Child Rearing Styles

My parent’s child rearing styles would be a mixture. There is just not one particular style that would fit my mother or father completely. My mother would be a mixture of the authoritative child-rearing style and authoritarian child rearing-style. My father has an authoritative child –rearing style, but not completely. My mother has always wanted the best for her children, but she had a lot of stress factors of her own that distracted her at times. My mother is a very sensitive and emotional parent, which helped her children to gain a close connection to her. My father exercised firm and reasonable control. He insisted on appropriate maturity, and he gave us the reasons for his expectations with our lives. My mother and father both allowed
us to make our own decisions in certain areas when we were ready to do so. My mother and father divorced when I was in elementary and I was the youngest child .My father was still involved in our lives regardless of his relationship with my mother. He would always come to pick us up to spend quality time and attend all of our school functions. My father was more attentive and responsive to all of our actions. He always made reasonable demands for maturity and consistently enforced and explained them. My mother would not take as much time out to explain her demands that she had for us. For example, we all knew we had to make passing grades in school or else we would get punished by her, but we never really knew the real reason of how making good grades in school would really impact our future. My mother was stronger on encouraging us to express our thoughts, feelings and desires in life. She mainly wanted us to just be ourselves, be proud and happy about it. My mother had just a little touch of the authoritarian child-rearing style.
She would make many demands coercively, using force and punishment. To apply control, she would yell, command, criticize, and threatens, trying to demand unquestioning obedience. For example, if either child had made a bad grade, then she would yell to get her point across, then she would let you know the consequences for your failing and making low grades, which was followed by a spanking. I think that the communication could have been better, such that the message would have been understood and received better. My belief is that the cultural factors that might have influenced my mom’s parenting approach were spankings from her childhood and her parent’s childhood and so on. My mother and my father were raised getting spankings if they did not do something right or if they were disobedient as punishment, rather than taking time out to put a child in time out or taking a special item away for a certain amount of time such that we could reach an understanding that if you fail you lose your TV watching privileges or you will not hang out with your friends for a week which in the long run would have sent the message less forceful but rather encourage us not to
fail. I have had classmates in school who I knew their parents fit the permissive child-rearing style, because they were able to leave the house at late hours of the night, talk on the phone all night, and even have the opposite sex spend the night at their house at a young age. I could observe and see that there was no guidance and no demands for maturity. While some of my other classmates’ parents had neglected them and the child was able to do whatever they wanted to do without any restrictions, it was a sign of a parenting style closely related to the uninvolved child-rearing style. Many children with parents closely related to these styles, had a lot of problems in school and would always get in trouble or called to the principal’s office a couple times. These parenting styles are very similar to a lot of people I know, but I have not seen one that just completely fits one person.