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Uself Midterm Lecture

Family relationships are complex systems where parents and children influence each other bidirectionally. The family environment is also shaped by outside influences like culture, neighborhood, work, school and extended family. Parents socialize children through both direct instruction and indirect modeling to help ensure children's survival, acquire skills and learn cultural values. Parenting styles ranging from authoritarian to permissive impact children's development and behavior. Effective parenting requires finding the right balance of warmth, control and feedback tailored to each child's needs and stage of development within an evolving reciprocal relationship.

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Charice Anne Villamarin
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48 views

Uself Midterm Lecture

Family relationships are complex systems where parents and children influence each other bidirectionally. The family environment is also shaped by outside influences like culture, neighborhood, work, school and extended family. Parents socialize children through both direct instruction and indirect modeling to help ensure children's survival, acquire skills and learn cultural values. Parenting styles ranging from authoritarian to permissive impact children's development and behavior. Effective parenting requires finding the right balance of warmth, control and feedback tailored to each child's needs and stage of development within an evolving reciprocal relationship.

Uploaded by

Charice Anne Villamarin
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Family Relationships

The Family
• Families form a system of interacting elements

• Parents and children influence one another


• Parents influence their children both directly and
indirectly

• Children influence their parents


– Children’s behaviors, attitudes, and interests affect how their
parents behave toward them
In the systems view, families,
parents and children influence
each other and parent-child
relations are influenced by other
individuals and institutions
Culture
Neighborhood

Family
Work Father Mother

School

Extended
Family Children

Religious
Organizations
Function of Families
• Survival of offspring
– Families help to ensure that children survive to maturity by
attending to their physical needs, health needs, and safety

• Economic function
– Families provide the means for children to acquire the skills and
other resources they need to be economically productive in
adulthood

• Cultural training
– Families teach children the basic values in their culture
Parental Socialization
• Parents as direct instructors
– Parents may directly teach their children skills, rules, and strategies and
explicitly inform or advise them on various issues

• Parents as indirect socializers


– Parents provide indirect socialization in the course of their day-to-day
interactions with their children

• Parents as providers and controllers of opportunities


– Parents manage children’s experiences and social lives, including their
exposure to positive or negative experiences, their opportunities to play
with certain toys and children, and their exposure to various kinds of
information
Parenting Dimensions
• There are two general dimensions of parental
behavior

• The degree of warmth and responsiveness that parents


show their children

• The amount of control parents exert over their children


Warmth and Responsiveness
• At one of the spectrum are parents who are
openly warm and affectionate with their
children

• At the other end of the spectrum are parents


who are relatively uninvolved with their
children and sometimes even hostile toward
them
Parental Control
• Parents’ efforts to supervise and monitor their children’s
behavior

• Effective control
– Setting standards that are appropriate for the child’s age
– Showing the child how to meet the standards
– Rewarding the child for complying to these standards

• Parents should enforce the standards consistently


– Children and adolescents are more compliant when parents
enforce the rules regularly

• Effective control is also based on good communication


– Parents should explain why they’ve set standards and why they
reward or punish as they do
Parental Styles (Baumrind)
• Authoritarian parenting
– High parental control with little warmth

• Authoritative parenting
– A fair degree of parental control with being
warm and responsive to children

• Indulgent-permissive parenting
– Warmth and caring but little parental control

• Indifferent-uninvolved parenting
– Neither warmth nor control
• Children with authoritarian parents typically have
lower grades in school, lower self-esteem, and are
less skilled socially

• Children with authoritative parents tend to have


higher grades and be responsible, self-reliant, and
friendly

• Children with indulgent-permissive parents have


lower grades and are often impulsive and easily
frustrated

• Children with indifferent-uninvolved parents have


low self-esteem and are impulsive, aggressive, and
moody
How Can Parents Influence Their Children?

• Direct Instruction
– Telling a child what to do, when and why

• Learning by Observing (modeling)


– Learning what to do by watching
– Learning what not to do (counterimitation)

• Feedback
– Parents indicate whether a behavior is appropriate and should
continue or should stop
Feedback
• Reinforcement
– Any action that increases the likelihood of the
response that it follows

• Punishment
– Any action that discourages the reoccurrence of
the response that it follows
Negative Reinforcement Trap
• Parents often unwittingly reinforce the very behaviors
they want to discourage

– First step: The mother tells her son to do something he


doesn’t want to do

– Second step: The son responds with some behavior that


most parents find intolerable

– Third step: The mother gives in – tells the son he doesn’t


need to do as he was initially told as long as he stops doing
the behavior that is so intolerable
Punishment Works Best When:
• Administered directly after the undesired behavior
occurs, rather than hours later

• An undesired behavior always leads to punishment,


rather than usually or occasionally

• Accompanied by an explanation of why the child was


punished and how punishment can be avoided in the
future

• The child has a warm, affectionate relationship with


the person administering the punishment
Drawbacks to punishment
Punishment is primarily suppressive: if a new
behavior isn’t learned to replace it, the old
response will come back.

Punishment can have undesirable side effects:

– Children become upset as they are being punished


which makes it unlikely that they will understand the
feedback that punishment is meant to convey.

– When children are punished physically – they often


imitate this behavior with peers and younger siblings.
Children who are spanked often
use aggression to resolve their
disputes with others and are more
likely to have behavior problems
Parenting behavior and styles evolve as a
consequence of the child’s behavior.
Children’s behavior helps determine how
parents treat them and the resulting
parental behavior influences children’s
behavior, which can in turn cause
parents to again change their behavior.
This reciprocal influence lead many families
to adopt routine ways of interacting with
each other.

Some families end up running smoothly


(parents and children cooperate, anticipate
each other’s needs, and are generally happy).

Some families end up in trouble (disagreements


are common, parents spend much time trying
to unsuccessfully control their defiant children,
and everyone is often angry and upset).
Children’s Influence
• Parental warmth gradually changes as
children develop
– Hugs and kisses work with toddlers not with
adolescents

• Parental control gradually changes as


children develop
– Parents gradually relinquish control and expect
children to be responsible for themselves
Attractiveness
• Mothers of very attractive infants are more
affectionate and playful with their infants than are
mother of infants with unappealing faces

• Why?
– An evolutionary explanation would propose that
parents are motivated to invest more time and
energy into offspring who are healthy and
genetically fit and therefore likely to survive

• Attractiveness could be seen as an indicator of


these characteristics

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