Parenting Styles and the Impact

Parenting Styles and the Impact of Alcohol Consumption of College Freshmen Aged Men

Introduction to Area of Interest

Whether or not parents want to admit it, they have the biggest and most profound impact upon their children's lives than anyone else. Parents, by nurturing and encouraging their children, can develop securely attached children; overly criticizing children or punishing them in an overly-harsh way can develop children who are anxious or aggressive (Harris, 2011). By selecting a child's school or the neighborhood where a child grows up, the parent generally is directing the course of a life -- another aspect of evidence which demonstrates that parents have a tremendous amount of influence on their children and the way their lives unfold (Harris, 2011). Particular areas of parenting dominate more than others: the level of a parent's warmth and nurturance, how well the parents communicated with their children, what discipline was like in the household (too much being as a bad as too little) and levels of autonomy that the child was given (Harris, 2011). These elements are all present in the four different styles of parenting to a greater or less degree. It can clearly be inferred that these different parenting styles can definitely impact alcohol consumption of children during their freshman years of college.

Theories of Conceptual Framework (s) related to area of inquiry:

Bowlby and Aisenworth made massive strides in the field of psychology decades ago when they "suggested that early attachment experiences help people create an internal working model of the world and themselves. Children with sensitive mothers, in Bowlby's view, will come to think of other people as supportive and helpful. In turn, this positive model will influence their later relationships in a healthy way. In contrast, children who develop a working model that the world is insensitive may be at risk for poor adjustment or difficult relationships" (Comer & Gould, 2012, p.81). Just these initial findings demonstrate how a child could develop not just a strong or weak attachment model to other peoples, but with it, to the surrounding world he lives in and the substances within it. Thus, it's not difficult to see how some people could develop dysfunctional relationships with alcohol, and others could develop healthy relationships. Once experts in child and family psychology understood attachment styles that allowed them to begin to explore how different traits of parenting were exclusive to distinct parenting styles, ultimately causing the emergence of the four styles of parenting. For instance, "Securely attached participants' parental representations were characterized by differentiation, elaboration, benevolence, and non-punitiveness. Representations by dismissing participants were characterized by less differentiation and more punitiveness and malevolence" (Levy et al., 1998). For instance, child psychology expert found that the attachment style the child developed was largely a byproduct of two majorly important parent-child interactions: how many demands the parent placed on the child and how responsive the parent was to the child (Comer & Gould, 2012, p.81).

Proposed Quantitative Two-Way- Anova Methodology:

Engaging in an ANOVA methodology would be ideal for such a research topic as determining how young men of a Jewish background use or abuse alcohol in their freshmen year of college as it would allow researchers to compare young men from a range of parenting styles. The two variable design would compare children of highly responsive, highly warm parenting styles (group a), versus children of parenting styles characterized by a lack of responsiveness or by punitive measures (group B). This would help illuminate the impact of parenting methods with a greater level of clarity and illumination.

Description of Proposed Design

500 children raised by parenting styles from group a would be interviewed and observed weekly for five years, as well as 500 children from group B. The research would begin once the child was four years away from his freshmen year of college and include that freshmen year. The researchers would seek to understand how the children from these widely different parenting styles responded to peer pressure, stress, disappointment, temptation and other elements of growing up based on the parenting styles they characterized their parents by.

Proposed research population and how would you draw upon this population for research:

The proposed research population would be taken for convenience and would ideally be made up of male participants from a Jewish high school (or several high schools), and would take participants from the first year class. Researchers might need to open themselves up to including multiple high schools in order to get a more well-rounded sample and so that there were 500 males in each group.

Examples of research Data That May Be Collected:

The types of research data that will be collected will involve opinions and characteristics that the children have and find in their parents. Some of the most fundamental research that needs to be collected before the latter half of the study occurs is concrete findings which determine which specific group (a or B) to place the boys into for research. "Parenting styles convey parents' overall feeling about the child through body language, tone of voice, emotional displays and quality of attention" (Benson & Haith, 2010, p.281). In many ways, labeling a child as originating from a particular parenting style generally describes how the parent feels about the child and feels about being a parent. This will be collected via surveys given to the children so that they can freely categorize their parents based on a series of questions. Thus, the research study will also collect information about how the child uses alcohol, when and how often and why and trace those reasons as they adapt throughout life. The measuring tools for this data set will be primarily questionnaires, interviews and through observation.