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Effects of parenting practices
To ensure the best possible outcome for their children, parents must balance the maturity and disciplinary demands they make to integrate their children into the family and social system with maintaining an atmosphere of warmth, responsiveness and support. When parent conduct and attitude during the preschool years do not reflect an appropriate balance on these characteristics, children may face a multitude of adjustment issues.
In a number of investigations, sensitive-responsive parenting was linked to positive emotionality in children, while children who were negative, irritable or aggressive were found to have received less supportive, if not problematic parenting. More specifically, inconsistent, rigid or irritable explosive discipline, as well as low supervision and involvement, have been closely associated with the development of child conduct problems.
For children living in poverty, other factors in the child’s social environment in addition to parenting have been found to have an impact on later child functioning, such as parental age, well-being, and history of antisocial behaviour: social support within and outside the immediate family, and neighbourhood quality.
Determinants of parenting
What makes parents parent the way they do? A number of personal and social factors come into play.
Social-contextual factors that shape parenting include the attributes of the children, the developmental history of the parents and their own psychological make-up, personal and inter-parental distress, social isolation, and the broader social context in which parents and their relationship are embedded. Parents’ personality characteristics also play a role by influencing the emotions they experience and/or their cognitions, including the attributions they make about the causes of their child’s behaviour.
Research shows that language stimulation and learning materials in the home are the parenting practices most strongly linked to school readiness, vocabulary and early school achievement, while parent discipline strategies and nurturance are most strongly linked to social and emotional outcomes such as behaviour and impulse control and attention.
Parental knowledge also plays a key role. When parents are aware of developmental norms and milestones and are familiar with caregiving skills, it provides them with a global cognitive organization for adapting to or anticipating developmental changes in children. Studies show that mothers with higher knowledge of infant and child development have higher levels of parenting skills. In the same way, parents’ inaccurate beliefs or overestimation of their child’s performance can actually undermine the child’s performance, probably because parents’ expectations can have an effect on their behaviours.
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