1. Family

2. 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

3. In the systems view, families, parents and children influence each other and parent-child relations are influenced by other individuals and institutions

4. Culture School Work Extended Family Neighborhood Religious Organizations Family Mother Father Children

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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.

17. Children who are spanked often use aggression to resolve their disputes with others and are more likely to have behavior problems

18. 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.

19. 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).

20. 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

21. 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