Parenting Styles and Their Essence
It is a common knowledge that children are the reflection of their parents. In this sense, the way parents take care and raise their kids impacts who they become in the future. All personal factors, from appearance to emotional state, are the product of parenting strategy. Given the fact that parenting strategies can have different effects on children’s development, it is rational to identify principal parenting styles in psychology and analyze them using media examples and essaystore
Even though researchers share different views on the defined number of parenting styles, common findings in psychology assume that there are four primary parenting styles. Thus, according to Rathus, parents rely on authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, or uninvolved style. Authoritarian parents have a strong belief that their children should obey parent’s orders and follow parental rules without exception. Such a rigor is considered good for children’s sake. Moreover, children’s opinion is not accepted by authoritarian parents. Authoritative parenting presumes that parents earn their children’s respect through discipline, reward systems, logical reasoning, life lessons, and exceptions. Permissive parenting is about giving freedom to children and a huge portion of indulgence. They use soft, mild, and tolerating techniques to raise their children. Uninvolved parenting means that parental control is zero or minimal. Children are raised themselves while parents are just supporting their growth in the family without paying attention to children’s doings. Evidently, authoritative and authoritarian styles are similar in setting strict rules and guidelines; however, authoritative parents listen to their children unlike authoritarian parents. In the meantime, permissive and uninvolved parenting styles illustrate sort of liberal strategies, yet with formal distinctions. Hence, permissive style includes both freedom and close support, which results in family warmth. In turn, uninvolved style represents freedom with parental negligence, which negatively affects children’s social skills. Among all parenting styles, it seems that authoritative style prevails in terms of efficiency. It focuses on the development of both personal and social skills of children; cultivates children’s sense of discipline and responsibility; and represents close relationships between parents and children.
It is important to mention that media and cinematography incorporate multiple examples of parenting styles that can be examined and interpreted as lessons learned. For instance, one of the most successful films with great parenting moral is Liar Liar movie starring Jim Carrey. His character, Fletcher Reede, is an efficient and fast-growing lawyer who surrounds himself with lie and hypocrisy to succeed and gain personal benefits; yet, his way of life affects his family and his son Max in particular. Every act of the father’s lie makes Max suffer, which is why the boy’s key wish on his birthday is that his father stops lying. Evidently, despite his love to Max, Fletcher a typical example of the uninvolved parent, who is stuck to his professional career and who always finds an excuse to complete his selfish tasks instead of playing baseball or having fun with his son. Eventually, negligence over a child ruins Fletcher’s career and life path, but most importantly, it affects Max’s wellbeing. Specifically, Max becomes closer to his mother’s new man Jerry, who cannot unfortunately fully substitute his own father, but this man does not lie to the boy at least and spends his personal time with Max. The situation is really sad since there is an incompatibility of expectations between a parent and a child: while Max approaches his father and is eager to spend more time with him, the parent simply avoids him. Ultimately, this causes a strong emotional pain to a child provoking long-term dissatisfaction from such parenting. As a family expert, I would recommend Fletcher to considerably changing his lifestyle and habits to find a proper work/family balance to save his collapsing family.
In conclusion, it is evident that parenting is of crucial importance to the development of children. Four parenting styles are recognized today, and a task of parents is to pick up the most advantageous one to raise a decent and socially developed individual.