Rethinking Baumrind’s “Authoritative” Parenting

Excerpted from Unconditional Parenting (Atria Books, 2005)

….The most popular false dichotomy in parenting runs as follows: “We need to take a hard line with kids and stop letting them do anything they feel like.” In effect, traditional discipline is contrasted with permissiveness. Either I punish my child or else I let her “get away with” whatever she did. Either I take a hard line or I draw no line at all…

In theory, it would be better to choose from among three alternatives rather than only two, but here, too, we have to be careful. A number of writers, on discipline and other issues, try to make their views seem more palatable by positioning themselves as the reasonable “middle ground” between two extremes. Call it the Goldilocks Gambit: Some approaches are too this, some approaches are too that, but my approach is just right. The “this” position is usually some sort of extremely punitive, power-based parenting, while the “that” position is a variant of loosey-goosey, anything-goes neglect.

In the abstract, most of us would agree that something in between those extremes would be better – and, indeed, on some issues, I, too, recommend a “third way.” But we should never be talked into accepting someone’s suggestions just because they’re placed between caricatured alternatives. Moreover, some writers may be starting with a question based on a dubious premise, such as “How much should we control our children?” Pick one: (a) constantly and excessively, (b) not at all, or (c) the ideal amount, as explained in the author’s copyrighted five-point program. Rather than picking the obvious choice, we may want to challenge the way the issue has been framed and consider alternatives to the whole idea of control.

The fact is that the “reasonable middle ground” option may not be all that reasonable when evaluated on its own merits. One example in the discipline field is Diana Baumrind’s schema, which has been adopted by lots of researchers as well as practitioners. She describes parenting as being “authoritarian” on one side, “permissive” on the other side, or “authoritative” (read: just right) in the middle. In reality, though, her favored approach, supposedly a blend of firmness and caring, is actually quite traditional and control-oriented – even if less so than Option 1. In fact, a close reading of Baumrind’s research raises questions about the recommendations she offers, particularly her endorsement of “firm control.”

To begin with, Baumrind (1972) has argued against unconditional acceptance of children by their parents, declaring that “the rule of reciprocity, of paying for value received, is a law of life that applies to us all.” She continues: “The parent who expresses love unconditionally is encouraging the child to be selfish and demanding” – suggesting that an economic model for human relationships may go hand-in-hand with a dim view of human nature. She also assumes that “structure” in the family requires the use of extrinsic motivators and “contingent reinforcement,” which she strongly supports. She approves of spanking, dismisses criticisms of punishment as “utopian,” and declares that parents who don’t use power to compel obedience will be seen as “indecisive” (Baumrind 1996).

Unfortunately, the research she cites to show that authoritative parenting works best doesn’t support any of these positions. Her original findings were interpreted as proving that a combination of warmth and “firm control” (or “enforcement”) was optimal. But another researcher who looked at the data carefully (Lewis 1981) discovered that the positive outcomes for children of authoritative parents didn’t actually seem to be connected to the use of firm enforcement at all. Kids whose parents were warm but not controlling did just as well as kids whose parents were both – probably, she suggested, because control in the traditional sense isn’t required to create structure and predictability as Baumrind (and many others) assumed.

By the same token, Baumrind seemed to blur the differences between “permissive” parents who were really just confused and those who were deliberately democratic. There were no problems with the children of the latter parents, suggesting, in the words of another psychologist, that “a close look at Baumrind’s actual data may reveal significant support for child-centered parenting” (Crain 2003) even though Baumrind has created a very different impression because she personally opposes that style.

Subsequent research using Baumrind’s formulation seems to support this view. A huge study of teenagers (Lamborn et al. 1991) did indeed find benefits from what was described as “authoritative” parenting, but that term was defined to mean that parents were aware of, and involved with, their children’s lives, not that they were even the least bit punitive or controlling. Another study (Strage and Brandt) similarly cited Baumrind by way of suggesting that parents need to be both supportive and demanding, but it turned out that being demanding when their children were young was unrelated, or even negatively related, to various desirable outcomes. By contrast, the extent to which the parents had been supportive, and also the extent to which they had encouraged their children’s independence, had a strong positive relationship to those same outcomes….