Compare and contrast the authoritative and authoritarian child-rearing styles

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answer: The authoritative child-rearing style—the most successful approach—involves high acceptance and involvement, adaptive control techniques, and appropriate autonomy granting. Authoritative parents are warm, attentive, and sensitive to their child’s needs. They establish an enjoyable, emotionally fulfilling parent–child relationship that draws the child into close connection. At the same time, authoritative parents exercise firm, reasonable control. They insist on mature behavior, give reasons for their expectations, and use disciplinary encounters as “teaching moments” to promote the child’s self-regulation. Finally, authoritative parents engage in gradual, appropriate autonomy granting, allowing the child to make decisions in areas where he is ready to do so. Throughout childhood and adolescence, authoritative parenting is linked to many aspects of competence—an upbeat mood, self-control, task persistence, cooperativeness, high self-esteem, social and moral maturity, and favorable school performance. Longitudinal research indicates that among children of diverse temperaments, authoritative child rearing predicts maturity and adjustment into adolescence.
The authoritarian child-rearing style is low in acceptance and involvement, high in coercive control, and low in autonomy granting. Authoritarian parents appear cold and rejecting. To exert control, they yell, command, criticize, and threaten. They make decisions for their child and expect the child to accept their word unquestioningly. If the child resists, authoritarian parents resort to force and punishment. Children of authoritarian parents are more likely to be anxious, unhappy, and low in self-esteem and self-reliance. When frustrated, they tend to react with hostility and, like their parents, use force to get their way. Boys, especially, show high rates of anger and defiance. Although girls also engage in acting-out behavior, they are more likely to be dependent, lacking interest in exploration, and overwhelmed by challenging tasks. Children and adolescents exposed to the authoritarian style typically do poorly in school. However, because of their parents’ concern with control, they tend to achieve better and to commit fewer antisocial acts than peers with undemanding parents. In addition to unwarranted direct control, authoritarian parents engage in psychological control, in which they attempt to take advantage of children’s psychological needs by intruding on and manipulating their verbal expressions, individuality, and attachments to parents. Children subjected to psychological control exhibit adjustment problems involving both anxious, withdrawn behavior and defiance and aggression—especially the relational form, which (like parental psychological control) damages relationships through manipulation and exclusion.
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131. Discuss factors within the family that heighten the risk of child maltreatment.

Answer: Many interacting variables—at the family, community, and cultural levels—contribute to the risk of child maltreatment. The more risks present, the greater the likelihood of abuse or neglect. Within the family, children whose characteristics make them more challenging to rear are more likely to become targets of abuse. These include premature or very sick babies and children who are temperamentally difficult, are inattentive and overactive, or have other developmental problems. Child factors, however, only slightly increase the risk of abuse. Whether such children are maltreated largely depends on parents’ characteristics. Maltreating parents are less skillful than other parents in handling discipline confrontations. They also suffer from biased thinking about their child. For example, they often attribute their baby’s crying or their child’s misdeeds to a stubborn or bad disposition, evaluate children’s transgressions as worse than they are, and feel powerless in parenting—perspectives that lead them to move quickly toward physical force.
Most parents have enough self-control not to respond with abuse to their child’s misbehavior or developmental problems. Other factors combine with these conditions to prompt an extreme response. Abusive parents react to stressful situations with high emotional arousal. And low income, low education (less than a high school diploma), unemployment, alcohol and drug use, marital conflict, overcrowded living conditions, frequent moves, and extreme household disorganization are common in abusive and neglectful homes. These conditions increase the chances that parents will be too overwhelmed to meet basic child-rearing responsibilities or will vent their frustrations by lashing out at their children.