Parenting: Best Practices for Raising Children (continued)

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Permissive parents are warm but have little control. They fail to set or enforce appropriate limits for their children. Permissive parents avoid confrontation with their children. Being too lenient, they do not require that their children behave in a mature and responsible manner. Sometimes permissive parents justify their style by saying they'd rather be a friend than a parent to their children. A permissive parent might dismiss the misbehavior lightly ("Now you know we don't hit, so don't let me see you do that again"). At the extreme, permissive parents can become indulgent—beyond merely allowing their children to misbehave, they may actually encourage or foster their misbehavior: "Well, if he hit you, then you just hit him back!" As their children and teens grow older, permissive-indulgent parents may encourage or condone inappropriate behaviors such as skipping school, vandalism, alcohol or drug abuse, or sexual promiscuity. Compared to authoritatively raised children, children from permissive homes are more impulsive, perform less well in school, and are less self-assured, independent, and confident in their activities (Parke & Buriel, 1998).

Rejecting/neglecting parents don't set limits and are unresponsive to their children's needs. This category of parenting has two substyles: Rejecting parents are harsh and actively reject their children, whereas neglecting parents ignore their children and fail to fulfill their responsibilities as parents. These parents don't monitor their children properly and may not notice misbehaviors. Rejecting/neglecting parents may be under too much stress to parent appropriately; they may not be committed to the task of raising children; or they may be depressed or otherwise psychologically or emotionally unavailable to their children. Children raised by rejecting/neglecting parents fare the worst of all. Compared to other children, rejected/neglected children grow up to show higher rates of delinquency, alcohol and drug use, and early sexual activity. They perform more poorly in school and show other disruptions in peer relations and cognitive development (Parke & Buriel, 1998).

In her later work, Baumrind expanded the number of parenting styles to seven: authoritative, democratic, nondirective, authoritarian-directive, nonauthoritarian-directive, unengaged, and good enough. She also added two dimensions in addition to parental warmth and parental control. Maturity demands are parents' expectations that the child will show age-appropriate behavior, self-reliance, and self-control. Democratic communication is the degree to which parents ask for and consider the child's feelings and opinions. As you might expect, higher levels of each are indicative of more effective parenting. Research in this area also highlights the problem of intrusiveness, or control that parents maintain by psychologically manipulating and inhibiting children. Studies have linked higher levels of intrusiveness with poorer outcomes for children and adolescents. Researchers have confirmed this finding in several different cultures, although children of "unengaged" parents still seem to fare worst of all (Barber, 2002; Baumrind, 1991).

Quality parenting is an issue of great interest and concern to all who work with children, but there is little agreement on how to improve it. One proposal involves requiring people to get a license before they can become parents.