Which parenting characteristic is more prevalent among ethnic minority families?

4.6.4 Permissive Parenting

Permissive parenting (also called indulgent or laissez-faire parenting) typically allows children a great deal of freedom to behave as they see fit. This type of parenting is often measured based on parental reports, but in at least one case it was measured using the reports provided by young adults in a college student sample (Schaffer et al. 2009). Table 4.6.4 shows that most studies have reported a positive correlation between permissive parenting and offending behavior, but one study actually reported the opposite relationship (this was the study using college students reporting on their recollections of the parenting style used by their mothers).

Table 4.6.4. Permissive Parenting and Offending Behavior by Offspring.

Parental Education

Another external factor that seems to affect parenting style is parental education level. Families with higher levels of parental education tend to be more authoritative and lower in authoritarian and permissive parenting. This finding is further supported in a study of exclusively African Americans that indicated that maternal education is correlated with child-centered parenting. Studies conducted in both Egypt and China replicated the finding that mothers with less education were less likely to exhibit authoritative parenting than mothers with more education. Additionally, mothers with low levels of education are more likely to use physical punishment to discipline their children, and they place more emphasis on conformity. However, mothers with higher levels of education have been linked to more supportive, child-centered parenting.

Medicine versus behavior modification

In the United States, busy parents may be looking for a “quick fix” for their child’s difficulties. Medication, however, is not the answer to bad behavior or absent/permissive parenting. All special needs children (SEN) require active parenting, good boundaries, reasonable expectations, and the opportunity to be successful. They desire secure attachment, attention, affection, acceptance, approval, and acknowledgment (Nemeth, Ray, & Schexnayder, 2003). Regardless of their abilities or disabilities, children need love. Most children desire to please. If they are rewarded for good behavior, more good behavior will follow. Medicine will not fix bad parenting.

Parents must learn to accept their child “as is” and appreciate his/her uniqueness. The goal of healthy parenting is to raise independent individuals who can function in society. Some children need more help than others to achieve this goal. Some may never achieve total independence. Regardless of their abilities or disabilities, the goal is to help children be the best they can be.

Good parenting is the first step in this process. For SEN, seeking out caring pediatric neurological and/or neuropsychological professionals is the second step. Securing competent educational opportunities and therapeutic intervention is the third step. In this regard, medication may help along the way, but it is not the answer. It is merely a part of the process.

Effects of Permissive Parenting Style

The developmental outcomes for children reared in permissive homes are also generally more negative compared to those reared in authoritative homes. Permissive parents are low in demandingness and high in responsiveness. The quality of responsiveness often present in permissive parenting can facilitate higher positive self-perceptions in children (Lamborn et al., 1991). However, a lack of demandingness may mean permissive parents provide fewer opportunities for their children to develop self-reliance. Despite the appearance that permissive and authoritarian parenting styles are opposites to each other, in actuality they share the common outcome of minimizing opportunities for children to learn to cope with stress effectively. Authoritarian parents accomplish this by limiting autonomous decisions made by their child. Permissive parents do this by failing to implement standards for appropriate behavior, thereby granting their children freedom to behave in any manner they please. Consequently, children of permissive parents tend to be limited in their capacity to deal with difficult circumstances and may be unprepared to cope successfully with problems that arise normally in life.

Children reared in permissive families often fail to control their impulses and lack self-reliance (Lamborn et al., 1991). Children of permissive parents generally experience less academic success (Baumrind and Black, 1967), in part due to a lack of self-reliance and reduced persistence on tasks (Ginsburg and Bronstein, 1993).

Flexible languaging and workable parenting

Being able to language flexibly is supportive of developing a flexible, workable parenting style including: recognizing unworkable fusion, being able to shift to defusion and developing workable tracks. Dysfunctional parenting styles, such as authoritarian or permissive parenting, are both rigid in different ways. Even inconsistent parenting ironically is underpinned by a rigidity of thought: the parent is often fused with the idea that nothing will work with their child.

