Parenting Styles

I will be describing, comparing, and contrasting parenting styles from Baumrind, Lareau, and Kohn. Baumrind came up with a typology widely used today from observations. From these observations, Baumrind came up with 3 parenting styles: Authoritarian, Authoritative, and Permissive. Each style relates to parent interaction, form of punishment, and outcomes in children based of raising style. Baumrind's styles are used to explain Laureau and Kohn's styles. Baumrind's styles reflect the types of parenting style that Laureau and Kohn use to explain their theories. Lareau focuses more on social class and it's effect On values, norms, and expectations of parents for their children. Lareau explains how low income families are likelier to have less participation in children activities and extra curricular participation because of lack of money, yet these activities are important for academic achievement. Similar to Lareau, Kohn believes class takes a big role in parenting children. Unlike the other two though, Kohn relates the traits parents value most with the parents world of work. This style states that the characteristics parents will value reflect the characteristics they believe are needed for the work they're expected to be in in the future, thus related to social class. It's a matter of Conformity vs self direction. Kohn believes lower class families would attribute Baumrinds authoritative style versus higher class's use of permissive parenting most often than not. From these three, I like Baumrinds parenting styles because they are reflected from observations. Though they are limited in the sense that they don't take everything into consideration such as class, race or gender, they summarize three of the most common parenting styles.