Can children thrive in every family? The answer is yes. The key lies in what parents do. We know that parents need to promote a secure attachment and be sensitive to a child’s temperamental needs. Is there an overall discipline style that works best? In landmark studies conducted 40 years ago, developmentalist Diana Baumrind (1971) decided yes.

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Think of a parent you admire. What is that mother or father doing right? Now think of parents who you feel are not fulfilling this job. Where are they falling short? Most likely, your list will center on two functions. Are these people nurturing? Do they provide discipline or rules? By classifying parents on these two dimensions—being child-centered, and giving “structure”—Baumrind (1971) and other researchers spelled out the following parenting styles:

In relating the first three discipline studies to children’s behavior (the fourth was added later), Baumrind found that children with authoritative parents were more successful and socially skilled. Hundreds of twentieth-century studies confirmed this finding: Authoritative parenting works best (Maccoby & Martin, 1983).

Decoding Parenting in a Deeper Way

At first glance, Baumrind’s authoritative category offers a beautiful blueprint for the right way to raise children: Provide structure and lots of love. However, if you classify your parents along these dimensions, you may find problems. Perhaps one parent was permissive and another authoritarian. Or, your families’ rules might randomly vary from authoritative to permissive over time.

According to one global study, the worst situation—in terms of a teenager’s mental health—occurs when families have inconsistent rules (Dwairy, 2010). If one parent is more authoritarian and the other permissive, you do have predictability (“I can get away with things with Mom, but not with Dad”), although you might feel a bit upset. But imagine how disoriented you would be if your parents sometimes came down very hard on you and, in similar situations, seemed not to care. Rather than adhering to a single parenting style, parents should provide a consistent roadmap for their child.

But aren’t there times when parenting styles should vary, or situations when every child needs a more authoritarian or permissive approach? These questions bring me to two other classic parenting styles critiques:

CRITIQUE 1: PARENTING STYLES VARY FROM CHILD TO CHILD AND MAY SHIFT AT DIFFERENT LIFE STAGES. Perhaps your parents came down harder on a brother or sister because that sibling needed more discipline, while your personality flourished with a permissive style. As you learned earlier in this book, good parents should vary their child-rearing, depending on the unique personality of a specific child.

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Unfortunately, however, as you also learned in previous chapters, when children are “high maintenance” (difficult to raise), due to an evocative process, parenting styles are apt to change for the worse. A mom may become excessively controlling (authoritarian) when her child has a chronic illness (Pinquart, 2013). She might yell, scream, and wall herself off emotionally from a son or daughter with ADHD (Gau & Chang, 2013).

A study conducted in Finland suggested mothers were most likely to retreat into walled-off, distant caregiving when raising a temperamentally grumpy child (Laukkanen and others, 2014). Therefore, it makes sense that U.S. researchers find that parents are most likely to abandon being authoritative when their sons and daughters reach adolescence—that grumpier, less compliant life stage. Interestingly, this U.S. study showed, when caregivers did withdraw emotionally during puberty, preteens were most at risk for delinquency later on (Schroeder & Mowen, 2014).

So again, parenting is far more “bidirectional” (and child evoked) than Baumrind assumes. Moreover, parents are apt to become less loving in the very situations when children need extra loving the most. Does adopting a rule-focused, authoritarian parenting style ever work best?

CRITIQUE 2: PARENTING STYLES CAN VARY DEPENDING ON ONE’S SOCIETY. Baumrind’s styles perspective, developmentalists point out, reflects a Western middle-class perspective on child-rearing. Yes, we think structure (rules) is vital, but we put a premium on loving and listening to our sons and daughters. If you know families from Korea or China, or Latinos or African Americans, you may be struck by the more authoritarian agendas of these moms and dads: “Be obedient,” “Don’t talk back,” “I make the rules” (Fuller & García Coll, 2010; Mistry, Chaudhuri, & Diez, 2003).

This cultural difference, specifically in Asian parenting, was spelled out in a controversial book called The Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother (2011). Amy Chua, a second-generation Chinese American parent, made the case that, in contrast to our laid-back democratic style, “traditional Chinese” parenting was superior at producing a high-achieving child (see Chua, 2011; Lui & Rollock, 2013).

