Has your child started avoiding interactions with you lately? Is he demanding for stuff that you think is ridiculously expensive? Has your child been having troubles making friends?

The key to this raises another question again; do you think your parenting style is suitable for your child?

What is a parenting style? What effect does it leave on our children?

Parenting style refers to the way in which parents choose to raise their children. A parent is an important factor in their children’s social as well as emotional growth and development. There is no way in which parents can escape having a regulating effect on their children’s personality, character and competence.

In a research, Diana Baumrind(1966) found that there were two basic elements that helped in shaping successful parenting-:

Parental responsiveness or warmth

It is the way parents respond to their children and their needs; mostly seen in authoritative parenting while lack of response results in absence of both warmth and control which is essential for the child; mostly seen in neglectful parenting.

Parental demandingness or control

Parents tend to hold unrealistic expectations from the child compared to his/her potentials; mostly seen in authoritarian parenting while parents keeping no demands or expectations from the child without foreseeing cons of their decisions, results in extremely accepting and lenient parenting; seen particularly in permissive parenting.

We cannot say that every parent falls clearly into one specific category yet these parenting styles usually match with the type of discipline a parent selects to use with his or her child which needs parental expectations and guidance that change with time as the child grows to encourage certain outcomes that are expected from the child. The quality of parent-child interactions has been shown to influence the development of children’s motivation.

We are all born different and unique. What we think we loved as kids might not work the same way for our children since evolution has its effects on every single individual.

“It’s not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can’t tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself” – Joyce Maynard