Some directive parenting may do a child good

New research suggests children benefit from two complementary parenting styles: challenging and directive as well as supportive and caring.

Stereotypes suggest the sensitive, caring mother—but not father—responding to a young child’s emotional needs.

Research on dads has long suggested that men may interact differently with their children: being more direct, sometimes pushing the child to take risks beyond their comfort-zone and encouraging them to persevere when faced with frustration.

In the end, according to a new study, children may need both parenting styles—the challenge to take risks, explore, and learn from the world around them while feeling supported in the loving care of their parents.

Joyce Lee, a doctoral candidate in social work and developmental psychology at the University of Michigan, and colleagues analyzed whether fathers’ challenging and directive style of parenting benefited their kids’ development.

The data came from the Building Strong Families project, which included a racially diverse sample of 672 low-income parents with preschoolers. Designed to test father-child activation relationship theory, the researchers found evidence for a more challenging and directive pattern of parenting used by some fathers and some mothers.

Parenting behaviors were observed during father-child and mother-child play sessions and then examined in relation to children’s socioemotional development and language skills. Both dads and moms fell into one of three parenting profiles: supportive, intrusive, and challenging/directive.

Few of the parents in the study appeared to be intrusive, which involves a high degree of parent-centered control and interference in children’s play and a disregard for the child, says Lee, the study’s lead author.

When Lee and colleagues compared families in which fathers and mothers were using similar or different styles of parenting on child outcomes, they found that children in families with challenging/directive fathers did not differ from kids with supportive dads on such outcomes as children’s behavior problems, prosocial behaviors, emotional security, and effortful control. Children with both supportive moms and dads had the highest scores in language skills.

When parents, either fathers or mothers, engage in challenging and directive parenting that occurs in a supportive and positive parent-child relationship, children may be more willing to take some risks and rise to the challenges placed before them, trusting they have the protection and support of their parents, the researchers say.

“By focusing exclusively on a style of parenting that has traditionally emphasized responsive, positively affectionate, child-centered mother-child interactions, we may be overlooking other ways of parenting that may also benefit children’s socioemotional development by challenging children to go the extra mile, persevere, and gain self-confidence in the process,” Lee says.

The study appears in the journal Psychology of Men & Masculinities.

Source: University of Michigan

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