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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   30516 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Do you have studies to back that up?

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.

"Despite the unconditional acceptance, lenient practices, and equalitarian values of their parents, adolescents from permissive fami- lies were almost 1 SD less autonomous (individuation and self-efficacy) than their peers "

You're other question:

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.

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 :

Parental responsiveness refers to the degree to which the parent responds to the child's needs in a supportive and accepting manner. Parental demandingness refers to the rules which the parent has in place for their child's behavior, the expectations for their children to comply with these rules, and the level of repercussions that follow if those rules are broken.

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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