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

 

Jen Lumanlan  00:02

 

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,

 

Jenny  00:09

 

Do you get tired of hearing the same old intros to podcast episodes? I don’t really, but Jen thinks you might. I’m Jenny, a listener from Los Angeles. Testing out a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes. There’s no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn’t just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development but puts it in context for you as well. So, you can decide whether and how to use this new information. I listen because parenting can be scary and it’s reassuring to know what the experts think. If you’d like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 Reasons Your Child Isn’t Listening To You and what to do about each one. Sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe. You can also join the free Facebook group to continue the conversation. Over time, you might get sick of hearing me read this intro, so come and record one yourself. You can read from a script Jen provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com/recordtheintro. I can’t wait to hear yours.

 

Jen Lumanlan  01:33

 

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.

 

Jen Lumanlan  04:05

 

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.

 

Jen Lumanlan  07:02

 

The first thing I learned was that Dr. Baumrind actually never referred to them as parenting styles. In an early paper from 1966, back when there were only Permissive, Authoritarian, and Authoritative Styles and Neglectful hadn’t been added yet, she referred to them as “Three Models of Parental Control.” She went on to say the effects of punitiveness, which is punishment that is severe, unjust, ill-timed, and administered by an unloving parent, is probably harmful, as well as ineffective, but these “should not be confused with the effects on the child of particular forms of mild punishment, physical or otherwise.” So, not only does mild punishment not have negative effects, but it may have beneficial side effects, and she described these in academic language, so I’m going to translate them, and there are five beneficial side effects, and these are: firstly, after the “Emotional Release of Punishment,” which we have to assume is mostly only happening for the parent, both parent and child may be able to return to being affectionate with each other more quickly than they would if the child hadn’t been punished. Number two, “Any siblings who watch the misbehaving child getting punished are less likely to misbehave in that way themselves.” Number three, and I think this one might be my favorite, is “The child will copy the aggressive parent, which will result in positive assertive behavior with other people.” Number four, “The child won’t feel as much guilt because they misbehaved.” And number five, “The child will be able to endure punishment to achieve a goal.” I almost couldn’t believe my eyes when I read this list, so a child misbehaves and because the parent needs to release their frustration about what the child did, the parent should spank the child so they can go back to being affectionate again more quickly. I find it hard to believe the experience of a release of frustration through being hit but then makes them quickly feel affectionate again more quickly than they would have if they hadn’t been hit. I’m willing to believe that siblings watching the punishment are less likely to do the thing the punished child did, except if that activity really meets one of their needs, and they decide the value of meeting that need outweighs the negative of punishment. On the copying of the aggressive parent, pretty much every parent I worked with who has more than one child at some point, posts in our community about their wit’s end with their children fighting with each other, and what we typically see is when the parent hits the child, the child hits other people more, if they’re a really assertive child, then they might hit the parent, although usually, this power flows downhill. And I’m reminded of a cartoon I saw recently with four frames in it. In the first, a man is getting yelled at by his boss and then he goes home and yells at his wife, and the wife yells at the children, and the children torment the family hat. So children know that power shouldn’t flow uphill in a traditional hierarchical family, so they displace it to their other siblings or to the pet who can’t fight back. Honestly, the only “benefit” I see if there’s positive assertive behavior with others is it promotes White supremacy, this is parenting advice geared towards White parents who are preparing their children to take up their rightful role at the head of society, so they need to learn the people in power should be assertive and should punish those below them who step out of line.

Jen Lumanlan  10:06

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.

Jen Lumanlan  12:38

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.”

 

Jen Lumanlan  16:19

 

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.

