Your Child's Weight: Helping Without Harming: 1 by Ellyn Satter

Author:Ellyn Satter [Satter, Ellyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780967118932
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2011-11-30T23:00:00+00:00

RAISING A COMPETENT CHILD

How do you raise a child with such good character—with such social and emotional competence? Good character builds on your adolescent’s relationship with you and her desire to please you. Maintaining values, taking responsibility, accepting the consequences of choices and actions, and standing up for what she believes all build on the solid grounding of her relationship with you. To preserve that solid grounding, you must be clear about what your adolescent can do to please you, but you must not make her choose between pleasing you and pleasing herself.

That statement sounds like a riddle, and in some ways it is. You must again find that nebulous place—the middle ground. You must not go to the easier-to-define but nonetheless destructive extremes of either being controlling on the one hand or throwing away all rules and expectations on the other.

The research is clear that the middle ground works best. Adolescents of parents who share control—neither give up all control nor insist on obedience—tend to be high achievers and are unlikely to be seriously disruptive and disobedient. In a classic and often confirmed study of 7,400 adolescents, psychologist Glen Elder saw parents’ orientation to their children during adolescence as ranging from control over every aspect of the adolescent’s life to no control at all. Although Elder saw control as falling into seven categories, parenting styles during adolescence essentially reflected the same three orientations introduced in chapter 5, “Optimize Feeding: Birth Through Preschool”: authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive. Children of authoritative parents fared best.

Parents at the authoritarian extreme were autocratic. They laid down the law and didn’t let their adolescents express their opinions or make decisions about any aspects of their own lives. Parents at the permissive extreme acted like anything was all right. These parents showed no interest in guiding their child’s behavior and failed to lay out expectations. Permissive parents hid their impatience with their child’s negative behavior until they could no longer stand it. Then they blew up, felt bad afterward, and then tried to make up for it. Parents in the middle—about half the parents—were judged to be authoritative, neither giving up all control nor insisting on obedience. Those parents talked with their children to arrive at realistic expectations, gave children responsibility for following through, and enforced the expectations when it was necessary. However, parenting style also reflected the family environment. Parents living in dangerous areas tended to monitor and control their adolescents more carefully to keep them safe.2

In research conducted since the 1962 Elder study, adolescents have never been found to benefit from families that are permissive to the point of irresponsibility or strict to the point of mistreatment.3

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