Handbook of Parenting

Volume 5: The Practice of Parenting, Third Edition

Marc H. Bornstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138228788
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429686603
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Psychology

This highly anticipated third edition of the Handbook of Parenting brings together an array of field-leading experts who have worked in different ways toward understanding the many diverse aspects of parenting. Contributors to the Handbook look to the most recent research and thinking to shed light on topics every parent, professional, and policy maker wonders about. Parenting is a perennially "hot" topic. After all, everyone who has ever lived has been parented, and the vast majority of people become parents themselves. No wonder bookstores house shelves of "how-to" parenting books and magazine racks in pharmacies and airports overflow with periodicals that feature parenting advice. However, almost none of these is evidence-based. The Handbook of Parenting is. Period. Each chapter has been written to be read and absorbed in a single sitting, and includes historical considerations of the topic, a discussion of central issues and theory, a review of classical and modern research, and forecasts of future directions of theory and research. Together, the five volumes in the Handbook cover Children and Parenting, the Biology and Ecology of Parenting, Being and Becoming a Parent, Social Conditions and Applied Parenting, and the Practice of Parenting.

Volume 5, The Practice of Parenting, describes the nuts-and-bolts of parenting as well as the promotion of positive parenting practices. Parents meet the biological, physical, and health requirements of children. Parents interact with children socially. Parents stimulate children to engage and understand the environment and to enter the world of learning. Parents provision, organize, and arrange their children's home and local environments and the media to which children are exposed. Parents also manage child development vis-à-vis childcare, school, the circles of medicine and law, as well as other social institutions through their active citizenship. The chapters in Part I, on Practical Parenting, review the ethics of parenting, parenting and the development of children's self-regulation, discipline, prosocial and moral development, and resilience as well as children's language, play, cognitive, and academic achievement and children's peer relationships. The chapters in Part II, on Parents and Social Institutions, explore parents and their children's childcare, activities, media, schools, and healthcare and examine relations between parenthood and the law, public policy, and religion and spirituality.

Part I
Practical Parenting

1
The Ethics of Parenting

Ross A. Thompson and Diana Baumrind¹

Introduction

Ethical parenting, above all, is responsible caregiving, requiring of parents enduring investment and commitment throughout their children’s long period of dependency. The effort people put forth to be responsible parents, as in other areas of their lives, is a function of their self-attributions concerning the relation between their effort and outcome. As Bugental, Blue, and Cruzcosa (1989) have shown, parents who attribute a child’s dysfunctional behavior primarily to the child’s disposition or to peer influences rather than to their own practices are less likely to attempt to alter their disciplinary style when it is ineffective or developmentally unapt, or to attempt to alter their child’s behavior when it is changeworthy. Greenberger and Goldberg (1989) found that high-investment parents, as part of their identity, believed that they could meet their children’s needs better than other adults, and therefore willingly sacrificed other personal pleasures to be with their children. Such parents (whom the authors identified as authoritative) had higher maturity expectations, were notably responsive, and viewed their children more positively than did less invested parents.

The ethics of parenting begins, therefore, with the assumption of responsibility for children. This chapter is concerned with unfolding the nature of that responsibility in the context of the reciprocal obligations of parents and offspring, and the responsibility of the state to support ethical parenting. The moral obligations of parents to their children, and of the state to the family, have been long-standing concerns of philosophy, the law, and psychology dating back to ancient times. This short chapter does not attempt to comprehensively review this interesting history, nor to offer guidelines to contemporary parents about specific ethical dilemmas (e.g., should a parent ever lie to a child?). Instead, we outline a theory of the ethics of parenting, rooted in traditional and modern views in moral and political philosophy, that describes the needs and rights of children and the roles and responsibilities of parents and the state for children’s welfare. We argue, in brief, that children’s rights are complementary and reciprocal (but not equal) to those of parents, that parental responsibilities to offspring arise from a developmental orientation to children’s needs and capabilities, that the state has an important role in supporting parents but not assuming parental responsibilities, and that developmental scientists have an obligation to contribute to public understanding of parenting and its influences. Such a theory can, we hope, offer guidance for the specific dilemmas that parents often face and provide a comprehensive, thoughtful perspective on what parenting is for, and why, in relation to the needs of children.

The first part of the chapter concerns the ethical obligations of parents, with special attention to the rights of children, the moral justification of parental authority, and the contrasting views of protectionist, liberationist, and developmentalist approaches to understanding children’s best interests. This section closes with a profile of parents’ developmental responsibilities to children, especially in relation to the growth of character and competence. The second part of the chapter focuses on the relations among parents, children, and the state. In this section, we describe the state’s interest in the well-being of children and the conditions justifying the state’s intervention into family life to promote children’s well-being. In doing so, we also seek to profile what the state does well, and poorly, in its efforts to assist its youngest citizens. In the concluding section, we briefly consider the responsibilities of developmental scientists for fostering ethical parenting.

