Parenting Styles

The study of human development is centrally concerned with understanding the processes that lead adults to function adequately within their cultures. These skills include an understanding of—and adherence to—the moral standards, conventional rules, and customs of the society. They also include maintaining close relationships with others, developing the skills to work productively, and becoming self-reliant and able to function independently. All of these may be important to successfully rear the next generation. Researchers studying human development have assumed that the family is a particularly important context for developing these competencies, and therefore, they have examined how parents socialize their children to understand variations in adult outcomes. They have attempted to find associations between the way parents raise their children and children's social, emotional, and cognitive development. It has been assumed that variations in parents' discipline style, warmth, attention to the needs of the child, and parenting attitudes and beliefs all can be characterized in terms of consistent patterns of child-rearing, referred to as parenting styles, that are systematically related to children's competence and development. Research that began in the mid-1980s has focused more on the particular dimensions of parenting that underlie the different parenting styles to provide a more detailed understanding of how parenting influences healthy child and adolescent development.