Parents may become fused with many ideas, thoughts, or rules that may undermine workable parenting. For example: the child as aversive, that the child can’t cope with anxiety, that the child’s negative emotions are deserving of punishment, with attributions for the child’s behavior or even with the child’s expressed thoughts (Coyne & Cairns, 2016; Johnston & Freeman, 1997). For example, when children say things like “I hate you” a fused parent might take that literally—as their child literally hating them—whereas a defused parent might take that as “I’m hurting,” “I’m angry,” or even “please listen.” Defusion also helps parents to hold attributions like “he is doing it to annoy me” or “she is just like her mother” or even “this is all my fault” lightly. In other words, such attributional thoughts may be present, but the parent can still take the most effective actions in the long term, without getting stuck in unworkable attributions.

The lack of sensitivity to context that fusion creates may mean that parents are unaware of mismatches between their child’s development and their expectations of the child. For example, a parent who expects a young child to sit quietly for a lengthy period of time without toys or snacks or a parent who perceives their child’s increasingly private manner in adolescence as sneaky, suspect, or a rejection of their parents. This can also be apparent if children develop ways of living or thinking that are different from their parents. For example, migrants can easily view their children's acculturation to the new country as oppositionality and a rejection of the parents.

Rigidity and fusion may even be present in parent’s initial agenda when they seek help, as parents are often, in seeking help, asking for a new set of rules to follow. Of course, some parenting rules—“they are probably doing it for attention so ignore it” are better than others “spare the rod and spoil the child”—yet, if we simply give parents better rules without supporting the cultivating of a flexible, experimental approach to parenting, we may not have fully supported the parent’s long-term resilience.

Parenting practices

In pre-K, K, and G1, mothers completed the Parenting Styles and Dimensions (PSD; Robinson, Mandleco, Olsen, & Hart, 1995), a 32-item measure of parenting practices with three orthogonal factors corresponding to Baumrind’s (1995) authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive parenting style constructs. Parents respond to each item on a 5-point Likert scale anchored by “never” and “always.” The PSD has been standardized for parents of young children and has been used with samples of various ethnic backgrounds including Latina mothers from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico (Calzada et al., 2012; Calzada & Eyberg, 2002). The permissive scale, which showed low internal consistency, was not used in the present study. Alpha coefficients were adequate for authoritative and authoritarian parenting for both ethnic groups and in both languages (.69–.87).

Parenting/Child-Rearing

Given the attention that styles of parenting or child-rearing and their effects on children's and adolescents' social adaptation have attracted in research, the concept cannot be excluded in a discussion of socialization processes. The central ideas can be traced back to Kurt Lewin's taxonomy of leadership climates that was originally introduced to characterize styles of organizational management. Thus, the underlying conceptualization is broader, going beyond the realm of parent–child interactions. However, most developmental research has focused on children or adolescents and their parents. As this is covered extensively in another article of the encyclopedia, the following account can be kept brief.

In the literature, the different styles have been conceptualized in terms of parental behaviors as well as aspects of attitudes and relationship climate. Drawing on the dimensions of acceptance and responsiveness, on the one hand, and demand and control, on the other hand, authoritative (high acceptance, high demand), authoritarian (low acceptance, high demand), and permissive parenting (low demand) were distinguished as in the early taxonomy introduced by Diana Baumrind. Later on permissive parenting was differentiated into an indulgent (high on acceptance) and a neglectful variant (low on accepatance). More recent writers suggested a further distinction between behavioral control and psychological control, which refers to low degrees of granting psychological autonomy. By and large, findings converge in suggesting beneficial effects of authoritative parenting on various aspects of psychosocial adaptation. The research underscores the crucial role it plays in primary socialization as well as an indirect role concerning in the course of secondary socialization. Conversely, neglectful parenting proves to be extremely detrimental. It should be noted that there seems to be some variation of effects depending on the ethnic group and domain focused on.

