Why choose authoritative parenting

When kids do something wrong, authoritative parents will discipline by talking with them about it, guiding and teaching their kids while modifying their expectations depending on the situation and a child's individual needs. The authoritative approach to parenting has been shown to lead to the best outcomes in kids, including better emotional health, social skills, more resiliency, and more secure attachments with their parents.

This fourth style, identified by researchers Eleanor Maccoby and John Martin in the early s, describes a method of parenting in which there is little communication, lack of involvement in their kids' lives, little warmth and responsiveness to kids' emotional needs, and inadequate or insufficient attention to disciplining kids or supervising them. Uninvolved or neglected parenting is often associated with the worst outcomes for children.

Kids who are raised with this style of parenting tend to be emotionally withdrawn, anxious and may be at greater risk for delinquent and dangerous behaviors as well as substance abuse. Out of all the parenting styles, children who are raised with an authoritative style of parenting have been shown to exhibit the best outcomes.

Some of the many benefits of this approach for kids include the following:. Get diet and wellness tips to help your kids stay healthy and happy. Baumrind D. Effects of authoritative control on child behavior. Child Development. Hosokawa R, Katsura T. Correlating parenting styles with child behavior and caries. Pediatr Dent. Family predictors of continuity and change in social and physical aggression from ages 9 to Aggress Behav. Glozah FN. Health Psychol Res. Kuppens S, Ceulemans E. J Child Fam Stud.

Impact of attachment, temperament and parenting on human development. Korean J Pediatr. Role of parenting styles in adolescent substance use: results from a Swedish longitudinal cohort study. BMJ Open. Some specific characteristics of this style are that they are rational with their children to direct them, try to encourage their expression, validate their emotions, and reason with their rules.

With this reasoning, they teach kids to seek the reasons behind the rules and let them express their conformity or doubts, cope with the natural consequences of their actions, and give them feedback about them —but not in a strict way, like authoritarian parents.

Here are the differences between the authoritarian vs authoritative styles. There are two other parenting styles aside from authoritative and authoritarian, one is permissive parenting, which shares similarities with the authoritative style. The other parenting style is neglectful parenting, being the opposite of the authoritative.

Here, parents are disengaged from their children, without expectations, rules, or emotional attachment. They are not involved with their kids and are indifferent to their needs or wishes.

This usually leads children to have low emotional intelligence and other personal problems in their development. As we mentioned above, the authoritative parenting style has many positive outcomes in children, but it also requires a lot of patience as a parent, since it is primarily based on your communication and reasoning with your children. She is a mindfulness instructor, trained on the treatment of Learning Disabilities.

Authoritative parents are the ones who somehow manage to strike a perfect balance between disciplinarian and pushover. They're warm and kind to their kids; they respect their personhood and individuality, and parent with an end goal of producing well-rounded, independent, happy people who will be positive additions to society.

Sound like you? Read on to understand all the pros—and the few cons—of this parenting style. If authoritarian parents are hyper-focused on rules, and permissive parents tend to eschew rules altogether, authoritative parents use rules to empower their children to make the right choices.

When it comes to authoritative parenting, it's pretty much all good news! Study after study has shown that this type of positive discipline has shown to produce resilient, confident, respectful, and happy children. Below, Nalin outlines some of the biggest pros of authoritative parenting. With authoritative parenting being the most celebrated parenting type among psychologists all over the world, it's difficult to find many drawbacks.

Often in life, finding a balance between two alternatives is the best solution to a problem, and that's certainly the case here. But that doesn't mean that everything will be smooth sailing as long as you practice authoritative parenting. As they grow, kids go through normal phases of rebellion, anger and apathy. These phases may be particularly difficult for authoritative parents, who naturally have high expectations of their children, and have tried hard to raise their kids the best way possible.

Here, patience is the key to success, says Nalin. Parents can undergo a few periods of trial and error before they find the strategies that work best for them and their children.

It's important to recognize that rebellion is a natural part of childhood.