What authoritative parenting is and how can it help you
Authoritative parenting is the name the psychologists give to a specific type of parenting. To understand better this concept it would be helpful to analyze parenting style, like psychologists do. They measure up two factors when deciding to label a style: parental warmth and behavioral control or basically how you care and empathize with your child and how well you learn him or her to obey certain social standards. Obviously there are four parenting standards when viewed under this perspective. Authoritative parenting is the one that holds both parental warmth and behavioral control at high levels.
What does this mean for a normal parent? Well it is quite simple, those who practice authoritative parenting are those who both play with their kids, but also make them do their homework. Much better definition!
Ok, now we know what authoritative parenting means. Another question arises? Does it do any good? Well... sort of. For most of the American families who have used this style of parenting before it even had a name, it did very well. As a matter of fact most psychologists consider authoritative parenting as the best solution and uninvolved parenting (its exact opposite) as the worst style, but the truth is that this is just a label and most parents only use authoritative parenting to a certain degree, they will not always be empathic with their kids and they will not always punish bad behavior.
Authoritative parenting is more or less an ideal to which just about any parent strives. We are all human in the end and nobody is perfect. To make matters more complicated still, in certain cultures this sort of parenting is not actually effective. What a strange world we live in. The funny part of all this debate is that the Western world actively promotes this style, in good faith obviously, although the rules differ sensibly from one culture to another.
The carrot and the stick. Now this would be a nice logo for the authoritative parenting lifestyle. Some cultures though are more attracted to cabbage and others more attracted to the boomerang. Isn't there a global solution? I'm afraid that it isn't. There are too many fallacious assumptions in psychology to begin with, introducing one more would be sort of useless.
Bottom line is that if you live in a Western country the social pattern will make the authoritative parenting very effective and useful, but if you are not try using your common sense and do like your parents did to you. Not everything coming from the think tanks of the West holds universal truth in it.