Do Asian-heritage U.S. parents typically adopt Chua’s authoritarian parenting style? If we consider first-generation immigrants (Nomaguchi & House, 2013) or people living in ethnically homogenous enclaves such as urban Chinatowns (Lee and others, 2014), the answer is yes. But, in contrast to our stereotypes, Asian American parents are normally not more authoritarian than anyone else (Choi and others, 2013; Kim and others, 2013). In fact, if you grew up in India, you would probably have been raised more “permissively” than a European-heritage child born in the United States! (See Barnhart and others, 2013; Ferguson and others, 2013.)

Should Western parents adopt Chua’s rule-oriented child-rearing advice? The answer is definitely no. Among contemporary Asian families—both in the United States (Lee and others, 2014; Kim and others, 2013) and Japan (Uji and others, 2014)—authoritative parenting is correlated with superior child mental health.

In the past, parents needed to act authoritarian to socialize their children for life in harsh, dictatorial societies or protect their offspring from the horrors of war or disease. In dangerous places today, such as El Salvador, people still report reluctantly using these rigid child-rearing techniques. As one mother in this violence-wracked nation bemoaned: “. . . I do not let my son go outside . . . . I think we have become overprotective against our will” (Rojas-Flores and others, 2013, p. 278). But in the contemporary West, having “authoritarian values” is a symptom of feeling unhappier and more stressed out in the parenting role (Nomaguchi & House, 2013).

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Table 7.1 gives you a chance to step back and list your specific parenting priorities in a deeper way. Let’s now consider that deeper philosophical question: Is parenting critically important to how children turn out?

The most inspiring place to start is with those world-class role models who had terrible childhoods, but succeeded brilliantly as adults.

Making the Case That Parents Don’t Matter

What matters more in how we develop, our life experiences or our genes? Twin and adoption studies, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, come down firmly on the “it’s mainly genetic” side. Faced with this nature-oriented behavioral-genetic research message, one developmentalist famously concluded that it doesn’t matter if you were raised in your particular family or the one down the street. Given reasonably adequate parenting, children grow up to express their genetic fate (see Scarr, 1997; Scarr & Deater-Deckard, 1997).

The most interesting twist on this “parents don’t matter” argument was put forth by psychologist Judith Harris. Harris (1995, 1998, 2002, 2006) believes that the environment has a dramatic impact on our development; but—rather than parents—our peer group socializes us to become adults.

Harris begins by taking aim at the principle underlying attachment theory—that the lessons we learn from our parents transfer to our other relationships. Learning, Harris believes, is context-specific. We cannot use the same working model with our mother and with the classroom bully, or we would never survive. Furthermore, because we live our lives in the wider world, she argues, the messages we absorb from the culture of our contemporaries must take precedence over the lessons we are taught at home.

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Any parent can relate to Harris’s peer-power principle when she is horrified to witness her 3-year-old picking up every bad habit from her classmates after entering preschool. You saw a chilling example of a similar group infection in the last chapter when I described how aggressive middle-school norms evoke bullying in the “nicest kids.”

The most compelling evidence for Harris’s theory, however, comes from looking at immigrants. As I implied in the introductory chapter vignette, acculturation—children’s rapid shift to embrace new cultures—offers a vivid testament that Harris has an important point.

These arguments that genetics and our culture shape development alert us to the fact that, when you see children “acting out,” you cannot leap to the assumption that “it’s the parents’ fault.” As developmental systems theory predicts, a variety of influences—from genetics, to peer groups, to everything else—affect how children behave. But you may be thinking that the idea that parents are not important goes too far.

Many experts agree. For children to realize their genetic potential, parents should provide the best possible environment (Ceci and others, 1997; Kagan, 1998; Maccoby, 2002). In fact, when children are vulnerable or fragile as I’ve been pointing out, superior parenting is required.

Making the Case for Superior Parenting

Imagine, for instance, that your daughter is temperamentally “difficult.” You know from reading this book that you may be tempted to disengage emotionally from your child. You also know that adopting this less-responsive parenting style can make the situation much worse. So, you inhibit your use of power assertion. You provide lots of love. You arrange the environment to minimize your child’s vulnerabilities and highlight her strengths.

