Parenting styles and its emotional effects on children

Parenting is an on-going and ever-changing process. Each father or mother has his or her own style in bring-up a child. There are many factors could affect each ways of parenting, for instance:

- How he or she was brought-up by his or her parents?

- Education

- Certain beliefs and culture

- His or her child’s characteristics

Different parenting styles would have different impact on child’s psychological development, behavior, academic performance and social competency. Thus, it would be good if we could understand what type of parents we are and how would it affect our children.

Psychological and educational studies have explored 4 parenting styles:

1. The Dismissing Parent

• Does not care about children feeling

• Treat children feelings are irrational and unimportant, and thus tend to ignore a child’s emotion

• Feel that a child’s negative emotion would reflect badly on parents

• View the child’s emotions as demanding for something

• Will feel irritated, fearful and uneasy of a child’s emotion and thus always wants to get rid of a child’s negative emotions quickly

• Focuses more on how to get over one’s emotion instead of understand the emotion itself.

• Does not find solutions with the child but believes that the problems will gone as time pass by

Impact on children

• The children may thought that their feelings are improper and invalid

• The children may misunderstood that it is inherently wrong with their feelings

• May find difficult to manage his or her own emotions

2. The Disapproving Parent

• Have similar behaviors with the Dismissing Parents and with a more negative style.

• Believes negative emotional expressions will indicates bad personalities and thus, will criticizes and set limits or control on children’s emotional expression

• Require kids to comply with good conduct

• Rebuke, disciplines, or even punishes the kid pertaining to his or hers’ emotional expression, regardless of the child is misbehaving or even not really

• Presume emotions would make an individual weak; so children have to be psychological strong in order to survive

Effects on children

• Similar with the Dismissing style

3. The laissez-Faire Parent

• Would accept any kind of psychological expression from children

• Believes that they could not do much on a child’s negative feeling, thus will just comforting the child and would neither give much guidance on behavior nor teaching him or her about emotion.

• Is usually permissive, will not set restrictions on children

Impacts on children

• They do not know how to control their own feeling

• They would have difficulties in focusing

• They may have difficulties in developing friendships or to get close to other kids

4. The Emotion Coach

• Values and also respects a child’s negative feeling

• Does not worry about the kids’ emotional expression because they are in control and know what are they supposes to do

• Able to spend time with an upset, mad, or nervous child patiently

• They will listen to kid, empathize with calming words and love, help the child to label his or her own feeling, guide the kid to manage his or her emotions, teach the kids about problem-solving skills, set restrictions as well as teaching the kids about the acceptable expression of feelings.

Effects on children

• They learn how to believe in their own emotions, control their own feeling, as well as resolve difficulties

• They possess higher self-esteem

• They would able to learn well and would able to get along with others well