The American psychologist Diana Baumrind produced some of the most well-known research on parenting styles. Baumrind and many subsequent researchers focused on two important parts of parenting: responsiveness and demandingness. According to their work, parents high in responsiveness are attuned and sensitive to their children’s cues. Responsiveness also includes warmth, reciprocity, clear communication, and attachment. Parents high in demandingness monitor their children, set limits, enforce rules, use consistent and contingent discipline, and make maturity demands. Taken together, these two dimensions create four parenting styles: authoritative (high demandingness, high responsiveness), authoritarian (high demandingness, low responsiveness), rejecting or neglecting (low demandingness, low responsiveness), and permissive or indulgent (low demandingness, high responsiveness).
Children who have authoritative parents tend to show the best outcomes (e.g., school success, good peer skills, high self-esteem). This is generally true across ages, ethnicities, social strata, and many cultures. In contrast, children who have rejecting or neglecting parents tend to show the worst outcomes (e.g., delinquency, drug use, problems with peers and in school).
In the 1980s American psychologist John Gottman began to research parent-child interactions. He identified four parenting styles by focusing on how parents handled their children’s emotional states, especially negative emotions, such as distress and anger. The dismissing parent disregards the child’s emotions, may disengage from or ridicule the emotional child, and wants the negative emotions to disappear quickly. The disapproving parent is similar to the dismissing parent but is more judgmental and critical about the child’s emotions and may punish the emotional child. Both styles are related to children who have difficulty trusting, understanding, and regulating their emotions. In contrast, the laissez-faire parent freely accepts the child’s emotional states and may offer comfort but provides little guidance to help the emotional child solve problems. Children with laissez-faire parents have difficulty regulating their emotions, becoming, for example, overwhelmed by emotional states. Finally, the emotion coach is accepting of and sensitive to an emotional child, respects the child’s emotions without telling the child how to feel, and sees emotional moments as opportunities for nurturant parenting and teaching problem solving. Not surprisingly, children of emotion coaches have the best outcomes: they learn to trust and regulate their emotions and to solve problems. Being emotionally savvy, they get along better with peers and have higher self-esteem
