Parental Control

Parenting during childhood is about nurturing and taking care of the child’s simple needs. The parent is the one in complete control, when the child becomes an adolescent; they need a feeling of their own independence. The goal is for the adolescent to gradually be treated as an adult individual with an equal balance of power between parent and child(). When a child becomes an adolescent their needs grow to fit their new maturity and environment. They have social developed, in which their psychological needs come into play, competence, relatedness, and autonomy (Kakihara & Tilton-Weaver, 2009).

To grow these needs, parent control has to be open and supportive of the adolescent. The authoritarian parent demands for perfection and is unresponsive to the child’s needs. The child may feel neglected and distant from their parent. They may also feel overly pressured to meet the high standards set by the authoritarian parent. Permissive parents are the opposite, as in they have very low standards for achievement and have no rules for order. The parent acts in a laissez-faire manor, in which they allow the child to do as they please, without any discipline or praise for their actions.

Typically, children raised by permissive parents fail to mature into adolescence and tend to lack respect for the rules of society (Fite, Stoppelbein, & Greening, 2009). Ultimately, passive parents become more liberal parents resulting from the continual defiance and rebellion that their adolescent children express towards their parenting efforts (Keijsers, Frijins, Branje, & Meeus, 2009). The goal is to be a combination of authoritarian and permissive, which is referred to as an authoritative parent.

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The authoritative parent is highly supportive, and takes time to explain to the child why they may have been punished for their actions (Fite, Stoppelbein & Greening, 2009). In addition to the authoritarian, authoritative and permissive styles of parenting, each parent also has a particular style of parental control. The two main styles of parental control are behavioral and psychological. The authoritarian parent favors controlling the adolescents’ behavior by setting limits, enforcing rules, in an overbearing way.

The other type of control, psychological, is the parent using feelings and emotions to control them without the adolescent realizing. (Keijers, Frijns, Branje, Meeus, 2009). In an act to prevent adolescents from delinquency and following the “wrong crowd” parents try to seek information from the child without making them feel belittled. For delinquency to be prevented, parent involvement must be present, as well as the adolescent’s willingness to listen.

When parents fail to react as a supportive parent, they run the risk of their child reacting in a reckless and careless manor. In a study done by Keijsers, Frijins, Branje, and Meeus (2009), noted that adolescent delinquent activities were stronger in families with high levels of parental support. A significant part of raising an adolescent is trusting the child to confide in them (2009). The way parents track their child at the age of adolescents depends a great deal on the amount of information in which the child discloses.

The adolescent has greater control of what they are willing to admit, and the relevancy of it. Parents are often unaware of their child’s social life and after school activities. The less the child is willing to share the more the parent may be forced to believe they’ve been engaging in delinquent activities. In the case that this is true, perhaps the child is fearful of disclosing disappointing information. Peer influence plays a major role in the adolescent’s development. Much of their time is spent with friends during this time of development.

Whether or not the parent takes part in controlling who they associate with and what they do depends on the supervision*. The relationships adolescents create are the people they will spend a majority of their time with. These are the friends that will they’ll want to impress, feel accepted by, and eventually become their most influential source of approval (Trucco, Colder, & Wieczorek, 2011). Children linked to a misbehaving group that have trouble following authority are more likely to be the child of a laissez-faire parent.

The laissez-faire parent gives their child no means of rules or discipline, so when the child is put in a school like environment they’ll have no respect for the rules or consequences (Trucco, Colder, & Wieczorek, 2011). However, parents who don’t approve of their child’s relationships should first get to know their friends before making judgments. Adolescents hold their friendships very highly, a parent forbidding the child to see their friend may result in backlash of problem behaviors (Kakihara & Tilton-Weaver, 2009). Withhold info References

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