Monday, September 22, 2014

9/22/14- Barber & Xia

So, this article was really long and hard to follow/summarize. It mostly talks about parenting styles/types. But this was the gist of it—there are different kinds of psychological control that parents can use on their kids. Psychological control has a lot of bad outcomes. Here are some main points/parts that I took from the article.

-Nurturance (e.g. support, acceptance, responsiveness) is an adequate and reasonable regulation of behavior, and an absence of intrusive behaviors that manipulate to demean the child’s individuality.

-The element of control is an important factor in parenting and child development. Optimal functioning is undergirded by a basic tension between individual freedom (autonomy) and control (regulation, conformity).

There are two major forms of control exerted by parents--Parental Psychological Control & Parental Behavioral Control.

 “The two forms of control [psychological and behavioral] appear to have opposite effects on the adolescent…Adolescents appear to be adversely affected by psychological control—the absence of “psychological autonomy”—but positively influenced by behavioral control—the presence of “demandingness”

Developing children require:
  1. an adequate degree of psychological autonomy, that is, that they learn through their social interactions that are effective, competent individuals with a clear sense of person identity
  2. sufficient regulation of behavioral to enable them to learn the social interaction is governed by rules and structures that must be recognized and adhered to in order to be competent member of society

-Research has continued in depth and there has been found to be a significant association between psychological control and problematic child functioning.

-Psychological control is the control of the personal domain, strategic manipulation and pressure, conditional regard, coercion and disrespect

-According to research sighted in this article, psychological control—particularly manipulative forms such as love withdrawal, guilt induction, and conditional regard—is by definition controlling because its purpose is to coerce the child into feeling pressured to control or change him-or herself (i.e. his or her thoughts, feelings and behaviors).  This pressure to conform prevents the volitional functioning of the child, a cardinal principle of self-determined autonomous functioning.

-When these control attempts keep happening over time, the child internalizes the pressure to change themselves according to perceived parental demands and does so out of a desire to avoid anxiety, guilt, and shame.

-Children experiencing such control will learn not to value their independence worth but to consider themselves acceptable individuals only to the degree that they do/become what their parents demand.

-Parental conditional regard is effective in getting behaviors from kids in certain areas but has a lot of negative emotional and relational impacts.
-both conditional regard and psychological control predicted the mediator of shame after failure

-dependency-oriented psychological control : attempts to make the child psychologically and emotionally dependant on the parent.

-achievement-oriented psychological control: demands excessively high degrees of achievement by the children


Psychological Control as Coercion

-Coercive parenting has been studied and been associated with internalizing and externalizing adverse outcomes in children

Authoritative vs. Authoritarian:   Both are confrontive discipline which is firm, direct, forceful, and consistent. Authoritarian adds on coercive discipline which is preemptory, domineering, arbitrary, and concerned with retaining hierarchal family relationships.

-Parents can also exert psychological control by excessive domineering and interactions with their children.

Collection of data determined eight main types of psychological control:
-ridiculing
-invalidating
-violation of privacy
-guilting
-excessive expectations
-comparing to others
-ignoring


-Psychological control can impede the child’s ability to develop as an individual apart from the parent.

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