154: Authoritative isn’t the best Parenting “Style”

Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so,

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Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Before we get started, I wanted to mention that I'm reopening my Setting, Loving, and Effective Limits Workshop today. So, if you struggle to set limits on your child's behavior or if you set limits and your child disregards them, I'd encourage you to hop on in and sign up for the workshop because it's completely free. And for the first time, we have two ways to take it. You can do the Guided Path, where we walk you through it step-by-step starting in a few weeks, or you can do the Flex Path option, where you can get all the content as fast as you can complete the work if you just need the information now. So, to find out more about the totally free Setting, Loving, and Effective Limits Workshop and to sign up, go to YourParentingMojo.com/settinglimits. So today, we're going to talk about a topic I have been absolutely itching to dive into for months now, ever since I researched the episode on spanking with Dr. Andrew Grogan-Kaylor. So, you might well be familiar with the four parenting styles that were developed by Dr. Diana Baumrind, and you can imagine them on a two-by-two grid with the amount of parental control along the X axis, and the amount of parental warmth and responsiveness on the Y axis, so down in the lower left corner with Low Control and Low Warmth is Uninvolved Parenting, where parents don't ask a lot and they also don't give the child a lot either. In the upper left is Low Control but High Warmth, which Dr. Baumrind called Permissive Parenting. The lower right corner of High Control and Low Warmth is where we often find ourselves, sometimes even when we don't mean to be, which is “Authoritarian Parenting,” and I will add that setting limits puts us there pretty often. And in the upper right corner of High Control and also High Warmth is the supposed Holy Grail of Parenting, the “Authoritative Parenting Style,” and I do wish those names were more different, because I get them confused all the time and I'm going to try not to do that in this episode. Dr. Nancy Darling says that, "A parenting style is a constellation of attitudes toward the child that are communicated to the child, and create an emotional climate in which the parents' behaviors are expressed. Parenting style is expressed through parenting practices," although Dr. Baumrind's work really focuses mostly on the styles and doesn't talk so much about how these translate into things, parents actually do the practices so her parenting styles are pretty much-considered gospel in the parenting world. I've seen them cited everywhere, from popular books to her reviewed research, and never with any criticism It's just these are the parenting styles, and authoritative is the best one. And I will fully admit that I have done that too.

But while I was researching that episode on spanking, I came across a little nugget of a comment in a paper, and the comment was that, “On average, authoritative parents spank just as much as the average of all other parents. Undoubtedly, some parents can be authoritative without using spanking, but we have no evidence that all or even most parents can achieve authoritative parenting without an occasional spank.” And who are the authors of this paper? None other than Dr. Robert Larzelere, who has defended spanking far and wide for years with the co-author of Dr. Diana Baumrind of The Parenting Styles, so what the person who created these parenting styles is saying that the very best parenting style that results in the very best outcomes for children has ‘spanking’ as an integral component. Yes, you might be able to achieve this best parenting style without spanking, but goodness knows we severely doubt it. You really have to read the rest of the paper to believe it. If you want to find it, it's linked in the references and it's called Our Spanking Injunction Scientifically Supported, the author set out to show that spanking and junctions are not scientifically supported largely because both spanking and timeouts are shown to modify a child's behavior effectively. You might recall from the episode on Spanking that we discussed how a quirk in timing means is actually research by Dr. Mark Roberts at Idaho State University showing a cause-and-effect relationship between spanking and children's improved behavior that supports the use of spanking. This kind of research used to be allowed by university ethics committees and that study got in under the wire, and then the ethics committees started prohibiting research that involves beating children, so there can never be any research disproving this causal relationship. But the real kicker here is that the reason that Dr. Larzelere and Dr. Baumrind say ‘we should keep spanking’ is that parents benefit from having disciplinary options. They say that timeout is effective when it's practiced in the lab in a four-foot by five-foot empty room with a four-foot-high plywood barrier, as was used in Dr. Roberts's clinic and we just don't know if timeout is as effective as spanking in any other setting, so if families don't happen to have an isolation room with a four-foot-high plywood barrier, then they should spank their children if they need to because no other disciplinary method has been shown to be as effective. They go on to justify Dr. Roberts's use of a mean of 8.6 spankings before the child stays in timeout in one study, which they say, "Shows the difficulty of getting cooperation with timeout from clinically defiant young children who have learned to undermine all parental control attempts." These authors want to teach parents "how to punish more effectively," which means spanking their children if the child won't stay in timeout so the child will stay in timeout and the parent won't need to "escalate the severity of their verbal or physical punishment.” Of course, as soon as I learned this, I wanted to dig into these parenting styles and find out whether they are really something that should still be bandied about without questioning them.

