Compare and contrast authoritative and authoritarian child-rearing styles

Question

Please provide the best answer for the statement.

Answer 1

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, establishing 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 she or 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.
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, demanding unquestioning obedience. If the child resists, authoritarian parents resort to force and punishment. Children of authoritarian parents are 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 and overwhelmed by challenging tasks.
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 Children subjected to psychological control exhibit adjustment problems involving both anxious, withdrawn behavior and defiance and aggression—especially relational aggression, which (like parental psychological control) damages relationships through manipulation and exclusion.