Each family has unique circumstances that affect the way parents raise their children. Family members’ individual talents and personalty traits, couples with family structure, living arrangements, and cultural norms and expectations make it impossible to prepare a handbook for parenting that addresses every situation.
Usually the Lord gives us the overall objectives to be accomplished and some guidelines to follow, but he expects us to work out most of the details and methods. The methods and procedures are usually developed through study and prayer and by living so that we can obtain and follow the promptings of the Spirit. -Ezra Taft Benson
We are taught to “rear children in love and righteousness” and to adapt to child individuality.
Parents should never drive their children, but lead them along, giving them knowledge as their minds are prepared to receive it. Chastening may be necessary at times, but parents should govern their children by faith rather than by the rod, leading them kindly by good example into all truth and holiness.
Crucial Elements For Child Development
- Love, Warmth, and Support
- Clear and reasonable expectations for competent behavior
- Limits and boundaries with some room for negotiation and compromise
- Reasoning and developmentally appropriate consequences and punishments for not following the rules
- Opportunities to perform competently and make choices
- Absence of coercive, hostile forms of discipline, such as harsh physical punishment, love withdrawal, shaming, and inflicting guilt
- Models of appropriate behavior consistent with self-control, positive values, and positive attitudes.
The coercive parenting style is characterized of parents who deride, demean, or diminish children and teens by continually putting them in their place, putting them down, mocking them, or holding power over them through punitive or psychologically controlling means. It takes place in homes where there is a hostile climate manifested by frequent spanking, yelling, criticizing, and forcing. This type of parenting style has been linked to many forms of antisocial, withdrawal, and delinquent behaviors in children and adolescents.
Psychologically controlling behaviors by parents communicate disinterest in what the child is saying; invalidate or discount a child's feelings; attack the child in a condescending or patronizing way; and use guild or induction, love withdrawal, shaming, or erratic emotional behavior as means of control and manipulation.
Love withdrawal, angrily refusing to talk to or look at a child after he or she misbehaves, in particular runs contrary to the ways that God deals with disobedient children and is damaging to a parent/child relationship.
Coercive parenting is not the way God would parent. It is the way Satan would parent.
Coercive parenting shows little respect for the divine nature and individual characteristics of a child.
“Children don’t need beating. They need love and encouragement.” - Brigham Young
The permissive parenting style is characterize by parents who overindulge children or neglect them by leaving them to their devices. Parents who use this style fail to provide guidance and constraint when it is required for the child’s good. Parents have been counseled by modern-day prophets to enforce reasonable limits to teach their children the clear bounds of acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
Permissive parents tend to avoid using their authority to control their children’s behavior. They tolerate children’s impulses, encourage children to make their own devisions without providing necessary parameter, and refrain from imposing structure on children’s time (bedtimes, mealtimes, & computer time.)
Research suggest that children raised with permissive parents may have a greater difficulty respecting others, coping with frustration, delaying gratification for a greater goal, and following through with plans.
“We should avoid spoiling children by giving them too much. In our day, many children grow up with distorted values because we as parents overindulge them...One of the most important things we can teach our children is to deny themselves. Instant gratification generally makes for weak people.” -Elder Joe J. Christensen
The authoritative parenting style fosters a positive emotion connect with children, provides for regulation that places fair and consistent limits on child behavior, and allows for reasonable child autonomy in decision making.This style creates a positive emotional climate that helps children be more open to parental input and direction and allows for parents to individualize child rearing.
Children and adolescents raised by authoritative parents tend to do better in school; are less aggressive and delinquent; are less likely to abuse drugs; are more friendly and accepted by peers are more communicative, self motivated, and academically inclines; and more willing to abide by laws. THey are also capable of moral reasoning and are more self controlled.
Positive parenting styles are more likely to be effective when parents are unified in their parenting efforts.
Three Characteristics of Authoritative Parenting
Love
Limits
Latitude
Love
“Kind looks, kind actions, kind words, and a lovely, holy deportment toward them will ind our children to us with bands that cannot easily be broken; while abuse and unkindness will drive them from us.” -Brigham Young
Ephesians 6:4 says, “Provoke not your children to wrath; but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”
Research shows that children are less aggressive and more sociable and empathetic if they have parents (particularly fathers) who are more loving, patient, playful, responsive, and sympathetic to children’s feelings and needs.
“Fathers be kind to your children. Be companionable with them.”- Gordon B Hinckley
Take time to be a real friend to your children. Listen to your children, really listen. Talk with them, laugh and joke with them, sing with them, play with them, cry with them, hug them, honestly praise them. Yes, regularly spend un rushed one-on-one time with each child. Be a real friend to your children. - President Ezra Taft Benson
Limits
Finding way to effectively help children learn how to regulate their own behavior in non coercive ways is one of the most challenging parts of authoritative parenting.
Authoritative homes are clear and firm about rules and expectation. To make the home a place of security, parents build a safely net of appropriate limits for their children, generously communicate their approval of desirable behavior and help children understand how to regulate themselves.
One way that parents help children learn to be self-regulating is by setting limits and following through with pre-established consequences.
Latitude
Children benefit from being given choices and appropriate levels of latitude to make their own decisions in a variety of domains. Children learn and grow by learning how to make choices within limits that are acceptable to the parents.
Helping children learn how to make decisions requires that parents give them a measure of autonomy, dependent on the age and maturity of the child and the situation at hand. Parents need to give children choices and should be prepared to appropriately adjust some rules, thus preparing children for real-world situations.
Parental communication is open and nonjudgemental, with more emphasis on listening to understand rather than on talking.
When Children and teens are given latitude for decision making in areas that matter less, they are more likely to feel trusted and empowered to choose rightly and conform to parental expectations that matter more.
When our teenagers begin testing family values, parents need to go to the Lord for guidance on the specific needs of each family member. This is the time for added love and support and to reinforce our teachings on how to make choices. -Robert D. Hales
Rearing children in love and righteousness requires the best effort the parents have to offer.
“Of all the joys of life, none other equals that of happy parenthood. Of all the responsibilities which we struggle, none other is so serious. To reach children in an atmosphere of love, security, and faith is the most rewarding of all challenges. The food result from such efforts becomes life’s most satisfying compensation.” -Gordon B. Hinckley