On the theoretical level, there has been little doubt concerning the interactive nature of socialization, and there has been an extensive literature on child effects on parents in the 1980s. Nevertheless, empirical research has often treated parenting as a unidirectional process. Only recently have researchers widened their scope to also consider that parents adapt their child-rearing strategies to the development and behavior of their sons and daughters. Moreover, research increasingly takes into account a possible genetic association linking parenting and child or adolescent characteristics. On a more trivial side, adolescent reports on their parents' child-rearing strategies can be assumed to at least partly express genetically-based personality variables. More interestingly, there is some evidence suggesting that there is a genetic linkage between parental child-rearing behaviors and adolescent outcomes.

Religion

Some religious affiliations view any alcohol use or excessive alcohol use as directly in contrast to their belief systems, which may protect adolescent members of these religious groups from developing problematic drinking due to dogma and social norms. Religion’s relationship with alcohol use has been studied across various countries (e.g., Spain, Canada, U.S.), all finding religiosity to impact the perception and use of alcohol for adolescents. For example, a representative study conducted in the U.S., using data from the 2007 NSDUH, found religiosity to protect against drinking alongside non-permissive parenting strategies (Gryczynski & Ward, 2012). Some racial and ethnic groups are culturally inclined to religious involvement or to affiliation with denominations with more restrictive drinking rules. African Americans are more likely to believe in God when compared to other racial/ethnic groups, as presented in Table 19.3, and have stronger religious affiliation (Pew Research Center, 2014b); therefore, religious protection against alcohol use may in part explain low rates of alcohol consumption amongst adolescents in this racial group. African American adolescents are also more likely to be influenced by parents than peers, which may enhance the protection of religion if valued by their family (Dickens, Jackman, Stanley, Swaim, & Chavez, 2018). The religion of Islam prohibits alcohol consumption (Sheikh & Islam, 2018), and is practiced by individuals from several different racial/ethnic groups. Young people (ages 18–29) who identify as Muslim have a greater prevalence of religious group membership when compared to other religions (Pew Research Center, 2014a). This may protect Muslim adolescents from problematic drinking in their youth if they adhere to Islam’s prescriptions and proscriptions on alcohol, although few studies are available to confirm these relationships (Arfken, Arnetz, Fakhouri, Ventimiglia, & Jamil, 2011; Arfken, Broadbridge, Jamil, & Arnetz, 2014).

Table 19.3. Belief in God by race/ethnicity.

Parenting Style

Both autonomy development in adolescents and the conflict between parents and teens are significantly related to parents' parenting styles and parenting practices, with some styles and practices associated with better autonomy development and lower conflict than others. Parental style refers to the parent's global attitudes and approaches toward parenting. A significant amount of research in adolescent development has been devoted to exploring the association of adolescent development with Diana Baumrind's four categories (authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful) of parenting style. Authoritative parenting refers to the parental behaviors and attitudes that are balanced in terms of being both responsive to child needs and providing firm limit setting. In contrast, authoritarian parenting refers to parental behavior and attitudes that put high emphasis on parental rules and directions but tend to disregard child needs. Permissive parenting is characterized by high responsiveness to child needs, but with low age-appropriate demands. Neglectful parenting, in contrast, is characterized by low responsiveness to child needs as well as low age-appropriate demands.

Numerous studies show that authoritative parenting is associated with better mental and developmental outcomes for adolescents as compared to authoritarian, permissive, or neglectful parenting. The supportiveness combined with firmness and more open communication in families with authoritative parents appear to facilitate self-regulatory skills in adolescents and the development of social and cognitive competence and responsibility and facilitate the adolescent's functioning in social interactions outside of the family. In contrast to authoritative parenting, authoritarian rearing is associated with higher adolescent dependence, passivity, and lower social adeptness, self-assurance, and curiosity. Permissive parenting is associated with less responsibility and maturity and greater susceptibility to peer influence in the adolescent. Neglectful parenting compared to authoritative parenting is associated with greater adolescent health risk and antisocial behaviors, such as precocious experiment with alcohol, drugs, and sex. While authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful parenting style types when compared to authoritative parenting seem to be associated with higher probabilities of problems in adolescents, it is clear that not all adolescents in families with these parenting characteristics have difficulties. Nonetheless, the link between authoritative parenting (as opposed to authoritarian, permissive, or neglectful parenting) and competent adolescent development is remarkably strong and consistent as is the link between neglectful parenting (as opposed to authoritative parenting) and maladaptation in adolescent development.

