Parenting with Style: The Good Coach

Developmental and Clinical psychologist, Diana Baumrind's work on leadership styles spawned her investigation into how parents lead their families.  From these historic studies she generated three parenting styles.  This week we will look at the style that is usually considered to be best for most children:  Authoritative Parenting.

As you will see, the Authoritative parent is like a good coach or teacher.  Your coach cares about you and gives you praise or a pat on the back when you do well.  Your coach has high expectations about your performance - sometimes believing in what you can do even before you realize that you can.  A good coach has rules and if those rules are broken there is some sort of penalty - but these are fairly applied to everyone on the team.  Because of this a good coach is beloved and leads the team to victory!

Praise or a pat on the back are examples of Warmth: in last week's post we noted that Warmth has to do with all the ways parents can show love to their children.  Authoritative parents get it right by being High in Warmth:  they praise their kids when they make good choices; they are affectionate with their children and say "I love you;" and they don't take out the stress from their adult lives on their kids.  Their children do not have to guess if they are loved by their parents because they are given concrete evidence every day.

Having rules and consequences describes Control: you will remember that the ideal amount is Medium.  Authoritative parents also get this right:  they have control over their children's behavior because they have age-appropriate, reasonable rules that the child can successfully follow.  If those rules are broken, there are also reasonable, age-appropriate punishments that will occur.  Those consequences are predictable and happen every time the rules are broken.  Children of Authoritative parents have a clear road-map to the good behavior that is expected of them.  When they do not show that good behavior they also know that the consequence will always occur:  these won't be fun but these will be fair.

Another hallmark of Authoritative parents is that they want to teach their children to think independently about moral (right or wrong) situations.  They want their kids to make good choices even when nobody is around to advise them and even when an authority figure is telling them to do something wrong.  To do this they engage in dialogue with older children and teens about the family rules:  this allows kids to give feedback about the age-appropriateness of the rules and the parents have a chance to teach the morals behind the rules.  For example, maybe a family has a rule that the kids get new shoes only at the start of the school year, but one of the kids wants a second pair:

Authoritative parents would hear the kid out, listening to all of his good and not so good reasons that he should have those shoes.  They wouldn't automatically cave to his demands; they wouldn't automatically cut him off to show parental power.  Instead, they would ask their son questions and clarify moral issues behind the rules.  Some morals from this situation might be: how money is shared in a family; what is the importance of things over people; resisting pressure from advertising.

In the end, the Authoritative parent is the one who makes the decision to keep or modify the family rule.  So the parent might tell the son, "no," because bending the rule would not be fair to the other kids in the family.  The parent could also say, "yes," with a qualification:  maybe they will buy the shoes but the child has to do extra chores to earn possession of them with allowance money.  Possibly, the parent would say "yes," and buy them right away - not for a lame reason - but maybe in the discussion the child offered a really good reason, like safety when he walks to school in the morning while it is still somewhat dark outside.  Regardless of yes or no, this version of Medium control teaches the children how to think rationally about moral problems.

For most children the best outcomes occur when they have at least one Authoritative parent.  These children tend to have the best social skills and good relationships with other kids and with adults.  In addition, both at home and at school, these children show the best behavior!  Not surprisingly, they demonstrate age-appropriate independence and are likely to make the right choice even when their parents are not around.  Overall, these children are fun to be around, have a healthy level of confidence, and are highly competent for their ages.

When I lecture about Authoritative parents, some of my students seem doubtful that such good behavior can occur without harsh rules and harsh punishment.  It could be that these students grew up with a different type of parent or are raising their own children in a high risk environment.  Next week we'll talk about a High Control parenting style and the situations that may call for it.

Further Reading:

At your local college library you can access a good historical review of parenting, including Baumrind's three styles: Maccoby, E. E. (1992) The role of parents in the socialization of children: An historical overview. Developmental Psychology, Vol 28(6), 1006-1017.

More details on Authoritative parenting from the Parenting Science website.

Good advice on Medium Control discipline from the Sears family of pediatricians and nurses.