So that's what I read about Dr. Baumrind's stance on punishment that peak my interest because I had no idea that the person who developed the parenting style that everyone, including myself, accepts pretty much unquestionably as the superior one was not just developed by someone who believes spanking is good for children, but has said that while some authoritative parents may be able to achieve this best method without spanking, the vast majority will not. Spanking children is thus central to achieving the so-called best parenting style, something I had never realized in all of the years I've spent researching child development. So, of course, as soon as I read this, I wanted to dive deeper, so, Dr. Baumrind has only written three books as far as I can tell. One of these was on research methodology and other I couldn't find anywhere, but the third is called child maltreatment and optimal caregiving and social context, which is a longish position paper commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences, Study Panel on Child Abuse and Neglect with a goal of "applying what we know about normative family functioning to the circumstances of abusive and neglectful families". The book contains a summary of the parenting styles and how these apply to different populations and I'll just briefly address that different populations piece, so Dr. Baumrind actually comes right out and says something that I've gathered to be true from the research I've read over the many years, which is that "by studying healthy, affluent, middle-class samples, thus eliminating the pre potent effects of prejudice, poverty and chronic illness on children, the influence of variations in normal child-rearing styles on child outcomes can be identified.” And what she's saying here is that when we study middle-class White children who don't face a lot of stressors, we'll know how children should optimally develop, and then if we can just get everybody else to raise their children that way, then all children will grow up to have the advantages that middle class White children have. And this assumes, of course, that the way middle class White children develop right now is optimal, and as many of the parents I work with are middle class White parents, and I'm one too, I think it's safe to say that middle-class White parenting has left it scars on us, so to hold it up as the paragon of how to parent is a bit mistaken in my view. So now let's take a look at what makes up these parenting styles, Dr. Baumrind says that "data obtained from normal families usually focus on facets of responsiveness, meaning warmth, reciprocity, and attachment and demandingness, meaning firm control, monitoring positive and negative reinforcement,” and then she cites both early and current studies in support of this idea so let's look at each both responsiveness and demandingness individually.

Dr. Baumrind says that "warmth refers to the parents’ emotional expression of love that motivates high investment parenting and brings about cohesive family relationships". Babies anticipate how their caregiver is likely to respond to their behavior, and they try to get the caregiver to adjust their plans to take the baby's needs into account, which the caregiver is often willing to do if they have empathy with and experience warmth toward the baby. This give and take based on willing compliance is characteristic of authoritative families and is based on mutual good feelings, rather than a tip for that exchange. There's also some discussion of the links between warmth and attachment and it seems as though attachment sits within the concept of warmth, although there hasn't been much actual research to connect these two ideas. Dr. Baumrind specifically notes though, that "effective warmth does not imply unconditional acceptance. A warm and loving parent may also be affirmed, disciplinarian.” Based on her research findings that unconditional approval was not associated with competence in preschool children, and that passive acceptance and overprotective parental practices were associated with dependence, and also other indecisive of low competence. So, what she's saying here is specifically the unconditional acceptance of the child is not required to use this best style of parenting - the authoritative style, and in fact, the real danger here is being so accepting that we make our child dependent on us and incompetent in other ways as well. Let's leave that little gem there for a bit while we go and look at demandingness. "Demanding parents directly confront rather than attempt to subtly manipulate their children and thus, may invite open conflict with their children at points of disagreement. They supervise and monitor their children's activities and have high aspirations for them.” So demandingness is supposed to be better than the alternative of coercion because demandingness tries to focus the child's attention on the act that needs to be corrected instead of on the parent’s power, Dr. Baumrind thinks that a child who is coerced will be annoyed and so will disobey when the coercive parent isn't there. Confrontation is a central component of demandingness and is associated with pro-social behavior as long as parents are supportive, non-punitive, authentic, meaning they don't try to disguise, inconsiderate, and demeaning remarks to children as friendly confrontation, and sensitive meaning they take into account the extent to which a child is able to handle confrontation without being overstimulated, and normally resilient hearty child will be pleasantly stimulated were told by high emotional expressivity, whereas an introverted vulnerable child will be disrupted by this confrontation, Dr. Baumrind says that this direct confrontation about their misdeeds "using both reason and power to persuade them to comply with parents’ wishes is preferable to covert techniques of control in many circumstances," and there are five reasons for this. First, an explicit forceful directive to do something like share a toy has been shown to increase the likelihood that young children will continue to share after instructions and surveillance are discontinued. Second, children are often destructive when frustrated or selfishly motivated, and loving parents can discourage this undesirable behavior by modeling kindness and "contingently reinforcing children's spontaneous acts of equity and compassion". In other words, rewarding them for being kind to other people. Thirdly, "some show of force" is often necessary for the voice of reason to be noticed. Parents who habitually use reason without power after the child initially refuses to comply, signal to the child, they are indecisive about requiring compliance.”

