What Are Parenting Styles?
Effects on Gifted Children: An introduction to parenting style and how it can affect a gifted child’s outcomes in school and life. Part 1 of 2
Effects on Gifted Children: An introduction to parenting style and how it can affect a gifted child’s outcomes in school and life. Part 1 of 2
Various environmental factors play a role in the different outcomes within groups of children who have similar abilities and levels of intelligence.
I finished interviews of 60 now-grown gifted children about 18 years after their parents contributed their gifted children’s milestones and stories to my first book, 5 Levels of Gifted: School Issues and Educational Options in 2009. The original manuscript was first published in 2005 and named Losing Our Minds: Gifted Children Left Behind. (Links at end of post).
In the time between writing that first book and developing the 5 Levels of Gifted concept and rubric, I saw more than a thousand more families … sometimes briefly and sometimes with a thorough evaluation and consultation. The gifted children in the first book were all born between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s. Many families kept in touch with me. I wanted to wind down my consultancy but didn’t want to leave all I’d learned un-shared. Thus came the follow-up book published in 2023: The 5 Levels of Gifted Children Grown Up: What They Tell Us.
Study Results Related to Parenting Styles
Parenting style, the interaction of parent and child personality, parent viewpoints and beliefs, family socioeconomics, social capital, and peer groups are all among the factors that affect gifted children during their growing up years.
The initial working hypothesis of this study was that an interaction among parenting style, personality, and viewpoint each make similar contributions to gifted child outcomes and that a parent’s style comes from their own experiences and the resulting ways they see the world. It soon became apparent that one must also look at and analyze the deeper background of where this combination of viewpoints arose.
This post is the first of two Parenting Styles posts. I share explanations of what each of these topics means in the context of this analysis. In addition, some following posts provide the childhood personality type preference of the now-grown gifted child, as well as those of the parents, so we can look at ways that interaction between parent and child may affect the attitudes, feelings, and self-concept of the grown gifted child.
Eventual career outcomes appear related to the school fit during kindergarten through post-high school education. I posted pieces on career outcomes and best fit in earlier posts. The parents often play a role — active or incidental — in whether a “best fit” is available. School performance and cooperation are also affected by how well subjects see eye-to-eye with their parents on whether a school is working for them or not and to what extent the school fits each gifted child. This is where personality, parenting styles, and personal viewpoints appear to affect the outcome, as well. The kinds of peer groups different gifted children experience are related to all these other factors. In earlier posts I explained what the school and social environmental “fits” were for all the study subjects, as well as how postsecondary education was selected and paid for. The titles of those posts are listed at the end in case you want to find them in the archives. There are four of them and their titles all start with these words: “Post-High School Education and Careers.” The summary post for those four is called “The Five Levels of Gifted School Years and Post-High School Education and Careers.”
What Are Parenting Styles?
Although this post shares definitions and descriptions of parenting styles, readers should look for what seems familiar from their own childhoods. And, if you are parents yourselves, how does (or did) your own parenting style overlap or blend with those described here? By so doing, you will get more out of the posts that follow, and the ideas here may help you to determine your own perspectives and where your own viewpoints and views may have originated. Think about what worked for you as the gifted child you were while growing up — it is likely that the biological parents are fairly similar to their children in intellectual ability — so the chances they were also gifted children are high. Then consider how your own parents’ approaches and views worked for you and made you feel.
For the purpose of this study of families from the United States, the work of a well-known parenting style theorist, psychologist Diana Baumrind, is used. During the 1960s, Baumrind (1967) introduced terms and descriptions for parenting styles that she called 105 authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. A fourth style is neglectful or uninvolved parenting. The current analysis focuses on all four styles. Additional research continues to connect these core parenting styles with various child outcomes. What do these styles look like? I cover the first one here and the other three in the Part 2 post.
Authoritarian
Authoritarian parents are directive. They see their parent role as being responsible for how the child behaves, performs, and compares to others. Children are expected to follow strict, inflexible rules established by the parents and other authority figures with whom the parent agrees. Failure to follow such rules usually results in punishment. If the child asks why she has a specific rule the usual answer is some form of “Because I said so.” These parents have high demands and are not emotionally responsive to their children. “Not emotionally responsive” means parents focus on the outcome they envision and will not consider a protestation as possibly valid that the rule or punishment is unfair or wrong. According to Baumrind, these parents “are obedience-and status-oriented and expect their orders to be obeyed without explanation” (1991, p. 62).
As I gathered data for this study, it was apparent some adult children and their parents are confused about several elements of authoritarian parenting. For example, what is punishment? Most specifically, can you still be authoritarian even if you explain the rule and the punishment for breaking it? And can you still be authoritarian if you do not hit your child?
Punishment is not the same as discipline. Punishment is a parental reaction or consequence that does not teach an actual lesson except for the child to avoid getting in trouble and being punished. A parent can use the authoritarian style without ever resorting to hitting his child. Instead, the parent metes out a consequence, like grounding or withholding allowance, that is not related to the broken rule or parental expectation. When a parent explains why the child is receiving the punishment, and the punishment is still unrelated to building the child’s healthy independence, it is punishment rather than what most people refer to as a “Natural Consequence.”
