What is the psychology of effective parenting?

While the relationships between adolescents and their parents are changing, parents still have a tremendous influence on their child’s behavior. Research into which parenting behaviors tend to be critical components of good parenting has revealed connection, appropriate autonomy, and parental regulation to be fundamental

Key Components of Good Parenting

Connection

Parents often become less involved in the lives of their children as they enter the middle grades. However, adolescents still need to maintain a positive connection with their caregivers. Parents maintain connections with their teens by showing love and positive affect, listening and demonstrating empathetic understanding, building trust, showing acceptance, and giving approval. A good relationship with caring adults is one of the best safeguards an adolescent has as they develop.

There are a great variety of attitudes, opinions, and values, which can affect how parents choose to raise their children. Across these differences, however, research has shown that being effective parents involves the following qualities:

• Show love. Adolescents need adults who are there for them—people who connect with them, communicate with them, spend time with them, and show a genuine interest in them. This attention is how they learn to care for and love others.
• Listen. To listen means to avoid interrupting and it means to pay close attention. Listening is best done in a quiet place with no distractions. It is hard to listen carefully if the parent is also trying to cook dinner or watch television. Often just talking with children about a problem or an issue helps to clarify things. Sometimes the less advice that the parents offer, the more teens may ask for it. Listening can also be the best way to uncover a more serious problem that requires attention.
• Provide support. Adolescents need support as they struggle with problems that may seem unimportant to their parents and families. They need praise when they have done their best. They need encouragement to develop interests and personal characteristics.
• Show respect. Adolescents can be difficult, rebellious, outrageous, and even mean-spirted. Despite this, teens need to be treated with respect. Modeling respect teaches adolescents appropriate behavior and reinforces unconditional love—parents may not always love their child’s behavior, but they always love their child. Parents can demonstrate respect by recognizing and appreciating their teen’s differences and treating them as an individual. Respect also requires compassion and empathy. Try to see things from their point of view and to consider their needs and feelings.
• Talk over differences. Communication breaks down for some parents because they find it hard to manage differences with their child. Differences of opinion are easier to manage when we recognize that these differences can provide meaningful opportunities for us to rethink our positions and to negotiate, a skill that is valuable for adolescents to develop. When differences arise, parents should communicate concerns firmly but calmly and explain their position to help their teen understand the reasoning. Responding too strongly can lead to yelling and screaming, and it can shut down the conversation. At a time when they are already judging themselves critically, adolescents make themselves vulnerable when they open up to their parents. We know that the best way to encourage a behavior is to reward it. If parents are critical when their teenager talks to them, what the teen learns is that their openness gets punished rather than rewarded.
• Be a role model. Adolescents need strong role models. Adults should live the behavior and values that they hope their child will develop. When parents set high standards for themself and treat others with kindness and respect, the child stands a better chance of following their example. As adolescents explore possibilities of who they may become, they look to their parents, peers, well-known personalities, and others to define who they may become.

Autonomy

Emotional autonomy is a psychological separation from one’s caregivers. It includes a progressive decrease in dependency on their caregivers, individualization, parental de-idealization, and perceiving one’s parents as people (Steinberg & Silberberg, 1986). Despite previous thinking, this is not meant to be the ‘storm and stress’ of adolescent detachment from their family; instead, it is a peaceful process of becoming an individual. Teens are not detaching from their caregivers, but changing their childhood perceptions and dependencies on them. Adolescents will de-idolize their parents and thinking of them more as people.

While the process of developing emotional autonomy is a normal one that usually adaptive in the long-run, it can be distressing at the time. Teens may be experiencing a loss as they lose these childhood conceptualizations of the parents. However, in the end, this emotional distance will allow adolescents to rely more on themselves and develop independence.

Behavioral autonomy, also called decisional autonomy, is the ability to make decisions about one’s behavior. Emotional autonomy and behavioral autonomy are highly correlated. As teens become more emotionally autonomous, they desire to make more of their own decisions. With maturation comes increased emotional and behavioral autonomy. However, too much behavioral autonomy too early has been associated with poor adjustment in young teens. Behavioral autonomy in early adolescence has been found to result in higher risk for deviance and poor academic performance. Often, parents wonder how much autonomy to allow their teen and at what age.

How Much Independence and When?

Some parents allow too much of the wrong kind of freedom, or they offer freedom before the adolescent is ready to accept it. Other parents cling too tightly, denying young teens both the responsibilities they require to develop maturity and the opportunities they need to make choices and accept their consequences.

