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The language example is something that has happened several times in highly abusive situations, and has been studied in detail, for example, see Genie. Not enforcing any rules at all may be a similar form of neglect, lesser in severity, but still with consequences.
Yes, people used to beat their kids. As far as I can tell, that is ok, as long as the parent shows love at other times.
The experts have not turned the wheel, the experts have always said "Strictness and love," it's just interpreted through the popular self-help books differently through the generations.
Again, I consider the feral child analogy ludicrous, not carrying any weight.
Do you have studies to back that up?
So beating is optional? That is a bizarre position to take. It’s either necessary, as people used to believe, or it should be avoided, for obvious reasons.
I gave you an example of expert guidance, and it wasn’t popular interpretations of consistent ideas in a self-help book. They used to tell teachers that part of their job was beating children, and later told them to cut it out.
Yes, the large body of work on how Permissive Parenting produces kids who have decreased emotional intelligence. Baumrind followed a group of white kids from preschool to adulthood with an average IQ of 125, studying them in their homes, assessing the parenting styles and then checking back on the kids later to see what their outcomes are.
You're other question:
Beating is optional, setting and enforcing limits is not. Beating is one of several ways to enforce limits, but there are other ways to enforce limits that are equally good.
Thanks for the sauce.
So I can only read the synopsis, but it appears the strongest conclusion of that study is that the authoritarian style is the worst. Then it compares a bunch of other parenting style categories (directive, authoritative, democratic, permissive, disengaged) which seem ill-defined, prone to bias and an invitation to p-hack.
Take OP’s original example of the teenager who won’t get off the phone. Baumrind’s definition of the two dimensions she uses to define four of the categories (see table), via wikipedia :
If some parents confiscate the phone over their daughter’s tearful pleas, it’s easy for the social scientist working off this definition to count that as “not responding to their child’s needs in a supportive and accepting manner”. That by itself would make them either ‘authoritarian’ or ‘neglectful’.
Baumrind’s preferred style– “authoritativism” - is an “authoritarianism of the gaps” where you act authoritarian until someone proves a part doesn’t work, then you pretend that part was always part of the ‘bad authoritarianism’ while you’re just practicing good authoritarianism. Your secret sauce is that you love your children while the bad authoritarians of the past didn't.
So the expert advice seems to be: “be authoritarian, but not too much. Too much is definitely terrible”. Which manages to be both completely useless and maximally anxiety-inducing.
As to why some studies show ‘permissive parenting’ to be less positive than her gerrymandered position, it’s largely genetic effects, nothing causative.
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