So, parents are assumed to be the reasonable people in this relationship and they just need to get their unreasonable children to see this reason, and then their children will of course agree that the parents’ wish should be respected. It's almost assumed the child will refuse to comply on the first request, and the idea of the parent modifying their request or deciding their request was unreasonable is simply impossible, but we parents aren't always reasonable and rational. In fact, we very often get caught up in all kinds of unreasonableness, we make an arbitrary decision about the way we've always done things or the way we want them to be done is the right way, and it's our job to get our child to see that to be reasonable. And I work with parents all the time who say they ask the child to do something, the child refuses and the parent sees themselves becoming more and more unreasonable. The more the child refuses the more the parent digs their heels in and says, this must be done this way, you must do this thing when in reality, there's no real reason for it. We do this because we don't know how to identify our real needs and we assume that getting our child to comply with our demands will help us to meet our needs, when actually there are many other ways of getting those needs met. We'll come back to the idea at the end of the episode. In another paper, Dr. Baumrind says that "direct confrontation and power assertive discipline is non-manipulative and when use with reasoning is intended to control the child's behavior by encouraging the child to evaluate the rightness of the demands of adult authorities.” But she's not using this term evaluate in its traditional sense where the child is to ask whether the demand is reasonable but rather to imply that there can only be one conclusion from this evaluation. Wishes that the parent’s demand is right and thus, it's the child's behavior that must change. One of the ways we can get them to do this evaluation is to spank them which is in their best interest because if we want to be able to relax the discipline in the teenage years, Dr. Bowman says, “We need to establish firm habits of good behavior when they're young,” power assertive disciplinary methods are generally required to accomplish that end.” Now among the parents I work with, they're tend to be two kinds, those who excelled in school maybe because they love learning but most likely because they just didn't think about it too much and they did what they were told to do, and those are the folks we would say, succeeded by Dr. Baumrind standards, and then the other kind are the ones who went off the rails in the teenage years and got into all kinds of trouble in rebellion to their parents over strict discipline. And the thing is, neither of these groups of people are very happy, even the ones who toe the line recognize the enormous price that they paid for this. They're terrified of sharing their ideas and of being judged in the world and if actually letting anyone truly know them because everyone has judged them by their behavior, rather than understanding who they really are as people starting with their own parents. So, coming back to the five reasons why direct confrontation is preferable to covert confrontation, the fourth reason is that "children who are not made aware clearly that behavioral compliance is required do not learn that they are expected to internalize a norm requiring obedience to legitimate authority. Middle school-aged children seek information to discern whether they are being good or bad when parents articulate explicit norms and then reinforce an act the child is already performing, the child's identity as a good child is confirmed.” Now we could probably spend an entire episode on this point and maybe I will sometimes but for now, I just like to point out how damaging this approach can be. When the parent is judging the child's behavior, they're putting themselves in a position of power over the child and saying, “I don't care about your autonomy and your authenticity and what's true for you, the only thing I care about is your behavior. When that meets my needs, I will say you are a good child, and then you'll know you're good because my judgment is what should count in your eyes.” Now there have been a generation of us race using this approach. I think we can say how much it hurt us. We wanted to be truly known and understood by our parents, and instead, what we got was “I'll love you when you do what I say,” related to this, the fifth point is that "If a child clearly recognizes that the parent has the power to dispense and mediate rewards and punishments, the value to the child of receiving nurturance from that parent is enhanced," and this goes right to the heart of a classic, intimate and reward schedule that has been studied extensively by behaviorists.

