Parenting styles and their effects on early childhood development

Childhood Development

Factors Influencing Early Childhood Development

Darling and Steinberg (1993) proposed a model of parenting that integrated several prior models. They discriminated between parenting practice and parenting style, with the former representing domain-specific parenting habits and the latter domain-independent social interactions between parent and child. A critical distinction between parenting practice and style, based on their model, is that style communicates to the child how the parent feels about the child rather than the child's behavior. The natural extension of this model is that a child's sense of self-worth is directly influenced by parenting style.

The parenting styles reviewed by Darling and Steinberg (1993) included authoritarian, authoritative, indulgent, and neglectful. Of these parenting styles, authoritative was viewed as producing the best developmental outcomes in terms of socialization, academic achievement, and emotional maturation. Using the model proposed by Maccoby and Martin in 1983, parenting styles could be described empirically along two dimensions: (1) the nature and frequency of demands placed on the child and (2) the nature of reinforcement. For example, an authoritative parent would rate high in terms of demands and reinforcement, while an authoritarian parent would rate high on demands and low on reinforcement. However, the authors noted that other contextual factors, such as socioeconomic status and ethnicity, can modify parenting style efficacy.

Darling and Steinberg's model for parenting styles, which incorporated several prior models, provided child developmental researchers with a framework for asking empirical questions. Much of the research that had been done by the time Darling and Steinberg published their article in 1993 had used older children and adolescents as study subjects. This essay will examine whether there is more recent evidence supporting a significant interaction between parenting styles and early childhood development.

Contemporary Parenting Styles and Early Childhood Development

An increasingly common phenomenon is families with working parents, regardless of whether the home has one or two parrents (Tong et al., 2009). Work demands therefore frequently intrude upon interactions between parent and child in modern society. A recent study reviewed prior research efforts that examined the impact of working parents during early infancy on developmental outcomes and found mixed results. For example, one study found lower vocabulary skills associated with working parents, while another revealed improved cognitive functioning.

In an effort to bring clarity to this topic, Tong and colleagues (2009) conducted a large study examining the developmental outcomes of 504 Japanese children with working mothers and enrolled in childcare. The children were under the age of 4 at the time of study enrollment. After the two-year study period the children were assessed for motor, social, communicative, vocabulary, and cognitive development. The parenting style of the working mothers were graded based on stimulating interactions with child, social activities, use of punishment, family support, self-reports of parenting competency, and the child's reluctance to go to childcare.

Gross motor development was found to depend on whether a mother and child went to the grocery store together and the use of punishment (Tong et al., 2009). Social competence, communication abilities, and intelligence were improved dramatically if the mother and child played and sang together. Vocabulary, however, was diminished if the mother inconsistently used punishment. These results suggest that a parenting style which emphasizes prolonged interactions between parent and child, despite work obligations, will foster healthy developmental outcomes. These results were found regardless of which government accredited daycare facility the child was enrolled at.

Based on the findings of Tong and colleagues (2009), the only parenting style that would be predicted to promote healthy early childhood development would be authoritative. While an indulgent parent might spend a significant amount of time with the child, a positive and consistent use of punishment during the two-year study period was associated with improved gross motor skills and vocabulary. The child of an indulgent working parent with a weak, inconsistent, or absent punishment practice would probably be developmentally delayed on these two measures.

Conclusions

Early childhood, once viewed as a period when developmental influences are more nature than nurture, has been shown to be measurably influenced by parenting style and the socioeconomic status of the family. Of the four parenting styles discussed by Darling and Steinberg (1993), the authoritative style seems to confer the best developmental outcome to children during early childhood. Children born into families unable to provide an informal learning environment, due to socioeconomic or other conditions, can still benefit significantly from participating in preschool programs that foster the development of social and cognitive skills.