Actually, when a child is biologically fragile, or genetically reactive, sensitive caregiving can make a critical difference. From studies showing that loving touch helps premature infants grow (recall Chapter 3), to my suggestions for raising fearful or exuberant kids (see Chapters 4 and 6), the message is the same: When children are “at risk,” superior parenting matters most.

So let’s celebrate the fact that resilient children can flower in the face of difficult life conditions and less-than-ideal parenting styles. But when a baby needs special nurturing, the importance of high-quality nurture shines out.

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Poll friends and family about corporal punishment—any discipline technique using physical measures such as spanking—and you are likely to get strong reactions. Some people adhere to the biblical principle, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” They may blame the decline in spanking for every social problem. Others blame corporal punishment for creating those social problems. They believe that parents who rely on “hitting” are implicitly teaching children the message that it is OK to respond in a violent way. To put these positions into perspective, let’s take a brief tour of a total turnaround in corporal punishment attitudes in recent times.

Until the twentieth century, corporal punishment used to be standard practice. Flogging was routine in prisons (Gould & Pate, 2010), the military, and other places (Pinker, 2011). In the United States, it was legal for men to “physically chastise” their wives (Knox, 2010). Today, while these practices still occur in less developed nations, in Western democracies they are widely condemned (Knox, 2010).

Moreover in recent years—from Spain to Sweden or Croatia to Costa Rica—a remarkable 24 nations have passed laws banning child corporal punishment. Organizations from the American Academy of Pediatrics, to the United Nations, to the Methodist Church have also passed resolutions calling spanking children “inhumane” (Knox, 2010).

In the United States, we’ve been listening—a bit. Spanking is illegal at schools and day-care centers in most states. But any person proposing a bill to ban this behavior would be laughed off the congressional floor. Not only is our individualistic society wary about government intrusions in family life, but most U.S. parents spank their daughters and sons.

Still, with surveys showing only one in ten parents saying they “often spank,” corporal punishment is not the preferred U.S. discipline mode. Today, the most frequent punishments parents report are “time-outs” and removal of privileges and, to a lesser extent, getting sent to one’s room (Barkin and others, 2007).

Who in Western nations is most likely to spank? Corporal punishment is widely accepted in the African American community (Burchinal, Skinner, & Reznick, 2010; Lorber, O’Leary, & Smith Slep, 2011). As one Black woman reported: “I would rather me discipline them than (the police)” (Taylor, Hamvas, & Paris, 2011, p. 65). As you might imagine from the “spare the rod, spoil the child” injunction, people who believe the Bible is literally true are most apt to strongly advocate this disciplinary technique (Rodriguez & Henderson, 2010).

Adults who were spanked as children see more value in this child-rearing approach (Simons & Wurtele, 2010). (In my classes, I often hear students report: “I was spanked and it helped; so I plan to do the same with my kids.”) But if you feel that physical punishment got out of hand during your childhood, you are probably passionate about never hitting your own daughter or son (Gagne and others, 2007).

What do experts advise? Here, there is debate. Many psychologists argue that physical punishment is never appropriate (Gershoff, 2002; Knox, 2010). They believe that hitting a child conveys the message that it is acceptable for big people to give small people pain. Yes, spanking, these psychologists point out, does produce compliance. But, it impairs prosocial behavior because it gets children to only focus on themselves (Andero & Stewart, 2002; Benjet & Kazdin, 2003; Knox, 2010).

Other experts believe that mild spanking is not detrimental (Baumrind, Larzelere, & Cowan, 2002; Larzelere & Kuhn, 2005; Oas, 2010). They suggest that, if we rule out corporal punishment, caregivers may resort to more damaging, shaming responses such as saying, “I hate you. You will never amount to anything.” But these psychologists have clear limits as to how and when this type of discipline might be used:

The problem is that spanking is often not a final backup—particularly among the very children whom physical punishment does most harm—boys and girls at risk for externalizing problems (recall Chapter 6). Therefore, parent training is crucial. We need to emphasize the behavioral principle that positive reinforcement (giving rewards for good behavior) is more effective than any punishment, be it spanking or being sent to a room. We must vigorously dispel the misconception that it’s possible to spoil a baby, and that spanking produces a well-behaved child (Burchinal, Skinner, & Reznick, 2010).