So, perfectionism, we point out how a person or their work actions, or behaviors are inadequate. Mistakes aren't seen as growth and learning opportunities. Positive behaviors, like complying with an authority figure are considered to be normative and unspoken, a critical component of authoritative parenting. Number two, either or thinking - something is either good or bad with us, or against us, so a child's behavior is compliant or isn't, and people who don't comply are excluded, which leads them to hide parts of themselves that are perceived to be unacceptable to people in positions of authority to prioritize their need for safety and belonging. Number three, the right to comfort - those in power have a right to emotional and psychological comfort, often at the expense of marginalized family members’ discomfort, and those who cause discomfort are scapegoated as the problem. So, if a child's behavior threatens a parent's comfort, it's the child's behavior that needs to change and not the parent. It's assumed that if there's harmony in the family, then all is well and nobody looks to see whether the harmony is only present because everyone knows not to rock the boat. Number four is defensiveness - so this prioritizes protecting current power dynamics rather than facilitating the best, most authentic relationships. Criticism of those with power are inappropriate and threatening and their feelings are to be protected, and I'm thinking of all those families where the mother is responsible for maintaining the emotional climate of the home to protect the father from the inconvenience of having his authority challenged. Parents mete out punishments when the child gets caught doing something wrong, rather than looking at the harm that was done, how to repair it, self-accountability, opportunities for an apology, and sincere acceptance of the apology. Number five is objectivity - which is the idea there is such a thing as an objective view of a situation, and that we hold it and that our child doesn't, and any feelings that come up about that situation are disruptive, irrational, and shouldn't be part of how we make our decisions. We don't develop or even need to develop an understanding of emotional intelligence, instead, we should use Rational linear thinking to arrive at logical conclusions. Number six – is a sense of urgency, meaning it's difficult to take the time to engage in thoughtful decision-making. The focus is on getting the task done, rather than authentic relationships we develop through doing the task and we're impatient with people like children who often don't fit into the prescribed timeframes. We have a hard time considering multiple viewpoints and we must find a solution or resolution to a problem immediately. So I think there are seven more of these ideas but I think you catch the drift which is that authoritative parenting is deeply embedded within White supremacy, because parenting practices are one of the key ways that we pass on our culture to our children, by using authoritative parenting practices, we are passing the baton of White supremacy culture to our children.

There's a good deal of evidence coming out of universities in Spain, indicating that children there actually have better outcomes with permissive parenting rather than authoritative parenting, so there's likely a good deal of cultural variation here as well. Honestly, I think the whole idea of parenting styles is not very useful to us, it ultimately answers the question, “How should the average White upper-middle-class parent interact with the average White middle-class child to ensure the child's best possible outcome in a White supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society?” (This last part is assumed of course). When the question we're actually asking is, “How should I, Jen, parent this child, Carys, to bring about good outcomes for both of us both in her own life as well as our relationship together, as well as for other children in our local and global communities.” There's good evidence that authoritative parents produce competent children within these existing White supremacist patriarchal systems, which are based on finite resources and the need to get your share in case someone else gets it first, doing well in school so you can take up your place in a capitalist society without expressing the idea there might be any problems with that society, either by taking on those problems internally through depression or expressing them externally by acting out, not going to university not getting a good job. And we should say that we don't really know how or why this happens, we don't know if it's the demandingness that does it or the relative willingness to at least hear the child's ideas compared to the authoritarian approach or something else. But what if we don't hold this goal of succeeding within White supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist systems? Then is authoritative parenting still our best approach? My hypothesis is no. Another big problem that we've alluded to here in this episode is that parenting styles don't actually tell us what to do in the day-to-day interactions we have with our children. Dr. Nancy Darling and a paper reviewing Dr. Baumrind's research says, "One authoritative parent might have a policy stating homework must be finished before the child engages in any other activity, whereas another might require outdoor exercise before homework is tackled." What's clear here is that either parent might hear her child's objections to the homework or to the outdoor exercise, but the homework’s going to get done. The hearing of objections doesn't result in any actual change in the policies. The authoritative parent might not believe she's infallible as the authoritarian parent would, but she still acts as if she is. Dr. Greenspan goes on to describe a three-factor model of parenting that contains effective referring to feelings, behavioral and cognitive, referring to thoughts elements. I think this model has useful elements too, but I don't want to spend too much time on it because I still don't think it gets to the heart of where I want to go with it. As an example, Dr. Greenspan says that by using this model, a child who punches his brother should be told, "Brothers are not for hitting; we don't allow punching in this house. If you want to let your brother know how you feel, tell him in words, or go and punch that doll over there and make believe it's your brother.” And so these last two ideas taken together and compass the problems I see in every parenting model I've encountered so far. Firstly, there's the idea that even though parents know we don't know everything, we still have to act like we do, but what if that wasn't the case? What if we could admit to our children, we don't know everything all the time? And what if rather than saying what we ‘do’ and ‘don't allow’ and spending all of our time trying to prevent the behaviors we don't want to see, we were to instead try to understand why the child is doing those things that drive us up the wall and meet those needs, so we don't have to stop them from doing these things all the time, and can instead be in a relationship where both people's needs are met.

