Parenting Style and Adolescent Adjustment - ERIC

1 Parenting Style and Adolescent Adjustment5an ideologicalorientation that has its foundationsin trust,democracy, and indulgence ( ,"indulgent permissiveness").Onthe other are families whose lowlevel of demandingnessrefloctidisengagement from the responsibilities ofchild-rearing ( ,"neglectful permissiveness").Failing to distinguish betweenindulgent and neglectful permissivenessmuddies findings on theconsequences of permissiveparenting for the child's this study, we lookexplicitly at the contrasting consequencesof indulgence versus second emphasis concerns thediversity of outcomevariables from Saumrind's own work, muchof thesocialization literature in adolescence isoutc-ome-orionted and,as a consequence, focuses on oneoutcome ( , self-esteem), orparticular set of outcomes ( , indicators ofachievement)

2 , ata , the conclusions one reachesabout the costs andbenefits of particular parInting styles depend onthe example, one might hypothesize thatauthoritarianparenting has especially adverse effects inthe realm of thepsychosocial development because it restricts thechild's senseof competence and independence;authoritarianism may not havenegative effects in the realm of drug use,however, becauseparental control may act as a deterrent todeviance (Patterson fiStouthamer-Loeber, 1985).The reverse might be true forindulgently-raised children, who may enjoybenefits in the realmof psychosocial development butevidence higher rates the present investigation we haveincluded a rangeFINAL 20, 1990 Patterns of Competence andAdjustment Among Adolescents FromAuthoritative, Authoritarian, Indulgent, andNeglectful FamiliesSusie D.

3 Lamborn and Nina S. MountsUniversity of Wisconsin-MadisonU & DEPARTMENT OF FDUCATIONO ffice ot Educational %semen end ImprovementEDUCATIONALRESOURCES INFORMATIONCENTER (ERIC)Tim document has been mixoduced asreconed from the person or organizationortginating a0 Minor chanfos Aavt been made to Improwreoroductoon QualityPoznts ot stew or opmion slated in the 'Acu-men! dO not Almoommly reprmentothcialOERI positton or policyLaurence SteinbergTemple UniversitySanford M. DornbuschStanford University"PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THISMATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BYFin.

4 Me w en aTO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCESINFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)."The research was supported by a grant toLaurence Steinberg andB. Bradford Brown from the Departmentof Education, throughthe National Center on Effective SecondarySchools at theUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison, and from the SpencerFoundation,to our collaborators Sanford and P. HerbertLeiderman of the Stanford University Center forFamilies,Children, and Youth. Address correspondence to thefirst author,at the National Center for EffectiveSecondary Schools, 1025 WestJohnson Street, University of Wisconsin,Madison, k Style and AdolescentAdjustment2 AbstractIn order to test Maccoby andMartin's (1983) revision ofBaumrind's (1967) conceptual framework,the families ofapproximately 4,100 14- to 18-year-olds wereclassified into oneof four groups (authoritative,authoritarian, indulgent, orneglectful) on the basis of the adolescents'ratings of theirparents on two dimensions.

5 Acceptance/involvement and youngsters were thencontrasted along four sots ofoutcomes: psychcsocial development,school achievement,internalized distress, and problem indicatethat adolescents raised inauthoritative homes score highest onmeasures of psychosocial competenceand lowest on measures ofpsychological and behavioral dysfunction; the reverseis true foradolescents raised in neglectful raised inauthoritarian homes score reasonably well on measuresindexingobedience and conformity to the standardsof adults but haverelatively poorer self-conceptions thanother , adolescents from indulgenthomes evidence a strongsense of self-confidence.

6 But report ahigher frequency ofsubstance abuse and school misconduct and areless engaged findings suggest that Maccoby andMartin's four-foldclassification scheme provides a workableempirical framework forthose interested in the study of , the results indicate the need todistinguish betweentwo types of "rermissive" families: those that areindulgent andthose that are Style and Adolescent Adjustment3 The literature on various socializationpractices and theireffects provides consistent evidence thatparental warmth,inductive discipline, nonpunitive punishmentpractices, andconsistency in child-rearing are each associatedwith positivedevelopmental outcomes in children (MAccoby &Martin, 1983).

7 Since the early 1970s, this constellation ofpractices has cometo be known as "authoritative" Parenting , one of severalprototypic styles of Parenting identified inthe seminal studiosof Diana Baumrind.(1967, 1971).Youngsters who are raised inauthoritative homes score higher than their peersfrom permissiveor authoritarian homes on awide variuty of measures ofcompetence, achievement, social development,self-esteem, andmental health (Maccoby & Martin, 1983).Although Baumrind'sframework has been used primarily to examinesocializationconsequences during early andmiddle childhood, several recentstudies have applied the scheme to explainvariations in patternsof Adolescent development, including academicachievement andpsychosocial development (Dornbusch et al.)

8 , 1987;Steinberg etal., 1989).The findings from these studies ofadolescentscorroborate findings from earlier age periods: youngpeoplebenefit most from authoritative Parenting , andleast fromauthoritarian and permissive all influential theories of socializationin thefamily since the work of Sears, Maccoby, andLevin (1957),including Baumrind's, emphasize the need toconsider the jo:mtand interactive effects of differentdimensions of parental4 Parenting Style and AdolescentAdjustment4behavior -- most often combining anindex of parental warmth,acceptance, or involvementwith an index of parental control orstrictness (Maccoby & Martin, 1983).

9 Yet, despite the widespreadacceptance of such interactive models,most empirical studiesconaucted to date on parentingpractices and Adolescent outcomescontinue, surprisingly, to focus onsingle dimensions of theparent-child this study, we examine theinteractiv effects of parental warmthand firm control onseveral aspects of specific emphasesdistinguish this study from previouswork in this , we have employed a four-fold typologyof parentingstyle consistent with the frameworkoutlined in Maccoby andMartin's (1983) authors point out thatexaminingthe combined effects of warmth anddemandingness yields fourtypes of families, rather than thethroe emphasized in mostdiscussions and empirical tests ofBaumrind's model ( ,Dornbusch et al.)

10 , 1987).Although most of these empiricalstudies distinguish between demandingfamilies that are highversus low in warmth ( ,authoritative versus authoritarianfamilies), many ignore variations in warmth amongfamiliescharacterized by low levels of control,grouping these familiestogether into a single categorylabeled "permissive".Unfortunately, the use of a single categoryfor all parentslow in demandingness mixes togethertwo types of families whohave very different reasons for theirlax the onehand are families whose low levelof demandingness derives Style and AdolescentAdjustment5an ideologicalorientation that has its foundationsin trust,democracy, and indulgence ( ,"indulgent permissiveness").