Research tells us that adolescents do best when they remain closely connected to their parents but at the same time are allowed to have their own points of view and even to disagree with their parents. Here are some tips to help balance closeness and independence:

• Set limits. All children sometimes resist limits, but they want them, and they need them. In a world that can seem too hectic for adults and adolescents alike, limits provide security. Often, adolescents whose parents do not set limits feel unloved. Setting limits is most effective when it begins early. It is harder, but not impossible, to establish limits during early adolescence.
• Be clear. Most teens respond best to specific instructions, which are repeated regularly. Do not give vague requests, like, “I want your room clean.” Instead, be specific about what is expected and when.
• Give reasonable choices. Choices make teens more open to guidance. For example, establishing the rule that homework must be done before bed, but allowing the teen to decide when they will do it. Alternatively, when denying a teen something that they want to do, suggest an acceptable alternative choice.
• Be open to negotiation. As adolescents get older, rules may become more flexible and open to negotiation. Listen to teens’ concerns when discussing chores, curfews, access to the car, and other rules and privileges. By discussing guidelines with teens, parents can foster their child’s ability to think independently, compromise, and negotiate agreements—all-important life skills.
• Grant independence in stages. The more mature and responsible a teen’s behavior is, the more privileges parents can grant. For example, allow a young teen to pick out new sneakers within a specific price range. Later, teens may be able to manage their school clothes shopping with a given budget, but the parent will approve purchases before removing the tags. Eventually, teens can manage their clothing allowance without supervision.
• Health and safety come first. A crucial responsibility as a parent is to protect their child’s health and safety. The child needs to know that it is love for them that requires parents to veto activities and choices that threaten either of these. Let the child know what things threaten her health and safety—and often the health and safety of others—and be firm. This decision may be an area of disagreement, as adolescents often believe that nothing bad will happen to them. At the same time that they feel that everything they experience is new and unique.
• Say no to choices that cut off future options. Choose battles carefully. Not all things are worth an argument. Too many battles may desensitize teens to when parents must insist that the answer is “No,” such as health and safety issues, or when the choice can cut off future options for them. Teens may have a growing sense of the future, but they still lack the experiences required to fully understand how a decision they make today can affect them tomorrow. Talk to teens about the lifelong consequences of the choices they make. Help them understand there are good and bad decisions and that knowing one from the other can make all the difference in their lives.
• Guide, but resist the temptation to control. It is important to strike the right balance between laying down the law and allowing too much freedom. With most teens, it is easiest to maintain this balance by guiding but not controlling. Teens need opportunities to explore different roles, try on new personalities, and experiment. They need to learn that choices have consequences. That means making some mistakes and accepting the results. Nevertheless, parents need to provide guidance so that teens avoid making too many poor choices. Parents can guide by being a good listener and by asking questions that help the teen to think about the results of her actions. The fine line between guiding and controlling may be different for different children. Some children, whether they are 7 or 17, need firmer guidance and fewer privileges than do other children at the same age.
• Let kids make mistakes. We want our children to grow into adults who can solve problems and make good choices. These abilities are a critical part of being independent. To develop these abilities, however, teens, on occasion, need to fail, provided the stakes are not too high, and no one’s health or safety is at risk. Making mistakes also allows teens to learn one critical skill—how to bounce back. It is hard for a child to learn how to pick himself up and start over if his parents always rescue him from difficulties.
• Make actions have consequences. Consequences are a result of choices and how people evaluate their choices and decision-making processes. Parents can help children learn to follow the rules, respect authority, and understand good decision-making by providing consequences. If a consequence is threatened or expected, it is critical to follow through. When adults do not follow through on consequences, they lose credibility with the child. However, the punishment should fit the crime. Overly punitive consequences may undermine the lesson that the parents hoped to teach because the child focuses on the consequence more than their behavior.

Despite what we often hear and read, adolescents look to their parents first and foremost in shaping their lives. When it comes to morals and ethics, political beliefs, and religion, teenagers almost always have more in common with their parents than their parents believe. Parents should look beyond the surface, beyond the specific behaviors to who the teen is becoming. Teenagers may want to dye her hair purple and pierce most parts of her body, but these expressions may be independent of their sense of who they are and who they will become. At the same time that many teens’ behaviors are ultimately harmless, some of them may be not only harmful but also deadly.

Parents need to talk to their children and make it clear that many of the significant threats to their future health and happiness are not a matter of chance, but are a matter of choice—choices like drinking and driving, smoking, drugs, sexual activity, and dropping out of school. Research tells us that adolescents who engage in one risky behavior are more likely to participate in others. Hence, parents need to be front and center, talking to their children about the potentially deadly consequences of opening that Pandora’s box.






Regulation

Effective parents regulate their child’s behavior through supervision, appropriate limits, and discipline. Regulation teaches children self-control and respect for the rules. Regulation presents differently depending on parenting style.

 Moreover, sometimes, parenting styles change from one child to the next or in times when the parent has more or less time and energy for parenting. Parenting styles can also be affected by concerns the parent has in other areas of their life. For example, parenting styles tend to become more authoritarian when parents are tired and perhaps more authoritative when they are more energetic. Sometimes parents seem to change their parenting approach when others are around, maybe because they become more self-conscious as parents or are concerned with giving others the impression that they are a “tough” parent or an “easy-going” parent. Of course, parenting styles may reflect the type of parenting someone saw modeled while growing up.