Which Parenting Style Encourages Healthy Lifestyles in Teenage Children? Proposal for a Model of Integrative Parenting Styles

Abstract

Given that we live in an environment in constant change—a liquid society, according to Bauman—we propose a versatile parenting style with the capacity to adapt to the variations of socio-temporal evolution. This is achieved by basing parenting guidelines on the permanent, executive, cognitive, and affective components of a person. Although the first reviews of parenting styles emphasized the Authoritative style, the emerging tendency in some geographical areas has been to prioritize the Indulgent style. Extracting the common factor of these two styles, the suggestion is to improve the affective aspect of the relationship characterized by warm and close parent–child interactions. It is important to respect the style of each family in order to support it in its educational task while offering guidelines to help consolidate healthy adolescent lifestyles. In this line, we present successful experiments that have helped families in this decisive task by highlighting the efficacy of promoting systemic educational plans that involve the whole society.

Impact of Parents’ Knowledge about the Development of Self-Esteem in Adolescents and Their Parenting Practice on the Self-Esteem and Suicidal Behavior of Urban High School Students in Nepal

“…Similar to previous studies, we established in the Nepalese context that authoritarian parenting is a risk factor for suicidal behavior. In support of our findings, studies on parenting and adolescent outcome have stated that parenting with high control and harsh parenting, i.e., the authoritarian parenting style, lead to negative outcomes in their adolescent children, such as depression, diminished academic success, and self-harm, while authoritative parenting has a beneficial effect [41,[43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52]61,83,88]. Hence, our findings suggested that parents can prevent suicidal behavior in their adolescent children by reducing their authoritarian parenting style.…”

A Third Emerging Stage for the Current Digital Society? Optimal Parenting Styles in Spain, the United States, Germany, and Brazil

“…Four parenting styles have been derived from these dimensions—authoritative (characterized by both warmth and strictness), authoritarian (characterized by strictness but lacking warmth), indulgent (characterized by warmth without strictness), and neglectful (lacking both warmth and strictness) [4,10,12]. A parenting-styles approach captures the overarching, persisting parenting characteristics; better integrates and organizes particular parenting practices; and accurately organizes the relationships among parenting styles, parenting practices, and their associations with children’s personal and social well-being [4,6,8,10,12,13,14,15].…”

Parental Socialization and Its Impact across the Lifespan

“…As Steinberg noted (2005, p. 71), “responsiveness was often operationalized using measures of parental warmth and acceptance, while demandingness came to be defined with respect to parental firmness" [ 24 ]. The four parenting styles are defined by combining the two orthogonal dimensions: authoritative parents (high warmth and high strictness), authoritarian parents (low warmth and high strictness), indulgent parents (high warmth and low strictness), and neglectful parents (low warmth and low strictness) [ 26 , 27 , 28 ]. The empirical validation of the Maccoby and Martin model (1983) [ 1 ] with a sample of more than 10,000 adolescents and their families [ 15 ] showed the need to distinguish between two types of "permissive" parents: indulgent (with warmth) and neglectful (without warmth).…”