Jen Lumanlan  20:42

So, if you train a rat to run a maze and you reward them every time, and then suddenly you stop the rewards – cold turkey, the rats pretty quickly stop running the maze, but if you sometimes reward that rat, and sometimes you don’t, the rat will keep running the maze in the vain hope that the treat is going to reappear, so we’re the experimenter in the scenario, and our child is the rat and our attention and nurturance and love is the reward, and because we have this power of them, Dr. Baumrind says that the child values the reward more, but surely what the child is really doing is desperately seeking nurturance in the hope that this time it will come, never being exactly sure whether it will. And this is such a hard position for a child to be in. If we’re struggling in a relationship we’re having with another person, we have so many options open to us, we can get help from other people, we can do lots of things to help us feel better. Our children don’t have any of these options. When they’re struggling, the only thing they want is our love and nurturance, and when we withhold those because their behavior isn’t good enough for us, we’re teaching them to become just like the rat in the maze, forever seeking that reward. Okay, so now we know a bit more about what makes up these parenting styles. Let’s take a look at them and how Dr. Baumrind uses them. In a very early paper written in 1966, Dr. Baumrind says that “a permissive parent is nonpunitive, accepting and affirmative towards the child,” she, of course, she’s a she – the mother consults with him, of course, he’s a him – the child about policy decisions and explains family rules. She doesn’t ask him to do household chores or behave in a certain way, she is a resource for him to use not an ideal for him to emulate or a person who’s responsible for shaping or altering his ongoing or future behavior, she tries to use reasonable manipulation but not overpower to achieve her goals. Next, she describes the authoritarian parent who tries to shape, control, and evaluate the behavior of the child according to certain standards, which often have religious origins. Obedience is a virtue and where the child’s behavior clashes with the mother’s standards, she forces him to comply with what she thinks is right conduct, the child’s autonomy is restricted, and he’s assigned chores so he learns to respect work. The child has to accept her word as gospel just as she accepts the word of those who have more authority than her. This approach is well aligned with doing the will of God and since self-will is an impediment to eternal happiness, the authoritarian parent is stern because she cares. The neglectful style hadn’t been conceived of yet in 1966. So, the final style at this point is Authoritative in which the parent attempts to direct the child’s activities in a rational, issue-oriented manner. She shares the reasons behind her policies and “solicits his objections when he refuses to conform,” although the paper doesn’t say what she does with those objections because elsewhere in her writing, Dr. Baumrind is pretty clear that a refusal to comply should be met with a show of force. The entire description of the Authoritative approach is filled with these contradictions. So, both autonomous self-will and discipline conformity are valued by the authoritative parent. She exerts firm control but doesn’t have the child in with restrictions. She enforces her own perspective as an adult but recognizes the child’s individual interests in special ways. Other researchers have also pointed out that knowing about parenting styles doesn’t actually tell you what to do in a given parenting situation, and knowing these contradictions makes this even more complicated. In 1966, these parenting styles were presented as hypothesis needing to be corrected by data but before we go forward into that evidence, I want to point out what’s baked into this best Authoritarian style. So, let’s look at the kinds of ideas we’re seeing in Dr. Baumrind’s writing. So, it’s pretty clear that the Authoritative parent is acting from a place of confidence and clarity in her role and in the characteristics, she wants to inspire, she’s disciplined, she’s capable, she’s assertive, and above all else, she is logical, and these are all characteristics that are traditionally associated with masculinity, and are thus perceived to be superior to characteristics that are associated with femininity, things like unconditional love, nurturing, tenderness, kindness, sensitivity, and allowing are all traits that are associated with femininity, and are thus considered weak and undesirable.

