L11 - Family as a Developmental Context: Parenting

Question 1

How to define family?

Answer 1

• Group involving one adult related to child by birth, marriage, adoption or foster status, and who is responsible for providing basic needs like love, support, safety and stability
• Provide rearing env and heritable influences causing complex interactions for child development

Question 2

What is the role of family?

Answer 2

• Nurture children’s development
• Promote children’s health and well-being
• To protect children from risks of violence, economic, insecurity and harm
• To instil a sense of personal responsibility for one’s own and one’s family future

Question 3

What did Diana Baumrind say?

Answer 3

• Emphasis on overarching parenting style instead of parenting behaviours: control
• Children experience differences in the rules parents apply and the what rules are enforced
• How parents enforce rules determines differences in children’s development and achievement

Question 4

What are the three different types of control?

Answer 4

• Authoritative
• Authoritarian
• Permissive
• Uninvolved (not control but another parenting style)
• Differences are made of parent’s values/beliefs about their role and the nature of the child, showing differences in patterns of affect, practises and values

Question 5

What is the two-dimensional framework?

Answer 5

• Emotional Responsiveness: Emotional orientation ranges from warm and responsive to cold, rejecting and hostile
• Control/demandingness: Control can range from appropriate rule and boundary setting to authoritarian power assertion to indifference and neglect

Question 6

What are Authoritative Parents like?

Answer 6

• Demanding but warm and responsive
• Clear Standards
• Allow children to develop autonomy
• Attentive to kids needs and concerns
• Measured and consistent in discipline
• Children tend to be more competent, independent, self-assured, popular with peers and low in antisocial/drug use in teens

Question 7

What are Authoritarian Parents like?

Answer 7

• Cold/unresponsive to kids needs
• Controlling/demanding
• Expect their children to comply with their demands without asking questions or receiving explanations
• Children tend to be low in social and academic competence, unhappy, unfriendly and low in self confidence

Question 8

What are Permissive Parents like?

Answer 8

• Often responsive to needs and wishes
• Lenient with children
• Not require children to regulate themselves or behave appropriately
• Children tend to be impulsive, lacking in self-control and low in school achievement, and engage in more misconduct and drug use

Question 9

What are Uninvolved Parents like?

Answer 9

• Disengaged, undemanding, and low in responsiveness and no set limits for children or monitoring their behaviour
• Unsupportive of their children
• Tend to have disturbed attachment as infants/toddlers and problems with peer relationships. They exhibit antisocial behaviour, depression and social withdrawal, drug use, risky sexual behaviour and low academic and social competence

Question 10

What characteristics determine how parenting style influences child development?

Answer 10

• Values and goals parents have in socialising their children
• Parenting practises used by parents to attain goals
• Parenting styles or emotional climate which within socialisation occurs

Question 11

Does parenting have unidirectional effects?

Answer 11

• Children exert effects on parents
• Child as an active agent
• Bidirectionality of parent-child interactions
• Captured on bioecological systems

Question 12

What did Darling and Steinberg say?

Answer 12

Parent Goals and Values lead to parenting style and parenting practise (goal/domain specific) which leads to child willingness to be socialised and adolescent outcomes

Question 13

How do we put parenting into perspective?

Answer 13

• Interplay between inner psychological stressors and external social circumstances
• Understanding of parenting needs to take account of factors that facilitate or interfere with good parenting
• Comes back to systems model (Bronfenbrenner’s model) as it shows complex interactions
• Enduring interactions in the immediate env are called proximal processes e.g comforting a baby, and these interact with env features (distal)

Question 14

How does economic pressure affect parenting (exp)

Answer 14

• Longitudinal study
• Family economic pressure is made of per capital income, unstable work, debt-asset ratio and income loss
• Economic pressure = parent depressed mood & Parent-adolescent financial conflict = marital conflict = parent hostility = child adjustment