Child psychology has been the focus of attention for quite a while now, and research studies show that your parenting style can have a long-lasting impact on your child's development.
That is why child psychologists pay a great deal of attention to your child's behavior.
The main purpose is to observe how your child behaves and interact with you, their surrounding, and when they are alone.
This gives a child psychologist essential identifiers to access your child's mental development and wellbeing.
Among the different parenting styles, authoritative parents are often seen as the most beneficial, as they strike a balance between nurturing and discipline, fostering a healthy environment for a child's life.
We'll review what developmental Psychologist Diana Baumrind says about the types of parenting styles, including permissive parents, authoritarian parents, and neglectful parents, to understand their effects on children raised under these approaches.
The authoritative parenting style is the most effective and preferred parenting style by child psychologists. This type of parenting style helps prepare your child to lead a well-balanced and successful life physically, cognitively, emotionally, socially, and academically.
What sets you apart from an authoritarian parent is that you expect highly from your child as an authoritative parent, but you also offer more. However, it can be very tricky and requires a lot of self-control, mental resilience, time, and energy to master the authoritative parenting style.
Be child-centered; work to develop mutual consent for rules and other aspects of life. Work on their behavioral control and emotional stability with consistent nurturing and communication.
Child Psychology expert Diane Baumrind classified parenting style into four categories, which are.
Parenting Style Description Authoritarian As an authoritarian parent, you will be extremely strict in rules and show the least affection, love, or warmth toward the children. You rule with an iron hand and have zero tolerance for disobedience, insubordination, and errors. This authoritarian parenting style focuses on actions and consequences, which can result in harsh punishments at times. Children tend to have low self esteem as a result.
As an authoritarian parent, you will be extremely strict in rules and show the least affection, love, or warmth toward the children. You rule with an iron hand and have zero tolerance for disobedience, insubordination, and errors. This authoritarian parenting style focuses on actions and consequences, which can result in harsh punishments at times. Children tend to have low self esteem as a result.
You are an authoritative parent if you have set high standards for your child to follow. However, you also display a high level of affection, warmth, and admiration. Authoritative parents tend to support two-way conversations and discuss any discrepancies in your child's behavior, making it a balanced approach among the four parenting styles according to developmental psychologists.
In a permissive parenting style, you act as your child's best friend, not a parent. This is mostly due to your fear of being disliked by the child, which may have its roots in how your parents treated you. Indulgent parents in this category can negatively impact their child's psychology, leading to a lack of respect for authority, rules, and consequences.
Uninvolved parents have nothing to do with their child and do not care how they act or what they do. While we can all be neglectful at times, this does not make you an uninvolved parent. The uninvolved or neglectful parent style means you are completely uninterested in offering anything to your child, emotionally, mentally, and physically. No love, no warmth, no connection, no rules, as noted in child fam stud research.
If you wish your children to lead a healthy physical, emotional, and mental life, you must focus on their psychological development. This is where a child psychologist comes into play to help you understand how your interaction with your child affects them and why they act the way they do.
Not always, but some behavioral abnormalities have a close association with the parenting style you practice. Therefore, identifying the abnormalities in your parenting behavior can help you understand your children better.
Moreover, you can also learn to connect and communicate with them more positively and constructively.
By knowing your child's mind, you can also help them develop strong coping mechanisms in difficult situations. Some of the most common issues bad parenting style may cause in your child are.
Your parenting style affects every aspect of your child's development, i.e., physical, emotional, and cognitive. Let us look at how.
Did you know that newborns are aware of their surroundings and show interest? It may come as a surprise, but it is true. How you parent your infant will definitely affect their cognitive ability to understand and observe.
Plus, it will also impact their thought processing abilities pertaining to learning language, decision making, memorizing, and imagination.
Emotional development in your child refers to the feelings, understanding, and expression of emotions. You can observe this by some basic emotions of anger, joy, fear, or sadness. Moreover, emotional development goes hand-in-hand with social development as social interaction helps your child develop complex emotions.
This phase determines the emotional state of mind in terms of hope, guilt, confidence, pride, self-esteem, etc. Having the right parenting style can help you develop your child's ability to be empathic and feel and understand their emotion as well as others.
Yelling is not the answer. Think about it, when you yell at your kids for being aggressive, misbehaving, or being of the line by shouting at them, are you not contradicting yourself? Even if the child may comply out of fear when young, they may develop disliking towards you and other behavioral problems.
Thus, it is absolutely critical for you to work on the emotional development of your child, and the best way to do it is a healthy and positive parenting style.
As a parent, your attitude towards the child also determines their development in terms of values, social awareness, and mingling skills. The parenting style helps your child relate to people around them, such as who is in-charge, who has the authority, the peers, and whom to avoid, such as strangers.
Moreover, the right kind of parenting also instills friendship, trust, conflict management, and respect for authority in your child.
The take-away of the entire discussion is that as a parent, you must find a balanced parenting method to help your child understand the pros and cons of their actions. However, for that, you must first understand your actions and how they affect your child.
Be an authority figure to your child but pat their back and shower them with love, warmth, and praise when they deserve it. This will make your child respect authority but also become emotionally independent with higher self-esteem and confidence.
I am a Licensed Professional Counselor, and owner of Overcomers Counseling. I'm dedicated to helping individuals find strength and healing through life’s challenges. With a deep understanding of mental health and years of professional experience, I specialize in fostering hope and resilience while equipping her clients with tools to thrive. Passionate about empowering others, she creates a safe, supportive space where everyone feels seen, valued, and capable of overcoming obstacles on their path to well-being.
You can teach your child persistence by modeling the behavior yourself, encouraging them to take risks, setting goals and tracking progress, praising effort, and providing support and guidance.