 

Jen Lumanlan  24:47

 

And I’m pretty fascinated by the idea that this Authoritative mother is supposed to embody these traits that are perceived to be deeply masculine in our culture to inspire similar traits in children, even the female children, Dr. Baumrind does note in the early papers, there isn’t enough data on how these different styles affect children of different genders, but overall, I’m surprised that the socialization of male and female children is so similar when in our culture, their roles are seen as being so different, with men being the protectors who should never show weakness or fear and women being responsible for everyone’s feelings. Given that Dr. Baumrind never addressed this and that she was working so tightly within the cultural framework of hierarchical power and spanking, I think it’s unlikely, she’s proposing this framework as a barrier-breaking one so I really don’t know entirely how to make sense of it. In a 1967 paper, she does say that girls who were achievement-oriented needed to be less easily managed by adults compared to other girls. She hypothesized that independence is more difficult for girls to achieve than for boys and doing this requires a certain amount of rejection of peer and adult influence. And this is delivered without a hint of irony. She’s essentially saying that girls who want to be independent need to push back against the very parental control for which she is advocating in her authoritative parenting approach. Perhaps the key distinction is that we’re not socializing children so much about what they should do, but about what they should expect from people in a position of authority, and what characteristics they are allowed to use in responding. They are to expect power assertion and are to respond to reason with reason, and by recognizing the superior person’s authority, of course, what we’re really doing when we privilege these traditionally masculine qualities is upholding patriarchy. If you want to do a deep dive on this, you might want to listen to the two episodes I recorded with listener Brian Stout, where we interviewed Dr. Carol Gilligan, who’s written about patriarchy for decades, but the short version is that in patriarchy, we arbitrarily divide qualities we all have in us, and associate some of these with masculinity, like the logic and power, and capability that we discussed, and others with femininity like tenderness and nurturance, and acceptance, and we make the masculine more desirable, and even as we punish each other for not playing within the boundaries of our gender roles. Patriarchy is also about where power lies. In Dr. Baumrind’s papers, it’s pretty clear that the parent holds and uses power over the children, and that by absenting himself from childcare, the father in the family shows this role as beneath him. The mother’s role is to care for and discipline the child, and the father’s role is to care for by earning money and discipline the mother. Patriarchal roles are thus reinforced through this parenting approach, and of course, the other thing we’ve already mentioned that is enforced is White supremacy. Tema Okun, wrote a now famous paper on How White Supremacy Culture Shows Up in Organizations, and a blogger called, Amanda Gross translated these concepts into ways that it also shows up in families. She starts out with a drawing of the iceberg of culture, on the top of the iceberg is the parts of culture we can see, we’re aware of, we think about them, things like art, literature, drama, music, dancing, games, and cooking, and then the other 90% of the iceberg, the ways we transmit culture, happen underneath the water, and primarily outside of our awareness, things like the ideas about child raising, patterns of superior and subordinate relations, incentives to work, attitudes toward dependent people, approaches to problem-solving, logic and validity, and so on. So how we approach these ideas, and others like them determines the kind of culture we want to pass along. And how do we approach these ideas as an Authoritarian parent? Well, Amanda Gross offers 13 practices so I’m just going to review the most relevant ones here, and so, these specifically are practices that transmit White supremacy culture, and I’m relating these to Authoritarian parenting.

 

Jen Lumanlan  28:30

 

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.

 

Jen Lumanlan  30:17

 

