkin, K. (1995) Developmental Social Psychology (p. 214-217), London: Blackwell

Santrock, J. (2009). Child Development (12th edition) (pp. 292-294). London: McGraw Hill.