This essay focuses on dialogue between parent and child. Authoritarian parenting involves high demands on children, with strict rules and little open dialogue

dialogue between parent and child

discuss again later in this chapter, Chinese children really shine in their academic performance, particularly in math and science. Could it be that this over-the-top strict parenting style actually leads to successful children? The most well-researched approach to understanding the effects of parenting styles has been Diana Baumrind’s (1971) tripartite typology. Authoritarian parenting involves high demands on children, with strict rules and little open dialogue between parent and child

. It typically involves low levels of warmth or responsiveness by the parents to the child’s protests. Authoritative parenting is a child-centered approach in which parents hold high expectations of the maturity of their children, try to understand their children’s feelings and teach them how to regulate those feelings, and encourage their children to be independent while maintaining limits and controls on their behaviors. This approach is associated with parental warmth, responsiveness, and democratic reasoning. Permissive parenting is characterized by parents being very involved with their children.

THis is with much expressed parental

warmth and responsiveness, but placing few limits and controls on the children’s behaviors. The results of research on these styles with Western populations have been fairly consistent: Authoritative parenting leads to the most desirable outcomes in terms of perceived parental warmth, acceptance, better school achievement, autonomy, and self-reliance 182 CHAPTER 5 � DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIALIZATION (e.g., Leung, Lao, & Lam, 1998; Steinberg, Lamborn, Dornbusch, & Darling, 1992; Trommsdorff, 1985). However, some have argue that Baumrind’s typology is bind up in Western cultural understandings of development and does not adequately capture parenting styles elsewhere.

At first glance, Chinese

parenting styles, with Amy Chua’s as an extreme example, would seem to be best describe as authoritarian. Indeed, such kinds of strict parent-centered parenting are also common in other non-Western cultures, such as countries in East, Southeast, and South Asia, as well as in Egypt, Iran, Turkey, and Latin America (e.g., Dornbusch, Ritter, Leiderman, Roberts, & Fraleigh, 1987; Harwood, Miller, & Irizarry, 1995; Huang & Lamb, 2014; Kagicibasi, 1996;

Rudy & Grusec, 2006). However, some elements of various non-Western cultures’ dominant parenting styles are inconsistent with the authoritarian category. First, it is important to recognize that in many Asian cultures, infants and toddlers are often shown a great deal of indulgence with few demands or expectations placed on them until they reach school age, when parents become much stricter (e.g., Conroy, Hess, Azuma, & Kashiwagi, 1980; Kim, Kim, & Rue, 1997; Morrow, 1989); that is, there are different parental styles depending on the stage of development of the child. Second, the ways th.