In a much later 1996 paper, Dr. Baumrind outlines what she sees are the two intertwined goals of child rearing, which are to foster moral character and optimal competence. She says that character “refers to the aspect of personality that engenders accountability is responsible for persistence in the face of obstacles, and inhibits impulses in the service of some more remote or other-oriented goal,” and I see the Protestant work ethic embedded in every part of that description. We’re accountable to our superiors and to God, and we are to persist even when things get difficult without examining why things are difficult. This is why women are taught if we’re struggling with being a parent, the problem is ours and we should overcome these obstacles rather than seeing the problem as being one of lack of social support, and why poor Black and Brown children are taught to have grit and growth mindset so they can overcome their difficult social conditions because it’s cheaper and easier to do this than to actually address poverty that’s causing the obstacles that they need to overcome in the first place. And of course, we should learn to inhibit our feelings and needs today in service of future growth or because another person with more power wants us to do something. And then by optimal competence, Baumrind means ‘finding a balance of what she calls agentic and communal qualities’ – meaning a balance of communing with others and dominance and power for oneself. When she writes a communion, she sees that showing up in young children is empathetic, kind, helpful behavior with peers and obedient, trustworthy interactions with adults, which as a child matures are transformed into self-regulated participation in adult-initiated activities. In other words, “Do what the grownups tell you, and make sure you’re well-liked by others as well.” She doesn’t say as much about the agentic qualities except that we need to have agency in our lives, which is the sense that we have some say over the outcomes of our lives, but unfortunately, she doesn’t say how children develop this agency when their parents are forcing them to comply with the parent’s wishes on such a regular basis. I think it’s also important to consider the historical timeframe that Dr. Baumrind was working in. She received her BA in Psychology and Philosophy in 1948, just after the end of World War II, around the same time that Dr. John Bowlby was developing his theories on attachment which place the woman’s role firmly in the home, taking care of the infant. And of course, you can see attachment within Dr. Baumrind’s broader idea of warmth, which again is something the mother provides to the child. Dr. Baumrind was a Research Psychologist at the Institute of Human Development at UC Berkeley actually just down the road for me from 1960 to 2018, and she actually died at age 91 in 2018 after the car she was riding in was hit, and a head-on collision on a road that I drive on regularly. So, she began her research career in the 1960s, which was a time of huge change in families in the US. Young people are watching their family and friends get drafted into the Vietnam War and were questioning traditional society and the government. While in 1960s, 70% of families had a male breadwinner and a female stay-at-home parent. By the mid to late 1960s, more women were reentering the workforce after they’d been forced back home for a while after the end of the war. Betty Friedan published, “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963, which chronicled the lives of women who were unhappy and unfulfilled in their traditional roles and encouraged women to seek more. As women entered the workforce, they demanded their husbands help them more with housework and childcare, and into this rapidly changing climate walks Dr. Diana Baumrind, with her parenting styles hypothesis, almost like a steadying hand on the rudder of the ship that was threatening to escape command, and do something wild like demand equality with men to say that a woman’s role but not a man’s role, most certainly was in the home performing child care, and in that performance, her job was not to allow the ship to escape command, but to feel the firmness of her husband’s direction to her, and to impart that firmness to her child through directives about how the child’s behavior must meet her wishes helped along with the side of warmth to make the medicine go down.

 

Jen Lumanlan  35:05

 