Frequent spanking promotes the very behavior it is supposed to cure. To take one example, researchers found that parents who believed strongly in spanking had kids who said it was fine, during disagreements with a playmate, to “hit” that other child (Simons & Wurtele, 2010). Worse yet, what might start out as a spanking can escalate as a parent “gets into it,” the child cries more, and soon you have that worst-case scenario: child abuse.

Child maltreatment—the term for acts that endanger children’s physical or emotional well-being—comprises four categories. Physical abuse refers to bodily injury that leaves bruises. It encompasses everything from overzealous spanking to battering that may lead to a child’s death. Neglect refers to caregivers’ failure to provide adequate supervision and care. It might mean abandoning the child, not providing sufficient food, or failing to enroll a son or daughter in school. Emotional abuse refers to continual shaming or terrorizing or exploiting a child. Sexual abuse covers the spectrum from rape and incest to fondling and exhibitionistic acts.

Everyone can identify serious forms of maltreatment; but there is a gray zone as to what activities cross the line (Greenfield, 2010). Does every spanking that leaves bruises qualify as physical abuse? If a single mother leaves her toddler in an 8-year-old sibling’s care, is she neglectful? Are parents who walk around naked in the house guilty of sexual abuse? Emotional abuse is inherently murky to define, although this form of maltreatment may be the most common of all (Foster and others, 2010).

This labeling issue partly explains why maltreatment statistics vary, depending on who we ask. In one global summary (involving an amazing 150 studies and 10 million participants), scientists estimated that roughly 3 of 1,000 children worldwide were physically maltreated, using informant’s (meaning, other people’s) reports. In polling adults themselves, the rates were 10 times higher than that (Stoltenborgh and others, 2013). Considering all forms of abuse, the figures are alarming: 15 percent of teenage boys were labeled as abused in a city in Iran (Mikaeili, Barahmand, & Abdi, 2013). In Canada, 1 in 4 adults reported being maltreated as a child (MacMillan and others, 2013).

Obviously, far more individuals will report (“I was abused”), than the “objective” abuse-rate statistics in any particular community indicate. But another force that accounts for these variations are cultural norms. Do you live in a patriarchal society where corporal punishment is traditionally routine (as in Iran)? Do your society’s values stress family loyalty (as in China or Japan)? (See Foynes and others, 2014.) In both cases, we would expect fewer maltreatment reports than in the West.

What we can say is that, while a few adults are prone to err in the over-reporting direction (saying “I was abused” when they are chronically angry with a mom or dad), outsider-reported rates qualify as the iceberg’s tiny tip (Greenfield, 2010). Why is maltreatment swept under the rug in our day and age? Before answering this question, let’s look at what provokes this parenting pathology and probe its effects.

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Exploring the Risk Factors

As developmental systems theory would predict, several categories of influence cause child abuse to flare up (Wolfe, 2011):

PARENTS’ PERSONALITY PROBLEMS ARE IMPORTANT. People who abuse their children tend to suffer from psychological disorders such as depression and externalizing problems (Annerbäck, Svedin, & Gustafsson, 2010). They often have hostile attributional biases (Berlin, Appleyard, & Dodge, 2011; Crouch and others, 2010), assuming “bad” behavior from benign activities, like a toddler’s running around. Their determination not to “spoil” their babies is accompanied by other unrealistic expectations. They may believe that 3-month-olds can be taught not to cry or that 8-month-olds can be totally toilet trained (Bissada & Briere, 2001).

LIFE STRESS ACCOMPANIED BY SOCIAL ISOLATION CAN BE CRUCIAL. Abusive parents are often young and poorly educated (Bartlett & Easterbrooks, 2012; Sieswerda-Hoogendoorn and others, 2013). They tend to be coping with an overload of upsetting life events, from domestic violence to severe poverty (Annerbäck, Svedin, & Gustafsson, 2010). Most important, they feel cut off from other people. Social isolation, plus severe economic distress, is the match that is most apt to ignite child abuse (Berlin, Appleyard, & Dodge, 2011; Li, Godinet, & Arnsberger, 2011).

