The Pros of Positive Parenting

One day, your kids are letting you kiss them goodbye on the schoolyard—the next, they are asking you to drop them off a block away so no one will see you. As children get older, they tend to push their parents aside in favor of their peers.

Some parents worry that their influence starts to fade around the middle school years. But new research shows that parenting style continues to make a big impression on children’s emotional adjustment, even into adolescence.

Nancy Eisenberg is Regents Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University. She and a team of researchers studied 186 children over a span of four years. The children’s ages ranged from 7 to 12 years at the start of the study. Eisenberg’s team considered three variables as part of the study. They looked at parental warmth and positive expression. They looked at the children’s ability to self-regulate their impulses and attention. And they also looked at the extent to which children externalized problems through behaviors such as bullying or defiance.

They found that self-regulation, or “effortful control,” served as a mediator between parenting style and externalizing problems. Children with warm, positive parents tended to show greater effortful control and, likely as a consequence, less externalization.

“Warmth and support is associated with kids being better regulated. This regulation at least partially accounts for the relationship between warm socializing and low externalization,” says Eisenberg.

The researchers studied the participants three times at two-year intervals. They measured parental warmth through observation of parent-child interactions. Examples of warm or positive interaction include verbal expressions, like “Good job!” Touching, smiling at the child, and humor were other positives.

The scientists measured effortful control by watching the children working on difficult puzzles. Children who cheated or gave up on the puzzles demonstrated less control than those who persisted.

In addition, parents and teachers reported on both effortful control and externalization of problems.

Eisenberg says that their results suggest that warm parenting might have a causal effect on reduced externalizing. However, the ASU professor stresses that this study only shows correlation and cannot prove causation. But the correlation only appears to work in one direction.

“There wasn’t support for the notion that the more regulated kids might elicit better parenting, which might explain why they have less problem behavior,” Eisenberg says. “If you had a powerful enough sample and could look at it over a long time, the relationship is probably bi-directional,” she adds. “But the support appears stronger for the parenting affecting the child rather than for the child affecting the parent.”

Earlier research has shown links between parenting behavior and children’s externalizing in early childhood. Eisenberg says that her study results suggest that parenting continues to affect behavior among pre-adolescents and adolescents, an age when many parents feel their influence is waning. —Diane Boudreau