[full _BEST_] Darling Art Modeling Stud
Chris Richard
Despite broad consensus about the effects of parenting practices on child development, manyquestions about the construct parenting style remain unanswered. Particularly pressing issues arethe variability in the effects of parenting style as a function of the child's cultural background, theprocesses through which parenting style influences the child's development, and the operational-ization of parenting style. Drawing on historical review, the authors present a model that integratestwo traditions in socialization research, the study of specific parenting practices and the study ofglobal parent characteristics. They propose that parenting style is best conceptualized as a contextthat moderates the influence of specific parenting practices on the child. It is argued that only by maintaining the distinction between parenting style and parenting practice can researchers addressquestions concerning socialization processes.
We lean to the belief that a specific discipline does not exert aspecific invariant psychological influence upon the child and thatits effect can be gauged only from a study of the parental attitudesassociated with its administration, (pp. 7-8)
dent and autonomous sense of self while conforming to rules,but rather the reciprocal communication characteristic of au-thoritative families and the experience children in these fami-lies have of successfully modifying parental rules through argu-mentation. Specifically, Lewis suggested that Baumrind's find-ings could be reinterpreted as showing that the advantagesenjoyed by authoritatively reared children are attributable totheir parents' openness to bidirectional communication. Lewis (1981) did not question the empirical validity of theassociation between authoritative parenting and child compe-tence. In essence, however, she redefined authoritative parent-ing in terms of its emphasis on mutual accommodation ratherthan on a certain type of control. 2 Although the validity of thisredefinition remains an open question both empirically andconceptually, Lewis's reinterpretation brought into focus two important related points: (a) Any parenting typology (including Baumrind's) captures a configuration of parenting practices, thus making it difficult to ascertain what aspect of parentingaffects which developmental outcomes, and (b) extant notionsabout the processes through which parenting style influenceschild development are speculative rather than empiricallygrounded. The putative processes (e., mutual accommodation, effec-tive conflict management, and firm control) by which parentalauthoritativeness might influence the development of compe-tence have been discussed in depth, albeit hypothetically, byboth Baumrind (197la, 1983) and Lewis (1981). However, theconfigurational approach makes it difficult to move from thehypothetical to the empirical. This is especially true when com-parisons are limited to comparisons of children raised in bla- tantly different parenting styles, because within-group studieswould be necessary to specify the operative socialization pro-cesses. Unfortunately, the richness and detail of the dataBaumrind gathered in her research necessarily restricted thesize of the samples she studied, making the critical within-group comparisons unfeasible. In retrospect, a review of the Lewis-Baumrind argument un-derscores the fact that, despite consistent evidence that authori-tative parents produce competent children, we still do not re-ally know how or why. Both the attribution and social learningperspectives offer interesting hypotheses about the mecha-nisms through which such an association might come about,but the empirical evidence necessary to allow us to judge whichhypotheses are correct is lacking.
The conceptual distinction we offer between parenting prac-tices and parenting style both advances the study of socializa-tion in the family and facilitates the examination of three unre-solved issues in the study of familial influences on child devel-opment: First, how does the influence of parenting style vary asa function of the cultural background of the developing person?Second, what are the processes through which parenting styleinfluences child development? Third, what are the determi-nants of parenting style? In this section, we briefly discuss eachof these issues.Contextual variability. An important question raised in therecent work that has expanded socialization research beyondWhite, middle-class samples is whether and why the influenceof parenting style and practices varies across cultural contexts.For example, both Dornbusch et al. (1987) and Steinberg et al.(1991), using different approaches to the measurement of au-thoritative parenting, have found that the association betweenauthoritativeness and school performance is much strongeramong European- and Hispanic-American adolescents thanamong Asian- and African-American adolescents. Many hy-potheses have been offered for this difference, including coun-tervailing peer or community influences, social disincentivesfor academic success, and the relative functionalism of aca-demic success for youths from different ethnic backgrounds(Steinberg, Dornbusch, & Brown, 1992). An additional hypoth-esis, however, concerns differences in the goals toward whichparents socialize their children. It is possible that authoritativeparenting as a style is equally effective in socializing childrenacross all cultural contexts, but that the goals toward whichchildren are socialized, and thus parents' practices, vary acrossthese very same ecologies (Baumrind, 197la). Before conclud-ing that authoritative parenting, or, for that matter, any otherstyle of parenting, is more or less effective in different culturalcontexts, we need to know more about the goals toward whichparents socialize their children and the practices they use toachieve these goals.Processes of influence. Despite many years of research, weknow surprisingly little about the processes through which par-enting style influences the development of children's compe-tence. Although the implicit processes proposed have nearlyalways included changes in characteristics of the child (presum-ably through modeling or changes in cognitive complexity, attri-butions, or the emotional relationship with the parent), re-search documenting these processes is scant. In one exceptionto this general trend, Steinberg et al. (1989) found that the rela-tionship between parenting style and adolescents' academic per-formance was mediated specifically through changes in adoles-cent psychosocial maturity. More research is needed that speci-fies both the discrete aspects of parenting style that influencechanges in child characteristics and how these changes mediatethe relationship between style and behavioral outcome. This
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