What I see in Dr. Baumrind’s theory and research on parenting styles, is that she envisions either the mother being in charge in the authoritative or the authoritarian models, or the child being in charge in the permissive or neglectful models with no possibility for a middle ground, so either the child’s day-to-day activities are structured by rules in many areas of his life, such as TV, bedtime, and food, or the child’s day to day activities vary widely, and the child has wide latitude in setting his own regimen, and parents adjust their own expectations about how bedtime, menu, and TV viewing, fit with the child’s interests and moods. Parents train the child to behave independently or parents permit dependent clinging which seems to have been written with more than a touch of disapproval. Parents enforced directives and don’t give in when the child causes a commotion or parents cannot enforce the directives and the child is openly disobedient or disrespectful. There’s no middle ground here at all, and what I’m proposing that we do instead is to find exactly that middle ground. Dr. Baumrind actually almost arrived at this conclusion herself in a 1970 paper when she studied middle-class White families in Berkeley, tucked away at the very end of a 103-page paper right before the references she said, “A new kind of parent was observed and referred to as harmonious, these parents were non-conforming provided a very enriched environment and encouraged independence. Harmonious families had one identifying characteristic in common, the observers assigned to study these eight families would not rate the family on the items measuring firm enforcement. In each case, the observer felt that any rating on these items would be misleading since the family was characterized by having control, i.e. The child seemed to intuit what the parent wanted and to do it but not by exercising control, i.e. The parent almost never directed or commanded the child. While permissive parents avoided exercising control but were angry about not having control, and authoritarian and authoritative parents exercise control willingly, harmonious parents seemed neither to exercise control nor to avoid the exercise of control, instead, they focused on achieving equality of harmony in the home, and upon developing principles for resolving differences and for right living. Harmonious parents were equalitarian and that they recognize differences based on knowledge and personality, and try to create an environment in which all family members could operate from the same vantage point, one in which they recognize differences in power and did not put the child at disadvantage. In the hierarchy of values, honesty, harmony, justice, rationality, and human relations took precedence over power, achievement, control, and order. Many of these families were preparing themselves for communal living, and indeed, the qualities developed by harmonious families seemed ideally suited for some type of extended family organization.” So, she went ahead and published a short paper in that same year describing these families in more detail and attempting to draw some statistical conclusions about them which was rather difficult given that there were only eight families. These were of higher socio-economic status than a generally already advantaged sample, and the children had a higher average IQ than the already high average of the overall sample, which was high because Dr. Baumrind excluded families with children of a low IQ and she defined that as 95, which is still well within what research is considered to be an average IQ. The six girls in this tiny sample were achievement-oriented and friendly while the two boys were cooperative but were “notably submissive, aimless and not achievement-oriented and dependent. The harmonious pattern of child rearing seemed to produce an effeminate orientation in boys if one can say much about two cases, while the effect in girls was entirely positive. In girls’ high achievement and independence resulted without loss of a feminine i.e., cooperative and tractable disposition.” Tractable isn’t a word that’s used much anymore, so I looked it up to be sure of the meaning and it means easily controlled or managed, governable. So, I don’t think you can really say much about the effect of the harmonious type of parenting on boys from the two cases described.

 

Jen Lumanlan  38:30

 

And it was interesting to see an excerpt of an interview with a parent of a girl called, Nina in a study whose parent was classified as using the harmonious approach who seemed very much intractable. She had her own ideas about how to do things, she doesn’t follow others, and she isn’t really moldable at all. When the interviewer said, “Do you reason with Nina? Clearly, meaning – “Do you convince Nina of your superior logic and reasoning?” The parent responded, “Oh, yeah, she tries to reason with me too, from her point of view. When I consider it reasonable, I’ll throw at her. We just had a big discussion of reason the other day. Reason. I never thought about it as much as the other night.” It’s a very charged word also, it only means the person who’s saying it thinks it’s fair or “reasonable,” but it doesn’t mean that in some huge overall sense, it’s just or anything, as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t mean that at all. So, the parent calls out the interviewer’s misuse of the term reason and substitutes her own analysis of the term which is apparently discussed with her daughter, now, this is a parenting style I want to learn more about. The fathers in these families also scored low on the rating of authoritarianism, which perhaps reduces the power differentials in the rest of the family as well. Dr. Catherine Lewis at Stanford wrote a paper in 1981, called, “The Effects of Parental Firm Control A Reinterpretation of Findings,” where she attempts to look at the research on parental control through the lens of attribution theory, which distinguishes between compliance, so adapting one’s actions to conform to another person’s wishes, and internalization, which means incorporating those values as if they were your own. She contends we should be doing research on how a parent-child system develops in which both parent and child simultaneously feel in control. This is getting tantalizingly close to how I look like to look at these situations, which is not that we want both people to be in control, which I actually don’t think is possible, but that we want both people’s needs to match, but let’s set that aside for just a moment while we look at internalizing values. And a rebuttal to Dr. Lewis’s paper two years later in 1983, Dr. Baumrind says that “In naturally occurring control sequences, parents frequently have as their objective mere behavioral compliance, and not internalization of the norm consistent with such compliance. In fact, it is not at all self-evident what norm would be congruent with an act of compliance and whether or not parents intend their children to internalize that norm. The methods parents use to teach values are not necessarily the methods they will select when their intention is merely to constrain behavior.” And here I think Dr. Baumrind has misunderstood how children learn about values. While we might think we’re teaching our children about our values when we tell them what’s important to us, we’re also communicating with them when we allow and prohibit their behaviors, so if our values are so unrelated to the things we allow and prohibit in our children, that our children can’t even tell us what our values are, then we’re sending some seriously mixed messages. When we’re exerting control over our children’s behavior, they learn that people who are bigger and stronger than them have power over them to make them do things they don’t want to do, that’s the lesson they take out into the world, not our fancy speeches about how we’re all equal, now. When we make our approval contingent on their behavior they learn to modify their behavior to seek our approval, despite our speeches about how they can do anything they want. We see the effects of this out in the world today, the mostly White ruling class uses power often in the form of money to get everybody else to do what they want.