These parenting models don't acknowledge that people have needs at all. They just assume that when a child is prevented from acting out by directing them not to do it, or by punishing them for doing it that the parents’ need will be met. But do we really have a need for compliance? Doesn't that go against the goal that many of us have to raise children who will stand up for what they believe is right? And what about the child's needs? Why is the child in Dr. Greenspan's example hitting his brother? Dr. Greenspan, Dr. Baumrind, and pretty much all the other psychologists don't really care. In their view, as long as the child isn't hitting their brother, there's no problem. Whether that's because they listened when their parent told them not to do it, or they finally listened when they were punished. I’m envisioning a parent spanking a child saying, "Don't spank, hit spank, your spank, brother spank," or because they were given a doll to hit instead, but the idea of why the child is hitting in the first place is irrelevant to these people, but to me, this is one of the most important pieces of information we could have. When we know why the child is hitting their brother, then we can help them with that. Perhaps they feel as though they're not getting enough of our time and attention and they know that hitting their sibling is a surefire way of getting us to engage. They wish they didn't have to have our negative attention, but they'll take it over no attention at all, perhaps their sibling was winding them up at breakfast and throughout the day, and this was the last straw and we should have stepped in hours ago to help them, perhaps they feel as though their sibling is your favorite, and they don't feel seen and heard for who they really are, and they don't know how to express that to you or if they did, they know you'd brush them off and say, “Oh, but you love your brother really.” Whether we tell the child not to misbehave, punish them for misbehaving, or give them another outlet without understanding why they're doing this, we're missing an opportunity not just to help them not hit their sibling today, but to show them we do on or stand them, we do accept them for who they are, and then they don't feel the compulsion to hit their sibling. And then lo and behold, we see that our need was not for compliance after all, but for peace and ease in our home, and we get that too. When we have this kind of relationship with our child punishment becomes irrelevant. I'm actually going to go out on a limb here and say, “I've never punished my daughter, I've never taken away screentime or toys, or sent her to a room, or spanked her, I've never needed to.” When she does something that doesn't meet my needs, I tell her that, and we work together to find a way that meets both of our needs, and when I do something that doesn't meet her needs, we do the same. And when my husband or I sometimes lose touch with how to do this and we raise our voices with her, we work on reregulating ourselves, and then we say something like, “Daddy and I didn't learn how to do this when we were children. When we were growing up, it wasn't okay for us to do what you just did and we would have been punished. We want to do things differently with you. But sometimes it's hard to change the way you've been thinking for so long. Can you tell me what was going on for you when you did whatever it was I didn't want her to do?” And then we're able to meet my real needs, which are never really about compliance, but all about peace and ease and harmony, and her needs, which are often about autonomy and being truly seen and known as a person, and then there's no punishment required. If all of this sounds impossible right now, then I really encourage you to join the Setting Loving and Effective Limits workshop. In the workshop, I will teach you how to set limits effectively, but the good news is that it actually isn't very difficult, which means we have lots of time to go beyond setting limits, as well as punishments and rewards, to seeing how to have a relationship with our child where we just don't need to set as many limits as we think we do, right now. As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, we're trying a new approach with the workshop this year, which is that we have two paths you can take with it the Guided path and the Flex path. So if you choose the guided path, and we'll be in touch the week of May 1st, with some pre-work and the core material will be rolled out to you one email per day, between May 9th and 13th. If you choose Flex path, then you get to decide how fast we send you the content, as soon as you complete one activity you can move on to the next, either way, there's also an option to upgrade to get group coaching calls with me each day between May 9th and 13th, if you see the promise in this work, and you know you need more help to make it happen. So, to learn more about the free setting loving and effective limits workshop, just go to YourParentingMojo.com/settinglimits, and there's also a link to the workshop along with all the references for today's episode at YourParentingMojo.com/parentingstyles.

Hi, this is Jenny from Los Angeles. We know that you have a lot of choices about where you get information about parenting, and we're honored that you've chosen us as we move toward a world in which everyone's lives and contributions are valued. If you'd like to help keep the show ad free, please consider making a donation on the episode page that Jen just mentioned. Thanks again for listening to this episode of The Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Don't forget to head to YourParentingMojo.com/Record TheIntro to record your own messages for the show.