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Who's in Charge Here? Perspectives on Parental Authority Issues
By Lilian Katz

Lilian Katz spoke to Winnetka early childhood professionals on January 28, 1993, at the Alliance's Networking Event. Below are excerpts from her insightful comments.

There are many issues confronting modern parents. One important one is the parental exercise of authority.

Most of you are no doubt familiar with the now classical work of Diana Baumrind, who first reported on studies of parenting styles in the 1960's. As you will recall, Baumrind studied preschoolers, and found that different parenting styles predicted different levels of competence in children. Basically, she identified three major parenting styles, including:

• authoritarian: Authoritarian parents display high demands, high controls, low warmth, and low communication. Baumrind showed that parents who behaved this way had children who were hostile, negative, and somewhat sour and recalcitrant.

• permissive: Permissive parents, who were low on demands and controls, are fairly high on communication and warmth. Their children were somewhat clingy, whiney, and not very self-sufficient.

• authoritative: Authoritative parents combined all four--high de-mands, high controls, high warmth, and communication. Baumrind also called these parents responsive. They responded to children's behavior in all these ways: demanding, controlling, and with warmth, support, encouragement, and communication. These parents tended to have the most competent children. They were described as well-behaved, imaginative, exploratory, purposeful, and intentional--somewhat like our ideal children. The authoritative style of parenting is most likely to lead to children who are so-cially responsible and capable of social initiative. These children were not only personally more competent, but they performed significantly better in school and experimented less with drugs and alcohol during adolescence.

This finding suggests that parents' acceptance, abdication, and expression of their authority throughout the years of childhood has lasting effects not only on general social competence but on school achievement as well. What is worrying is that we are seeing more and more parents abdicating their authority, apparently expecting that the school and, perhaps, other social agencies will exercise it.

It seems to me that when there is insufficient exercise of authority and when there are weaknesses in the attachment between children and their parents early on, there is a vacuum. That vacuum may be filled by peers or the media or both. When we look at the media, we see that they teach not only violence and strong sexuality, but also greed.

So how can we help parents with this problem?

Everyone agrees that children need to feel loved, not just to be loved. Young children can only grow properly on the love that comes from someone they can look up to, and they cannot look up to parents they can push around, manipulate, outwit, insult, be rude to, or hit.

Why, then, have so many parents abdicated their authority? Are parents too busy to have time to monitor their children's lives, to communicate with them about their most urgent concerns, to stay with their children's problems for the length of time required to exercise their authority? Parental authority cannot be appro-priately exercised unless the parent really knows a lot about the child's life, feelings, and activities.

Are parents suffering from guilt and therefore indulging their children? I met a child care teacher who told a story about a child who regularly brought a very expensive, fancy war toy into the child care center, creating a good deal of havoc with the other children. When she asked the mother to keep it at home, the mother said, "I drop my child off early every morning and don't see him again until late evening, and I just can't deny him his favorite toys." Here the mother han-dles her guilt feelings by indulging the child, but we have good reason to believe that such indulgence is not in the long-term best interests of the child.

How can we help parents understand the important but subtle distinction between being sensitive to a child and being indulgent? Incidentally, for some time I have been interested in the similarities between the children of the very affluent and the children of

But it seems as though children need optimum limits and boundaries or they cannot organize their own purposes and mobilize their energies and develop socially desirable intentions. They are not required to try to seek out how to realize their wishes and purposes. There are not enough contingencies to be learned.

When parents are unsure of what they want and what they consider desirable and permissible behavior, they give children mixed signals about what is accepted and tolerated. Under these conditions, children are likely to either ignore parental signals or push hard until they get something really clear from them.

If we are going to make errors as parents, it is probably in the child's best long-term interests to make the error of being too firm, rather than too permissive. Excessive permissiveness makes it difficult for children to organize their own behavior and to control their own impulses. Similarly, authoritarian, heavy-handed parents would have the same effect. Someone else sets the purposes and exercises the controls. I think we have a big job to do in this matter.

What implications does this have for teachers? I think Baumrind's formulation of parenting styles can be easily applied to teaching styles as well. It seems to me that children need authoritative teachers. Perhaps we can at least provide children ample experience with authoritative adults.