Laurence Steinberg suggests that authoritative parenting may lead to adolescents' psychological well-being and competence because an authoritative parenting style creates an emotional context that is nurturing and involving, making adolescents more receptive to the influence of parents and thus enhancing efficient and effective socialization. Adolescents who perceive more rather than less parental involvement and acceptance have higher self-confidence, empathy, and identity exploration. More observed parental encouragement for communicating one's own perspective is associated with higher levels of exploration of identity in adolescents and subsequent psychosocial maturity. Similarly, in families where moral issues are discussed in a more versus less cognitive challenging but supportive ways, adolescents show higher moral reasoning levels. Moreover, studies suggest that for adolescents with authoritative parents, the positive outcomes are amplified when their friends also have authoritative parents, and that adolescents of authoritative parents fare better in neighborhoods where other parents are also authoritative, which may foster a more beneficial peer culture. In general, higher sense of responsibility, self-assurance, better adaptation, creativity, curiosity, social skill, and school success are associated with adolescents from authoritative families.

The benefit of authoritative versus authoritarian, permissive, or neglectful parenting appears to transcend the boundaries of socioeconomic status, ethnicity, household composition, and nationality. However, there is some evidence that the links between authoritative parenting and positive adolescent outcomes are strongest in European American families. Research reveals that authoritative parenting is more prevalent among European Americans than other minority Americans. Authoritarian parenting, however, occurs more often in African American and other minority groups. The association between authoritarian parenting and negative outcomes is less evident among minority groups compared to European American groups. This suggests the need to understand the relationship between parenting and adolescent development in a broader context such as is characterized by cultural beliefs and values or by the safety and challenges of neighborhoods and so on. These issues are considered in the following sections.

It should be noted that although the majority of current research on family socialization in adolescence has focused on the unidirectional influence from parenting to adolescents, recent studies also acknowledge the bidirectionality of influence between parents and adolescents.

CONCLUSIONS

Some American families are raising the quality of their family functioning and making the effort that it takes to maximize children’s development and potential. The parents in these families use an authoritative parenting style, which includes the communication of warmth, verbal explanations of why things are as they are, moderate limits with reasonable consequences for inappropriate behavior, little or no use of physical punishment, and consistent engagement with the child. These families have a systematic view of life, clear boundaries, and understood and flexible roles. There is relatively equal power in the marital dyad. They communicate and negotiate effectively, encourage autonomy, enjoy one another and family life, expect benign rather than negative reactions from others, and have transcendent spiritual values. These families have organized their time and priorities to express their value of children and family life.

A second large group of families is breaking down, falling apart, and becoming more dysfunctional. Parents in these families tend to use either authoritarian or permissive parenting styles. They are often overwhelmed by the demands of life and do not devote the time and energy necessary to help their children maximize their potential. Many of these families experience high conflict that is consistently associated with lower family life satisfaction and happiness. Where violence is common, children suffer immensely. Drug and alcohol abuse further cripples these families. Children in these families manifest many more behavioral and emotional problems.

Although intervention programs are often worthwhile, they often do too little too late. Much of the damage has already occurred. Too often our national response is to stick one’s thumb in one hole in the dike after another rather than to build a much stronger dike. In my opinion, it is essential that we communicate loudly and clearly what has been found to work in and for families and what has been found to be ineffective or even cause further problems. Every child has the right to be wanted and to be cared for by parents who have matured and developed the skills necessary for effective parenting. If our only interest were economic, we would be much further ahead in investing in more prevention because prevention can do so much before problems ever develop and/or become very expensive in terms of both dollars and happiness. Such simple principles as delaying marriage until the mid 20s, having clear roles in the marital dyad, planning for and desiring each child, and providing near full-time parental care during the first 5 years of life have demonstrated effectiveness. Also respecting and encouraging each member of the family, avoiding any type of abuse, learning and practicing good communication and problem-solving skills, and living and encouraging transcendent values will do much to alleviate many of the difficulties so challenging to our children who will be the leaders and contributors for much of the 21st century.