What is your parenting style?

Your parenting style is likely to impact the way your child grows up. Being responsive to your children, and at the same time, setting clear rules and limits, is crucial for you as a parent. Based on this, four main styles of parenting have been identified:

• "Just do it or else" – Some parents adopt a highly authoritarian, dictatorial style. They expect children to obey orders without questioning. Rules are well defined in such households and breaking them usually invites punishment. Such a system is typical of societies where little change is expected and deviance from normal behavior can be costly such as a rural or agrarian society.

• "A no means a no" – Some parents are firm, assertive, and authoritative without being authoritarian. They set clear rules, and are firm about discipline without using harsh punishment. Children in such homes are expected to be socially responsible.

• "Do anything you want" – Parents with this style believe in the permissive or indulgent approach. They do not demand responsible behavior and avoid confrontation with their children. Several parents in the 50s and 60s adopted this style.

• "I don't care what you do" – Few parents remain uninvolved in their children's lives, which in few cases, borders on neglect.

Typically, most parents are variations or combinations of the above four styles.

There is no “right” or “wrong” parenting style though we all have prejudices on what we think works best based on our own experience and values. Research, however, has shown the effects of various parenting styles on children:

• Children that have grown up in authoritarian settings, tend to show average performance in school but lack spontaneity, effective social skills, and self-confidence.

• Children who are brought up by authoritative parents, grow up to become more responsible. They easily adjust to situations that demand cooperation.

• Children with permissive parents tend to be more creative but some research indicates they may develop behavioral problems as they grow up because they do not accept responsibility.

• Children with uninvolved parents perform poorly at school.

http://www.greatdad.com/tertiary/27/1744/choose-your-parenting-style.html

Avoid TV in children under 2 years?

Infants vocalize significantly less, and the adults who are with them also speak much less, while they are watching TV, a study published in the June issue of the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine has confirmed.

Researchers analyzed digital recordings of 2- to 48-month-old children and their parents that were made once a month on random days for up to 2 years. Each hour of audible television was associated with a significant drop in how much the children vocalized and engaged in conversational exchanges with the adults present.

The adults also spoke 770 fewer words during each hour that the TV was audible — a dramatic bite out of the average 940 word-per-hour rate adults usually speak.

"That 770-word reduction is almost a complete 1-to-1 displacement [of the amount adults talk]," said lead investigator Dimitri Christakis, MD, from the Center for Child Health, Behavior, and Development at the Seattle Children's Research Institute and the University of Washington School of Medicine.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that TV exposure should be avoided in children under the age of 2 years and that older children should view only 2 or fewer hours of TV per day. This is to ensure that children engage in as much interaction as possible with adults and thus have normal language development and brain growth.

A Major Problem

Benard Dreyer, MD, from Bellevue Hospital and the New York University School of Medicine, in New York City, was an author of a previous, retrospective study of low-income families that also showed TV exposure is associated with less parent-child vocal interaction (Mendelsohn AL et al. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2008;162:411-417). He said he "completely" agrees with the veracity of the new study's findings.

"I think that this [TV watching by young children] is a major problem, especially with respect to language development and all other types of early-childhood development that are predicated on interacting with adults, including cognitive development," Dr. Dreyer told Medscape Psychiatry. "Children who are interacting less with their parents and hearing less language are going to develop less language and also fewer other cognitive skills," he added.

Dr. Christakis and his colleagues obtained the data for the study from the LENA Foundation Natural Language Study. In the study, parents and their children aged 2 to 48 months were recruited and matched to the national-average levels of maternal education and child sex. The parents agreed to put a digital language-processing device in the front pocket of a specially designed vest that their child wore once a month for up to 24 months.

A total of 329 child-parent pairs contributed at least 1 recording with usable speech data to the study. The children's average age at the first session was 18 months, 51% were boys, and 79% were white; they were exposed to a mean of 1.3 hours of audible TV per day.

The investigators performed regression analyses that revealed that television exposure was linked with significantly reduced child vocalization count and duration as well as reduced conversation. These effects increased with every additional hour per day of television exposure.

Likewise, every additional hour of television exposure was associated with a 636-word decrease in the number of words the children heard from the female adults in their vicinity and a 134-word decrease in words heard from adult males, for a total reduction of 770 adult words.

Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2009;163: 554-558. Abstract

http://stanford.wellsphere.com/

Help Your Kids Learn the True Meaning of the Holidays

As children grow into their pre-adolescent years, they spend more time outside the home and with friends, and are exposed to a lot more media messages beyond the influence of parents. Tweens are bombarded with advertising, both blatant and subtle, especially during the busy shopping season.

Developmentally, tweens are beginning their search for an identity separate from parents and family, so they are especially vulnerable to manipulative advertising that plays on their insecurities. They are anxious to "grow up," and marketers exploit this desire by targeting younger and younger audiences for products that were once considered only appropriate for adults.

We can relate to that feeling. Adults also buy into the hype of consumerism - a feeing that is only heightened during the holiday season. Just like our tweens, we hop from one "miracle product" to the next in hopes of buying a new and improved identity, or an instant wealth of happiness.

Help your tween separate fact from marketing: A product endorsed by their favorite celebrity will not give them a better sense of who they are. Having strong holiday traditions - making memories your child will always cherish - those are the things that will resound in their lives.

Here are some good ways you can spend time with your son or daughter, to help your tween develop the warm feeling:

• Make special holiday memories with your kids. Do things that they will enjoy and remember, so that some day they might share those things with their own children.
• Do volunteer work. Any community center or organization can advise your teen on how and where to begin, and the holidays are a great time, not only to reach out, but to reflect.
• Have your kids provide a gift for you, a sibling or a friend that costs no money.

Help your tween concentrate on making improvements based on actions rather than consumerism; he or she will be happier and more productive, and will know real warmth this holiday season.

From Who's Raising Your Child? , by Laura J. Buddernberg and Kathleen M. McGee