Parenting Styles

What it is

Later researchers sorted families on two dimensions, warmth and strictness, which gave four styles. Authoritative parents score high on both. Authoritarian parents are strict but low on warmth. Baumrind's permissive group was split in two: indulgent parents, who are warm but lax, and neglectful parents, who are neither warm nor strict. Fernando Garcia and Enrique Gracia's 2009 study of Spanish families used exactly this classification.

In effect

Martin Pinquart's 2017 meta-analysis of 1,435 studies found that warmth, behavioural control, autonomy granting and an authoritative style were associated with fewer externalizing problems such as aggression and rule-breaking, by very small to small margins. Harsh control, psychological control, and authoritarian, permissive and neglectful styles were associated with more, with harsh and psychological control showing the strongest links. The typology is the clearest way to separate gentle parenting that keeps limits, which sits close to the authoritative style, from gentle parenting that drops them, which sits close to the permissive one.

What it does not say

The typology does not say that one style is best everywhere. Garcia and Gracia found that among 1,416 Spanish teenagers, those from indulgent homes did as well as or better than those from authoritative homes, and concluded that the indulgent style was the optimum in Spain. Nor does it say that parenting simply causes children's behaviour: Pinquart found that several associations ran both ways, with children's behaviour also predicting later parenting. Most of the evidence is correlational. On physical punishment specifically, Elizabeth Gershoff's 2016 meta-analysis and Robert Larzelere's 2005 meta-analysis reached different conclusions about conditional use.

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