Throughout the semester I found Baumrind's parenting styles to be very interesting and helpful to those who are intending on having a family with children. There are 3 different styles in which he explains being permissive, authoritarian, and authoritative. Permissive parents tend to be too lenient with their children allowing too much freedom, causing very little discipline. Authoritarian parents tend to be too strict giving children little opportunity for free play and are punished when not responding appropriately to demands. But, Baumrind said that the best parenting style is authoritative which simply combines the best features of permissive and authoritarian worlds. Parents tend to be supportive with their kids but set clear and firm limits.
Finding the picture above connected with me very well as I have friends that clearly show that this diagram is correct. While learning about Baumrind and his theory on parenting styles I thought about my central group of friends and connected their life to how their parents raised them. Majority correlated perfectly with what the diagram says and of course there are the few who are outliers but this you will find with any experiment. It makes me wonder what parent wouldn't want to use the authoritative parenting style, all in all results show your kid will end up on the best path.
Where do YOUR parents fit?
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I would have to say that my parents have an authoritative parenting style. They gave me and my siblings freedom, but if we misbehaved there were definitely consequences. I am glad that my parents were not too strict with me because then I would not feel as close to them as I do now.
I also found parenting styles quite interesting as well. Reading about parenting styles made me analyze not only my parents parenting style, but the parenting styles of my friends and other people that I know. Through my observations (of course I have no data to really provide solid evidence) I found a tendency for my friends' parents to have similar parenting styles as my parents do, which could relate to why I have the friends that I do. I believe being raised in similar ways as my friends allows me to have a better connection with each other of them, as we have a better understanding of each others' lives.
I also saw some serious evidence of this amongst my friends. I had super lax parents and it's funny to think about how their permissive attitudes may have affected me today. I think the wheel is really more of a spectrum because parents are necessarily permissive all the time, and they can be permissive on some issues and really strict on others. In that respect, I think that makes it a little more difficult to analyze how a child is expected to turn out.
Well this shows what type of parents people are, I feel like a study should be done as to how parents style changes over their life. The reason why I wonder this is that my parents have a really different approach to raising me than they did for all my brothers. It would be nice to know if parents get more lenient the older they get.
I agree that an authoritative parenting style would be the best. One thing that I wonder though is that just because I was born and raised in the United States is the reason that I think an authoritative parenting style is the best. The majority of parents in China have an authoritarian parenting style, so I wonder if over there they would believe that is the best way to parent your child.