Therapist Jana Rockne points out that a natural consequence is when the child makes the choice, for example, not to put a dirty shirt in the hamper and it doesn’t get washed and she can’t wear it the next day as she’d planned. A logical consequence example is this: The rule is we do not leave our toys or personal belongings in the family’s common areas without explicit exceptions or permission (to allow for sensible exceptions). The consequence of going to bed or school without picking personal things up ahead of time will lead to those things being sequestered elsewhere for some predetermined time period. The punishment is directly related to the rule-breaking.
For parents in updated study, feedback from them and their adult children revealed the authoritarian pattern is frequently passed from one generation to the next. Several grown gifted children reported their authoritarian parents are still judged and measured by their own parents, too. Often involved, on-top-of-things, and the managers of their children’s schooling, most authoritarian parents believe doing “what you are supposed to do,” including what the teacher expects, is important, and getting good grades is a sign of achievement and promises future opportunities in life. In other words, they care a great deal about how the child turns out and are often perplexed or ashamed if it does not go well. Generally, authoritarian parents are the most likely of the parenting styles to decide for their children what their children need to aim for and achieve to be successful. Authoritarian parents also are likely to monitor homework, set specific times for when it must be completed, and offer the most hands-on homework support to their children. Their children disappoint them if they do not comply and achieve at high levels in the areas their parents’ viewpoint believes are important.
This does not mean authoritarian parents necessarily buy into what the school expects. In many cases, the parent does not think the school is doing as it should for their gifted child. These parents typically find another school or educational arrangements that will provide grades and rewards and attention for doing well. Some authoritarian parents homeschool to make sure their child gets what he or she “needs,” but they are more likely than parents with a different parenting style to adhere to a strict structure and curriculum rather than allow the child’s interests or passions to lead the way. Some children do well, or appear to do well, under this kind of supervision; others do not. The personality type preference of the child is usually behind the difference in what works well for different gifted children as readers will see in later posts.
Notes
1) For those interested in taking a deeper dive into the topic of parenting and parent styles, I include these resources 106 from both my own reading and Gail Post’s book, with permission, The Gifted Parenting Journey: A Guide to Self-Discovery and Support for Families of Gifted Children (2022), for further reading: Baumrind (1989, 1991); Cornell and Grossberg (1987); Darling and Steinberg (1993); Dornbusch, Ritter, Leiderman, Roberts, and Fraleigh (1987); Dwairy (2004); Freeman (2000a, 2013); Huey, Saylor and Rinn (2013); Karnes, Shwedel and Steinberg (1984); Maccoby and Martin (1983); Pilarinos and Solomon (2017); Robinson, Lanzi, Weinberg, Ramey and Ramey (2002); Weiss, L. H., & Schwarz, J. C. (1996) are all good ones to consider when zeroing in on your own particular interests and circumstances.
2) For another explanation of differences between punishment and discipline, see
https://childcare.extension.org/what-is-the-difference-between-discipline-and-punishment/
3) For more examples and explanations of natural and logical consequences see https://www.positivediscipline.com/articles/natural-consequences from Jane Nelsen, 1996. See Nelsen, J., 1996 and Dreikurs, R., 1964.
4) Read more about the difference between “natural” and “logical” consequences. See https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/print-publications/t/parenting-with-natural-and-logical-consequences-t-2390.pdf
5) Gail Post, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, writer, and consultant. In clinical practice for more than three decades, she provides psychotherapy and parent consultations with a focus on the needs of intellectually and musically gifted. She is also an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Dr. Post also generously agreed to review my Parenting chapter, and she offered tweaks and additional resources.
6) See Dona Matthews’ explanations about neurodiversity here: Neurodiversity and Gifted Education
7) The term basically means a child is gifted with a learning disability; the child is exceptional in intelligence and 112 has a learning problem. Both conditions need “treatment.” Different information and ideas on learning disabilities: https://ldaamerica.org/types-of-learning-disabilities/, and https://ldaamerica.org/info/adults-with-learning-disabilities-an-overview/
The Five Levels of Gifted Children Grown Up: What They Tell Us (2023). https://www.amazon.com/Levels-Gifted-Children-Grown-Up/dp/B0C9SHFRLH or https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-5-levels-of-gifted-children-grown-up-phd-deborah-l-ruf/1143719859?ean=9798988323709. This is an 18 year longitudinal study follow-up about the original gifted child subjects in 5 Levels of Gifted: School Issues and Educational Options (2005, 2009).
5 Levels of Gifted: School Issues and Educational Options in 2009. Here are links to the 5 Levels of Gifted book on Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/5-levels-of-gifted-deborah-ruf/1126358834 and Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Levels-Gifted-School-Educational-Options/dp/0910707987 or directly from the publisher: https://www.giftedunlimitedllc.com/store/p12/5_Levels_of_Gifted.html
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