Parenting Styles

Parenting is a very subjective topic, with many different styles, methods, and resources parents use in order to educate and discipline their children; there is no ‘right’ way to raise a child. There are four categories that parenting styles are grouped into: authoritative, permissive, uninvolved and authoritarian. Authoritative is a style that establishes fair rules that they expect their children to follow. However, when their children don’t meet these expectations, the parents are more nurturing and forgiving rather than punive. Permissive parents have very few demands of their children. Those rare demands are accompanied by rare disciplines, creating more of a friendly relationship rather than a parent-child relationship. Uninvolved parents …show more content…
Authoritarian parenting is when parents establish strict rules that they expect their children to follow. These rules are usually enforced with punishment and instrumental aggression. Every parent has their own preference and opinion about the different parenting styles. The most common parenting style is the authoritarian style. This parenting style may seem like a good style to partake in. However, the instrumental aggression, that is pivotal to the discipline process in this style, may result in long-term detrimental cognitive effects such as: aggression, lack of social competence, conforming, anger management issues, and resentment of authority. With this parenting style being so popular among parents in our current time period. There has been an increase in disobedient and insubordinate children recently, with more children failing out of school, getting involved with drugs, and ending up in jails and juvenile delinquent …show more content…
In this situation, the goal is to raise a well-behaved, socially conscious child via the use of punishment. These actions by the adult can be physical, verbal, or emotional. Some parents believe the authoritarian to be an effective style because ruling with an iron fist is the best way to keep their children in line. However, they are unaware that the punishment system set in place is detrimental to the development of a child’s amygdala and hippocampus. The amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for emotion and how that emotion is expressed in moods. The hippocampus is responsible for long-term memory. An example of authoritarian parenting is when a child got a cookie out of the cookie jar when her mother told her not too. When the child is punished for her actions, the punishment is correlated with a negative memory as well as the emotion the child is feeling at the time, mostly anger or sadness. The child is then conditioned to act out in that same way when he or she wants attention from their parent, since the only time any attention is given to the child is when that feeling of anger is coupled with negative actions, resulting in punishment, or the stimuli. Although this could possibly result in obedient children, the long-term effects of the lack of affection and communication can cause the child to become dependent on the parent’s instruction or discipline due to the