Parenting Styles In Personality Development

When it comes to the child personality development, the debate of nature (genes) versus nurture (parenting styles) always comes into the picture. As little could be done in the nature aspect for this era, we will examine the nurture aspect and its effect. It was noted that there are two dimensions that forms the various parenting styles, which is “acceptance responsive” and “demandingness control”. By combining these two dimensions, four basic parenting styles are formed: authoritarian, authoritative, Permissive-indulgent and neglectful, (Sigelman & Rider, 2012). The definition of the four parenting styles are list below.

Authoritarian style refers to high level of “demandingness control” but low level of “acceptance responsive” dimension.

This group of parents set high but obtainable standards and guides the child in the progression. They set clear rules and enforce it consistently, at the same time explaining to the child the necessity of the rules. This creates a dual channel communication: Parent to child and child feedback to parent, this leads to mutual understanding and compliance of the child, (Sigelman & Rider,

According to the studies conducted by Berkin, Louwerse, Verhulst and Ende (2012), the dissimilarity in parenting styles between both parents affect child development as well. It was noted that the children perceived that as they aged, the level of emotional warmth, rejection and overprotection from their parent decreases but there was a increase in perceived dissimilarity in emotional warmth and overprotection. This perceived dissimilarity in emotional warmth is positively correlated to internal and external behaviour problem, whereas the perceived dissimilarity in overprotection is positively correlated to external behaviour problem, (Berkin et al., 2012). The result shows that the effect of the perceived dissimilarity in parenting styles have a negative effect on the child, taking take over the effects of individual parenting