Fernando Garcia

Who they are

Garcia's affiliation on the 2009 paper is the Universidad de Valencia, Departamento de Metodologia.

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

Key papers

Is always authoritative the optimum parenting style? Evidence from Spanish families (2009), with Gracia. The study asked 1,416 Spanish teenagers aged 12 to 17 about their parents' child-rearing, and classified families as authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent or neglectful on two dimensions, warmth and strictness. Indulgent families scored high on warmth and low on strictness; authoritative families scored high on both. The teenagers were compared on self-esteem, psychosocial maladjustment, personal competence and problem behaviours such as school misconduct, delinquency and drug use. Both indulgent and authoritative parenting were associated with better outcomes than authoritarian and neglectful parenting, and the authors concluded that in Spain the optimum style was the indulgent one, since scores were equal to or better than those for the authoritative style.

Key ideas

The study is the clearest counterweight to the usual reading of Diana Baumrind's typology, in which warmth without strictness is a weaker version of authoritative parenting. It suggests that what warmth without strictness produces may depend on the culture in which a family lives. Its data are teenagers' own reports at one point in time.

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