Family Flashcards
What role does family play?
- Promoting survival
- Support: emotional, financial
- Socialization: the process through which children acquire the values, standards, knowledge, and behaviors seen as appropriate for their role in their culture
What are three aspects of parenting?
1.Warmth/support/acceptance/responsiveness
2. Control/demandingness
- Behavioral control
- Psychological control
Authoritative (2 Ts; love): +support, +control
Authoritarian, Permissive, Uninvolved (least ideal outcome)
The four parenting styles are on a spectrum and they can change over time.
3. Discipline
- Reinforcement & Punishment
e.g., spanking or physically punishing child is consistently associated with bad outcomes
- Power assertion, parents use their status to assert control, also linked with less ideal outcomes for children
- Inductive discipline, provide explanations within the discipline, positive outcomes
What are some important aspects about parent relations?
- Conflict is associated with poorer outcomes, but not as important as the quality of parenting
Quality of parenting matters more than parental conflict - Divorce is associated with increased problems in children, e.g., 2 times more likely to drop out of high school, more likely to have academic, behavioral, and psychological problems
Why? Parental conflict, stress, diminished parenting, economic difficulties, social difficulties, absence of a parent, relocation
- If parents have conflicts, getting divorced is better for their children’s distress and happiness
- Divorce as a process, e.g., pre-divorce differences, short-term effects vs. long-term effects (highly reduced negative outcomes in the long-run)
What about same sex/gender parents?
- No difference in adjustment, personality, achievement, sexual orientation
- Children from families with gay/lesbian/bisexual/queer report feeling different and subjected to social slights, but feel more positively towards their families
Takeaway: regardless of parent gender/sexuality , parenting quality matters
What are the four types of sibling relationships?
- Caregiver relationship: one sibling serves as a quasi-parent for the other, particularly for an older sister who is decently older than the younger one
- Buddy relationship: both siblings like each other, and try to be like each other; predictive with better outcomes
- Casual/uninvolved relationship: siblings have little to do with each other
- Critical/conflictual/rival relationship: one sibling tries to dominate the other, teasing, fighting
What are the varieties of sibling relationships?
Age
Age gaps
Gender
Biological vs. adopted
Stepsiblings vs. half-siblings
What are some functions of sibling relationships?
- Practice communication and social skills
- Buffer for peer rejection, parent conflict (divorce), and stressful experiences
- Try out new behaviours
- Can be opportunity for learn about another gender
- Promote individuality
- Conflict – destructive or constructive? depends on the amount of sibling conflict, moderate level = good, teaches us conflict-solving, high level with aggression and coercion = bad
What are some history ideas on birth order?
- 1874: Sir Francis Galton
noted that first-born sons
and only sons were over-
represented among
scientists - Sparked the idea and study
of birth order differences- Different home environments/treatments –
different personality
traits/outcomes
- Different home environments/treatments –
BUT research results are quite mixed, and results appear tiny.
What about only children? How are their development like?
- Siblings are not necessary for healthy development
- They tend to have higher self-esteem, do better in school (reason may be relationship with parents as the single attention)
- Differences in peer relationships? (Cultural dynamics) In North America, only children may be linked with less peer acceptance? In China, no difference (maybe due to more contact with cousins within the collectivistic culture, more normative to be only child).
What are the roles of grandparents in development?
- Anthropology/evolutionary view: useful for survival, may be adaptive to have older generations for support; the presence of grandmother predicts higher child survival rate, e.g., alertness during night or lending a hand for support
- Can boost emotional well-being in single-parent families
- Can also serve as buffers in children growing up in risky contexts
What are some different roles grandparents play?
- Influential
- Supportive
- Passive
- Authority-oriented
- Detached
What are some similarities and differences in parenting styles across cultures?
- In all cultures:
- use of warmth/support and control, beneficial for development
- Across cultures
- Differences in how warmth/support and control are expressed? (e.g., hug, telling love, or through behavior)
- Different “ideal” of control? e.g., for authoritative parents, how much control should there be
Differences between Chinese parenting vs. Western parenting
- 管 (seems neutral)
- Less warmth - tend to withold praise, believed to lead to self-satisfied children
- More controlling - belief in deeply-involved parents, respect for family/authority
Outcomes: many years before = beneficial
Nowadays = less beneficial
What are Latine parents’ parenting styles?
- More warmth?
- More controlling?
Familismo – desire for family ties, for family support
Respeto – fulfill obligations, maintain
harmonious relationships
Again, somewhat inconsistent findings on
outcomes! Some studies do find positive outcomes linked with warmth + ”hostile
control” for Latinx youth
What is the relationship between culture and parenting?
- Parenting is culturally situated
- What is valued as “good” parenting differs
- The relationship between parenting practices and outcomes may differ
- And - even within cultures, there may be a lot of variability
- “Normativeness” - within one cultural context, there are parents acting differently within a range
- Not all parents within a culture think and behave the same, high normativeness serves as a buffer for children who have high aggressive behaviors
- If parents’ practices are congruent with others in their cultural context – adaptive for children?