CHILDREN’S VULNERABILITIES PLAY A ROLE. A child who is emotionally fragile can fan this fire—a baby who cries excessively (Reijneveld and others, 2004), has a medical problem (Svensson, Bornehag, & Janson, 2011), or is premature (Sieswerda-Hoogendoorn and others, 2013). Therefore, in a terrible irony, the very children that require special loving care are most apt to provoke an out-of-control caregiver’s wrath. The fact that abusive parents may target just one child was brought home to me when I was working as a clinical psychologist at a city hospital in New York. A mother was referred for treatment for abusing her “spiteful” 10-year-old, although she never harmed his “sweet” 3-year-old brother. So disturbances in the attachment relationship are a core ingredient in the poisonous recipe for producing a battered child.

Exploring the Consequences

As you learned in Chapter 4, maltreated children often have insecure attachments (Stronach and others, 2011). They tend to suffer from internalizing and externalizing problems (Mills and others, 2013), and get rejected by their peers (Kim & Cicchetti, 2010). Just as with the orphanage-reared babies discussed in Chapter 4, brain-imaging studies suggest child maltreatment may compromise the developing frontal lobes (van Harmelen and others, 2010). In one study, children exposed to sexual abuse even showed epigenetic changes in their DNA (Beach and others, 2013).

Because terrible childhood experiences prime us epigenetically to biologically break down (Shapero and others, 2014), it comes as no surprise that the long-term effects of child maltreatment span the spectrum: from adolescent antisocial tendencies (Beach and others, 2013; Brody and others, 2014), to adult executive-function deficits (Nikulina & Widom, 2013); from depression and substance abuse (Herrenkohl and others, 2013; Mills and others, 2013), to higher rates of midlife heart disease (Midei and others, 2013). These children are primed to get embroiled in abusive, adult love relationships (McCloskey, 2013) and have more trouble lovingly bonding with their babies (Muzik and others, 2013). So yes, abused children are at higher risk of maltreating their own children when they become moms and dads.

Still most abused children become decent, caring parents (Woodruff and Lee, 2011). Some are passionate to never, ever hit their daughters and sons (Berlin, Appleyard, & Dodge, 2011). As one woman described: “I made a vow to protect my children no matter what. . . . It was almost like a mantra, that I’m never going to strike (my child)” (quoted in Hall, 2011, p. 38).

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People who break the cycle of abuse tend to have good intellectual and coping skills (Hengartner and others, 2013). They are blessed to have a DNA profile that I alluded to earlier, that makes them genetically more resistant to stress (Banducci and others, 2014). Being blessed to have a stable, loving marriage also offers potent insulation from repeating the trauma of abuse (Jaffe and others, 2013).

Although developed-world child abuse rates have declined (see Pinker, 2011), this parenting pathology still is unacceptably frequent today. However, since the late-twentieth-century lifestyle revolution, even more children undergo another unwelcome family change: divorce. How does divorce affect children, and what issues do families undergoing this life transition face?

Let’s start with the bad news. Studies comparing children of divorce with their counterparts in intact married families show that these boys and girls are at a disadvantage—academically, socially, and in terms of mental health (Amato, 2010; Potter, 2010). Worse yet, Swedish researchers found that—while this statistical disparity has shrunk, as divorce has become “normal”—it still exists (Gähler & Garriga, 2013). In large part, the problem may be economic. Divorce can propel a newly mother-headed household into poverty, even though that family had previously been middle class (Schramm and others, 2013; see also Figure 7.1a on p. 200 of this chapter).

The good news is that most children cope with divorce very well, especially if this family event is fairly drama free. Still, I don’t want to minimize the guilt parents feel when making this choice. One woman in a Finnish study revealed these predictable feelings when she anguished: “What am I to change two close people’s lives . . . Was a thought that did not leave me for a long time” (as reported in Kiiski & Määttä Uusiautti, 2013).

Imagine coping with feeling you have failed your family and then needing to have a conversation that upends your children’s world. And it’s not just that you explain, “Mommy and Daddy need to live apart, but we still love you,” and children get over the news. One Israeli woman described a fairly common scenario when she reported that for months her daughter’s conversations started with the phrase, “Soon, when Dad will come back home” (quoted in Cohen, Leichtentritt, & Volpin, 2014).

