Parenting Interview

I chose to interview a lady who was in a few of my classes at Texas Tech whom I became friends with. She is about to graduated from TTU in May with her Bachelors degree and is working towards her Masters degree in Education. She is a 52 year old women with 3 daughters ages 34, 26, and 18, she also started caring for her middle daughters children a year ago, which is a 7 year-old boy and a 6 year-old girl. She was married for 15 years and divorced her husband shortly after having her middle child, and then she lived with her boyfriend and had her 3rd child. They separated when the youngest was 8. From then on she raised the 3 girls on her own, then later gaining 2 grand children to care for. “Mary”(not her real name) allowed me to interview …show more content…
One of the concepts we learned in parenting was the different parenting style’s, such as authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive. When interviewing Mary she stated that she was more of an authoritative than the other parenting styles. In the textbook it classifies authoritative as, “Parents have strong commitments to children and balance demands with responsiveness to children’s needs” (Brooks 2013, pg. 353), I saw that this demanding and responsive parenting style applied to Mary’s parenting. Mary said, “I expect them to do good in school and follows the rules” as well as, “I focus on encouraging her daughters”(Mary, interview). These were just some examples as to why I thought Mary fell into this category of authoritative. These parents’ uses enforce firm standards for their children, while still allowing them freedom to be independent individuals. This could be seen by, enforcing a curfew/ bedtime, but still allowing your child to have the independence to do what they …show more content…
Mary mentioned that she uses negative consequences to discipline her children. Things like taking away their electronics if they brought home bad grades, or disobeyed. A negative consequence, as defined in the textbook is, “used to decrease behaviors that are not desired”(Brooks 2013, pg. 195), Mary did this by taking away something the child desired in order to punish them for what they did wrong. She also mentioned using time-out as another form of punishment for her children when they were younger and then grounded them when they were older. Time-out being another type of negative consequence, defined as “it serves to stop the disapproved behavior and to give the child a chance to cool off and think bout the rule violation” (Brooks 2013, pg. 196), this can best be paired with conversation with the child, telling them why one does not behave that way, or why they were placed in timeout. Mary said she used time-out as a form of punishment with her own children, and found that it wasn’t very affective at preventing the undesired behavior in the long term. She said her children would continue to get in trouble, when they knew they would just have to sit in timeout, which to them wasn’t that big of a deal. But, with her grandchildren, ages 7 and 6, she uses physical punishment when they misbehave. Mary said she will spank them when they act out, physical