 

Jen Lumanlan  42:35

 

And the parents who show up in my memberships and courses report feeling deeply wounded by not being truly seen and accepted for who they were by their parents, and that this chasing of external approval has hampered their lives in so many ways. This misunderstanding of how children internalize values perhaps shows how Dr. Baumrind can promote a theory that promotes so much control over children’s behavior because she thinks they aren’t internalizing this as a value. Dr. Baumrind disagrees with the attribution theorists who say we should use the minimal amount of control possible to change a child’s behavior and says we need to use strong overt control to change the child’s behavior, as long as we don’t use severe physical punishment and verbal hostility, then we’re all good. In a much later 2013 paper, she uses some circular logic to justify this position, she says, “In a democratic society, hierarchical distribution of power tends to be viewed pejoratively, however, a derogatory view of high-power assertion by parents in parent-child interactions is not justified, because authoritative parenting that is consensually considered optimal as highly power assertive as authoritarian parenting.” But who has considered this consensually optimal? There are no sources cited for this and she uses passive language to avoid saying who considered this method optimal. My guess is it isn’t the child who’s consented, so maybe it’s all the other researchers who are also invested in protecting the status of adults over children as well. She says, “Lacks control fails to provide sufficient structure and aversive consequences needed to determine misbehavior.” It’s all about the behavior for her when our child’s behavior meets our needs and all is well. We’re back to those core tenets of White supremacy, again, with keeping people in line being our primary goal. How I approached this literature chronologically, I was surprised to find so many studies of young children and no longitudinal studies of how children raised using these methods turned out, then finally in 2010, Dr. Baumrind worked with Dr. Robert Larzelere and another colleague to assess how the children she looked at in some of her original studies in the 1960s turned out, and again, if that name of Dr. Larzelere sounds familiar, it’s because you heard it earlier in the episode as well as in the episode on spanking, so he, along with Dr. Baumrind, has been the most outspoken defenders of spanking that I’ve seen in the literature and it seems like a big purpose of the paper was to see whether authoritative parenting that includes spanking is harmful to children, and perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised they concluded it wasn’t but that’s not our focus here. For some reason, the authors decided to introduce new categories of parenting approaches that weren’t studied in the 1960s, and they now distinguish between authoritative highly responsive, and moderately demanding directive which is highly demanding and moderately responsive, of course, the authoritative parenting style was again seen as superior, followed by a directive, democratic, and other categories and groupings of categories, but what was most striking to me was two things. Firstly, the children of authoritative parents did not have better outcomes than the other children related to externalizing problems, which is what psychologists call acting out, which is kind of surprising since preventing acting out is usually a primary parenting goal, despite the fact that acting out is usually the child’s expression of a need, they haven’t been able to get anyone to hear in any other way. And the second thing is these grand conclusions were drawn from a tiny sample, just 87 children were contacted, and only six of these were raised in authoritative families. So, we’re to judge the success of authoritative parenting as a concept based on six, two-parent, White, upper-middle-class families with children who have a high average or above average IQ, who lived in Berkeley, California in the 1960s and could be contacted again 10 to 12 years later.

 

Jen Lumanlan  46:19

 

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.

 

Jen Lumanlan  49:46

 

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.

 

Jenny  52:17

 

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.