What is the Baumrind Parenting Style?

The Diana Baumrind parenting style, evaluates parenting styles based on parental responsiveness vs. unresponsiveness and parental demanding vs. undemanding.

Baumrind's research and observations of parents research is based on what she considered to be the basic elements for successful parenting: the way parents control, and influence their children.

The dimensions of parenting she observed were the strategies parents used to discipline their children; the degree of warmth and style of nurturing; how parents communicated to their children; and the expectations parents had for their child's maturity and ability to self control.

As a result of her observations, the Baumrind Parenting Style classifies three basic styles of parenting, Authoritarian, Permissive and Authoritative.

Authoritarian Parenting

Authoritarian Parenting is based on the premise that the parent has all the power and children are expected to follow strict rules. Punishments are a consequence of failure to follow rules, and Authoritarian Parents see no need to give any explanation or reasoning behind rules. "Because I said so" or "Do as you're told, would be typical statements from Authoritarian Parents. The Baumrind Parenting Style typifies these parents as status driven, have high demands for obedience and expect to be obeyed without question.

Permissive Parenting

The Permissive Parenting style in contrast has very few demands of their children. Discipline is rare, and parents have very low expectations of maturity or self control. Permissive Parenting allows children to largely self regulate with little guidance, or confrontation. Tending to be warm and nurturing, the permissive parenting style has few rules, and values communication and self expression.

Authoritative parenting

The Baumrind parenting style tends to place Authoritative Parenting style as the ideal. There is still an emphasis on rules and guidelines, but Authoritative parents give explanations and are open to negotiation. They are responsive to their children, warm and nurturing, and foster assertion and social responsiblity. Authoritative Parenting, often called democratic parenting, tends to be rational, using reason rather than power to gain the child's cooperation. They encourage the child to have a say, however, unlike permissive parents, Authoritative parenting would set the standards and guidelines.

Eleanor Maccoby and John Martin expanded the Baumrind Parenting style, to be Four Basic Parenting styles which we will cover further.

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Resources for Parents

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Inspiration for Managing Behavior Issues

Disciplining children.
For parenting advice on discipline read my article on disciplining kids and teens.

Do Children Misbehave?
More ideas on handling misbehaving children, and understanding their needs.

Negotiating with Teens
Teenage years can be a delight and a challenge for many parents. Heres some ideas on handling some of those tricky times!

Teenage Behavior
This Audio answers questions from readers about communicating with teenagers. You can listen to it here from the page.

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