Essay Sample on Parenting Styles on Developmental Outcomes

Introduction

Parenting styles can be defined as the manner in which parents raise their children as they grow and undergo various developmental stages. It presents the parent's level of expectation, attentiveness to rules, performance demands, and many other expectations alongside the discipline style the parent uses to enforce their expectations of the children. Parenting styles determine their children's developmental outcomes. The differences in the behavior and characters of various children are dependent on what parenting style is imposed on them during their growth stages. This paper explores three main parenting styles and their developmental outcomes on the children's temperament, social skills, cognitive skills, and school learning.

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Family counselors and some developmental psychologists have identified and grouped various parenting styles into three main parenting styles namely; authoritative style, authoritarian style, and permissive style (Larzelere, 2013). These styles produce different outcomes on children's emotional development, peer relationships, cognitive skills, as well as learning skills. Children, therefore, become either well-developed or poorly developed based on what parenting style has been used to raise them.

The authoritative parenting style is one type of parenting style characterized by high demandingness and high responsiveness of parents to their children (Wong, 2014). Authoritative parents set high expectations for their children to achieve during their maturity stages while are also both warm and responsive. These parents guide their children through setting clear rules and regulations as well as setting behavioral boundaries beyond which their children cannot pass. However, the boundaries are established through open discussion between parents and their children to come to a reasonable agreement (Wilcox, 2013).

The following are the signs of the authoritative parenting style on child development. First, the authoritative style enhances the stable emotional development of their children. Authoritative parents are supportive of their children and offer them the independence to think and reason properly thereby, making them less aggressive, and agitative. Since the children have the independence to think and gain support from their parents, they are well guided and can easily handle tough situations. Therefore, children grow up while they are emotionally stable and can control their emotions and temperament (Wilcox, 2013).

The authoritative parenting style enhances strong and stable social development among children. Children who are raised under authoritative parents form stable relationships with their colleagues at school or home. This is because the foundation of a good relationship among these children had been founded on their parent's affectionate and supportive behaviors. In addition to that, the rules and regulations given to children by authoritative parents shape them to be responsible. Therefore, they can exist in any society and fit well in the moral principles of any particular environment (Wong, 2014).

The authoritative parenting style promotes the cognitive development of children. Authoritative parents engage their children in open discussions and help them reason correctly on issues concerning discipline and following rules (Larzelere, 2013). Therefore, the development of these children is enhanced. They can think, reason, learn, pay attention, and apply various concepts of the things they learn. Children raised by authoritative parents have better reasoning ability and can, therefore, tackle some of the difficult conditions they face in life. They are good problem solvers and can do well, especially in mathematical problems.

The authoritative parenting style produces high academic performance among children. Authoritative parents are very affectionate and supportive. They are especially good mentors to their children, helping them do their homework and making them able and willing to do all that is expected of them. Such children are conversant with the following rules. Therefore, they can tackle their academic work with little or no supervision from the teacher or parent. As a result, they perform well and far much better than others at school.

The second parenting style is the authoritarian style that is characterized by high demandingness and low responsiveness. Authoritarian parents, in contrast to their authoritative counterparts, demand high standards with blind obedience from their children. Children are not allowed to know the reason why they have been ordered to do a particular thing. The authoritarian style does not engage children in open discussion as does authoritative (Wilcox, 2013). Therefore, parents are generally stern in their control of children's behavior.

The authoritarian parenting style produces children who are very arrogant and hostile. The children can hardly control their emotions and temperament. Hence, children are susceptible to committing crimes or other unacceptable hostile actions due to the inability to control their emotional behaviors. In addition to that, children seem very sad all the time and emotionally insecure since they lack the listening ear to their needs. They are generally unhappy and unsatisfied (Wong, 2014). Another distinct characteristic of these children is that they have low self-esteem. Therefore, they do not believe in themselves. Often, they lose their temper easily and want to lord over their colleagues. Furthermore, children are also likely to love blaming others for the mistakes done rather than thinking it over to find the root cause.

Due to the arrogance and the antisocial nature of the children raised by authoritarian parents, they develop inferior relationships with their colleagues (Larzelere, 2013). The social development of such children is deterred. Therefore, they rarely connect with their colleagues. Children do not love taking responsibility for their misbehavior. Instead, they blame others for their faults thereby, breaking their relationship with their colleagues.

The authoritarian style does not help children develop in their brains. The children cannot handle large reasoning works thereby making them slow-thinkers and unable to solve problems that require the application of advanced cognitive skills. Children develop poor memory, thinking, reasoning and logic.

Children raised under the authoritarian style show the poorest performance in academic work. They cannot handle technical subjects like mathematics and problem-solving situations at school. They are generally slow learners enhanced by their poor memories. Children cannot think properly; they show low levels of thinking, reasoning, remembering, and problem-solving. As a result, such children end up performing poorly in school (Wong, 2014).

Another parenting style is called the permissive style characterized by low demandingness and high responsiveness. In the permissive parenting style, parents provide little or no guidance to their children. Parents seem warm and indulgent. However, they respect their children too much that they cannot dare say no to what the children want. They merely tolerate children whatsoever. Children, therefore, grow with much-crooked behavior. They cannot follow the rules and regulations since they love to be tolerated in whatever they do.

The permissive style produces children with weak emotional control. They love to be tolerated all the time. Therefore, they cannot develop strong emotions. They also lose temper very easily once you refuse to follow or grant their demands. As a result, the permissive style leads to the development of children with weak emotional development.

In their peer relationships, children raised by the permissive style often encounter many social problems in their relationships with other people. Most of the time, these children fall, victim to heartbreak in relationships, since they have high expectations of their colleagues which when not satisfied by those friends, they become disappointed. The children are egocentric. Therefore, they cannot love what belongs to others. This makes others shrink from relating with them thereby, making them remain on their own (Wilcox, 2013).

The cognitive skills of children raised under the permissive parenting style are inferior. The children cannot reason properly since they expect others to do for them everything. They have poor thinking and reasoning, poor learning and memory, and generally poor abilities to solve problems. They become underdeveloped in their cognitive skills that they cannot endure hard situations (Larzelere, 2013).

At school, children of permissive parents perform poorly due to a lack of knowledge and skills to learn, think and reason properly. Children cannot follow school rules and regulations, and they cannot also do elementary tasks such as doing and submitting assignments on time and studying the coursework. This is because the children depend on their parents so much that they feel it is an offense and even a violation of their rights to tell them to work hard at school (Wong, 2014). Hence, the children usually make mistakes, are offensive, and display undesirable characteristics.

Conclusion

In conclusion, parental styles determine the future behavior and development of children. Family counselors and some developmental psychologists have grouped parental styles into three main categories including authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive styles. The authoritative style brings out the best developmental effects on children as compared to other types of parental styles. Therefore, psychologists and parental counselors advocate for the authoritative style of parenting.

References

Chua, A. (2012). Battle hymn of the tiger mother. London: Bloomsbury.

Feller, A. L., Wolfgram, S. M., & the University of Wisconsin--Stout. (2014). Parenting styles and their effect on child development outcomes.

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Larzelere, R. E., Morris, A. S., & Harrist, A. W. (2013). Authoritative parenting: Synthesizing nurturance & discipline for optimal child development.

Scheier, L. M., & Hansen, W. B. (2014). Parenting and teen drug use: The most recent findings from research, prevention, and treatment.

Wilcox, W. B., & Kline, K. K. (2013). Gender and Parenthood: Biological & social scientific perspectives.

Wong, D. W. (2014). Counseling individuals through the lifespan.