Sensitivity and exactingness – this is quite enough to raise a happy child. Based on these two parenting qualities, four parenting styles can be distinguished. But only one of them is truly effective.
It depends on our attitude to the child whether he will grow up happy, open, self-confident. But how do you find the right balance? American psychologist Diana Baumrind created a model of four parenting styles, which are determined by the two most important manifestations of parental attention to the child – sensitivity and exactingness. By sensitivity, she meant the warmth that parents show towards their children: more sensitive adults support their children in everything, less sensitive ones may not accept them at all. Demanding means that parents control their children, develop rules and strictly enforce them, while parents lacking this quality do not make rules at all.
The combination of extreme manifestations of these properties creates the style of education: authoritarian, conniving, dismissive, or authoritative. Of course, there are also mixed types: after all, sensitivity and exactingness are not necessarily expressed to the maximum extent or absent altogether.
What are the features of each style? Explains child psychoanalyst Anna Skavitina:
1. Authoritarian: high demands, low sensitivity. Children are most often afraid of such parents. They grow up anxious, lonely and unhappy, do not tolerate frustration well, give up easily or, conversely, begin to show hostility. At the same time, they usually do well in school and are not prone to antisocial behavior.
2. Indulgent: low demands, high sensitivity. Such parents truly love children, but do not understand how to raise them. As a result, children have difficulty coping with their emotions and do not know how to control them, tend to rebel and act out of spite if their desires are not fulfilled, do not know how to cope with difficult tasks and are prone to anti-social acts.
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- Methods of education
3. Neglecting: low demands, low sensitivity. Indifference and coldness make children emotionally difficult: they rarely trust people, they are often cruel. Despite the need for love, they can neither receive nor give it themselves. They usually find it difficult to learn. They find it difficult to get along with people, have stable families, stable relationships in the workplace. They are more likely to learn to take care of themselves. May be prone to hypochondria.
4. Authoritative: high demands and high sensitivity. This combination is just right. And only this style of parenting makes children happy. What is his secret? Parents are demanding, but also kind at the same time. They explain the rules and encourage children to express their opinion about the rules, give them independence, but also instill values. Children grow up competent, self-confident, with well-developed self-control. Able to establish friendly relations with peers, always in a stable good mood, eager to explore and do not avoid the new.
The ideas of Diana Baumrind have received confirmation more than once. For example, in 1994, teenagers and their parents filled out special tests in the course of a large study, which were then repeated a year later *. It turned out that by the way adults behave, scientists can predict how a child will grow up. Those who grew up in a family with authoritative parents remained consistently good in character and behavior, while those who grew up with neglectful parents, behavior, especially during adolescence, became progressively worse.
True, high sensitivity and high demands usually do not arise by themselves, but are the result of a conscious choice and the inner work of the parents themselves. But what can you do for the happiness of children!
* L. Steinberg et al. «Over-Time Changes in Adjustment and Competence among Adolescents from Authoritative, Authoritarian, Indulgent, and Neglectful Families», Child Development 65, № 3, 1994.