Effective Parenting

The most effective parenting styles

Effective parenting technique is a puzzling topic that sometimes burnt out experts, and became a topic of brewing debates. However, developmental psychologists only began to study parenting and its influences on children in the 1920's. Most experts studying the most effective parenting technique rely on the concept of Diana Baumrind's three parenting styles, in which was found the authoritative parenting style to be the most balanced and healthiest.

Parenting can be seen as broad and limitless, when taking into consideration the differences in family values within the context of the norm, religious concepts, and many other ideals that shape the way parents deal with their children. Yet, failure in parenting cannot be solely blamed on specific instances but is seen as a typology of general practices of parents.

So what is the effective parenting technique? As broad as it might sound, authoritative parenting combines parental responsiveness and parental demandingness vis-à-vis the age of a child. Parental responsiveness describes a parent's intent to foster self-regulation, individuality, and self-assertion by being supportive of and adjusting to a child's needs and desires. Parental demandingness relates more to controlling a child's behavior that is seen as inappropriate, and a parent's willingness to enforce gentle disciplinary efforts, and confronting a child who intentionally disobeys or has committed a mistake.

You can do age-specific activities or discipline in order to set limitations but not to a point of taking full control over your child's life. Parents, themselves, need to acknowledge differences in personality styles, ideas, and life perspectives especially when a child has grown into an adolescent.

Other experts, meanwhile, advocate attachment parenting as the effective parenting technique to use on infants. Dr. William Sears and his wife, Martha, were the first to describe attachment parenting as a style that highly demands responsiveness from parents. This style of parenting negates the popular belief of not responding to a baby's cry immediately so as not to spoil him/her. Attachment parenting advocates believe that crying is a baby's instinctive and survival tool, which is their only means of communication to the world.

Both authoritative and attachment parenting are found to be the most effective parenting styles today, with studies showing positive results from children raised with these styles of parenting. Attachment parenting, in particular, advocates emotional closeness between parents and child to promote self-esteem and social competency later in life. Looking closely, these two styles of effective parenting techniques have similarities in terms of responding to children's needs and correcting ill behaviors in order to raise intellectually, emotionally, and socially-competitive individuals.