Diana Baumrind

Diana Baumrind

Diana Baumrind is the author of a 1966 paper, written at the University of California, Berkeley. The paper in Child Development, "Effects of authoritative parental control on child behavior", described three models of parental control, permissive, authoritarian and authoritative, and became the starting point for decades of research on parenting styles.

Who they are

Baumrind's affiliation on the 1966 paper is the University of California, Berkeley.

This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Effects of authoritative parental control on child behavior (1966). The paper describes and contrasts permissive, authoritarian and authoritative models of parental control, reviews findings on the effects of particular disciplinary practices, and examines the relation between freedom and control. It defends the position that authoritative control may produce in a child behaviour which, in the words of its abstract, "while well socialized is also wilful and independent".

Key ideas

Baumrind's typology framed the debate that gentle parenting has revived: whether warmth and firm control work against each other or together. Later researchers sorted families on two dimensions, warmth and strictness, and split her permissive group into indulgent families, which are warm but lax, and neglectful ones, which are neither warm nor strict. Martin Pinquart's 2017 meta-analysis of 1,435 studies linked the authoritative style with slightly fewer behaviour problems and permissive parenting with more, while Fernando Garcia and Enrique Gracia's 2009 study of Spanish teenagers found that indulgent homes did as well as authoritative ones, which suggests the pattern varies with culture.

Sources

  1. Baumrind, D. (1966). Effects of authoritative parental control on child behavior. Child Development, 37(4), 887-907. doi:10.2307/1126611
  2. Pinquart, M. (2017). Associations of parenting dimensions and styles with externalizing problems of children and adolescents: an updated meta-analysis. Developmental Psychology, 53(5), 873-932. doi:10.1037/dev0000295
  3. Garcia, F., & Gracia, E. (2009). Is always authoritative the optimum parenting style? Evidence from Spanish families. Adolescence, 44(173), 101-131. PMID 19435170