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In this interview study exploring the feelings of newly divorced Israeli mothers, women said their main agenda was to minimize their children’s pain. So, they struggled to put aside their vengeful feelings and not bad-mouth their former spouses. One mother helped her child cope with his father’s hurtful absence by making it into a shared game: “I laugh. I tell him, ‘OK you miss daddy. But where is he?’ And he says ‘far, far away’”. Others vowed to avoid mentioning the gritty details: “I don’t want to hurt him,” said a woman named Trina. “I won’t tell them that his father pointed a gun at his mother.”

This is not to say that parental alienation—poisoning children against ex-partners—is rare. Even many years after separating, some people can’t resist denigrating the other parent, especially after an acrimonious divorce (see Lowenstein, 2013).

The compelling lure to succumb to relational aggression (that is, enlisting children against a former spouse) brings up the subject of custody and visitation. When the divorce is bitter (or high conflict) should a child be allowed to frequently see both the dad and mom?

For almost the entire twentieth century, the mother was given custody unless there was a serious problem with her parenting (based on the psychoanalytic principle that women are inherently superior nurturers)—a practice that unfairly limited dads from being involved in their children’s lives. Today, Western nations—from Canada, to Italy, to Sweden—have rectified this wrong by passing laws encouraging joint custody (see Lavadera, Caravelli, & Togliatti, 2013). Spouses don’t have to split living arrangements 50/50. But when the parents share custody, even when the child lives with the mother, the father can see his sons and daughters any time.

Does this permeable visiting schedule help children cope? Actually, “it depends.” Researchers found that after a divorce, moving an infant child from house to house predicted greater attachment insecurity. In contrast, adolescent research suggested that teens who split their living arrangements between ex-spouses had better mental health than their single-parent counterparts (Carlsund and others, 2013).

The most informative finding comes from scanning Figure 7.3. While more overnights with a dad who provides positive parenting promotes adjustment, if a father had poor parenting skills, children’s emotional problems escalated (Sandler, Wheeler, & Braver, 2013).

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So with custody and visitation, we need to take an individual-centered, developmental systems approach. Go for shared arrangements in the abstract, but if a father is antisocial or the spouses continually bad mouth each other, limit access to one or both parents, to protect the child (see DeGarmo, 2010; Lessard and others, 2010). Moreover, with divorce, the ongoing parenting matters most. A child should spend the most time with the parent who parents the best!

Should children be able to decide which custody and visitation arrangement they prefer? One experiment, comparing standard divorce mediation with approaches centered more on child wishes, suggested yes (Ballard and others, 2013).

Still, in a poll of divorced families, everyone recoiled at the idea of putting total decision-making burden on a child (Cashmore & Parkinson, 2008). Imagine forcing a son or daughter to publically admit, “I prefer to live with Mom or (Dad).” And imagine the coercion that might ensue from the parent side. During this semester’s divorce discussion, a student poignantly described this scenario, when she told the class: “My daughter told the judge she wanted to live with her father, and then, years later said, ‘Mom, I wanted you, but I was afraid to say so because I was frightened of Dad.’”

At this point some of you might be thinking unhappy couples should try to bite the bullet and stay together for the sake of their children. If the marriage is labeled “high conflict,” think again. For children subjected to continual marital fighting, ending the marriage improves well-being (Amato, 2010). As another student explained during the class divorce discussion, “Because the atmosphere at home was terrible, I felt much happier after my parents divorced.”

Table 7.2 summarizes these points in a parenting-related divorce questionnaire. In Chapter 11, I’ll fully explore divorce from the adult point of view. Now it’s time to turn to that other setting within which children develop—school.

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Question 7.1

Montana’s parents = authoritative. Pablo’s parents = authoritarian. Sara’s parents = permissive.

Question 7.2

Amber

Question 7.3

Judith Harris’s advice = Get your son in the best possible peer group. This chapter’s recommendation = Provide exceptionally sensitive parenting.

Question 7.4

1. Never spank children of any age.

2. Mild spanking is OK for the infant.

3. Mild spanking is OK for the 4-year-old, as a backup.

4. If the child has a difficult temperament, regular corporal punishment might help.

a and c

Question 7.5

Ms. Johnson might feel torn about reporting her observations, because she is afraid of parents retaliating or worried about making false accusations. Even if she does make a report, there is a good chance authorities will not investigate the situation.

Question 7.6

The main criterion for awarding joint custody—or unlimited visits—should be whether the father is a good parent.