The Ethical Obligations of Parents

The Rights of Children

Discussions of parenting often begin with the rights of children. But what are children’s rights, and how are they justified? We propose that the moral norms of reciprocity and complementarity offer a new way of regarding children’s rights not as absolute entitlements to self-determination and autonomy, but rather as rights that develop in concert with children’s growing capacities to exercise mature judgment.

In 1989 the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations General Assembly, 1989) codified children’s entitlements in a document that was adopted by the UN General Assembly and subsequently endorsed by more than 100 countries, but not by the United States. The survival, protection, development, and self-determination of dependent children are among the children’s rights identified by the Convention. It was the inclusion of self-determination rights that accounts, in part, for the reluctance of U.S. legislators to endorse the document. According to the Convention, children have the right to express their views (Article 11); to have freedom of thought, conscience, and religion (Article 14); to associate freely (Article 15); to privacy (Article 16); and to be protected from all forms of physical or mental violence (Article 19). The Committee on the Rights of the Child, the organization charged with monitoring and implementing the provisions of the Convention, interpreted Article 19, as well as Article 37 (which protects children against any form of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment), as prohibiting all physical punishment.

In the United States, the debate over the ratification of the Convention sharpened fundamental differences between liberals and conservatives concerning the desirable degree of interference by the state in family life (the less, the better to conservatives) and the freedom with which a child should be legally endowed (the more, the better to liberals). Liberals have urged ratification but criticized the Convention for failing to explicitly proscribe physical punishment. Conservatives have strongly and successfully opposed ratification, arguing that the document contains unwarranted restrictions on the historical right of parents to regulate the physical, moral, intellectual, and cultural development of their children. This liberal versus conservative polarity reflects a broader division in views of the family that contrasts a hierarchical, paternalistic, authoritarian model that places obedience at the cornerstone in the foundation of character (Dobson, 1992) with a children’s rights position that demands for children the same civil rights as are possessed by adults (Cohen, 1980).

As the debate over the Convention in the United States illustrates, beginning with the rights of children (or of parents) sharpens the perceived conflict between the rights of each within the family and, inappropriately in our view, impedes thoughtful reflection on ethical parenting by polarizing discussion according to whether children’s rights or parents’ rights should be preeminent. The Convention neither acknowledges nor resolves the conflict created by its approach. We argue that it is much more useful to consider children’s rights and needs within a developmental perspective and within the context of the mutual obligations of parents and children, based on moral norms of reciprocity and complementarity.

The Moral Norms of Reciprocity and Complementarity

Instantiated by different value hierarchies in different cultures, a cornerstone of all ethical systems is the moral norm of reciprocity, represented in Christian religion by the Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and in Buddhist thinking as karma or the sum of the ethical consequences of one’s actions (Baumrind, 1980). Reciprocity refers to the balance in an interactive system such that each party has both rights and duties, and the subordinate norm of complementarity states that one’s rights are the other’s obligations. The norm of complementarity implies that if children have a right to be nurtured (and not merely to seek nurturance), then there must be adult caregivers with a complementary obligation to nurture. Children also incur obligations reciprocal to that right, such as returning love and complying with parental directives, that motivate and enable caregivers to nurture and guide them satisfactorily. Application of the principle of reciprocity requires, therefore, mutuality of obligation and gratification and governs relationships within all stable social systems, including the family. Thus, parents and children have reciprocal, not equal, rights. The view that the rights and obligations of youthful status are reciprocal rather than identical to those of their caregivers acknowledges reciprocity as a generalizable moral norm based on the mutually contingent exchange of resources and gratification whose application is likely to produce the greatest good for the greatest number.

Consistent with the principle that children’s rights and responsibilities are complementary, not identical, to those of their parents is the view that parents incur a duty to commit themselves to the welfare of their dependent children, who in turn have a duty to conform to parental standards (Baum-rind, 1978b). Because of their dependent status, unemancipated youth may claim from adults the protection and support necessary for their growth and development, but may not claim the full rights to self-determination appropriate to an emancipated, independent person. In practice this means that parents may choose their children’s education, religion, and abode and, at least until adolescence, censor their reading, media exposure, friends, and attire. As children approach adolescence, however, their developing capabilities permit greater self-determination, and they also begin to relinquish the privileges of childhood as they assume the responsibilities and entitlements of adulthood. The remaining restrictions on their freedom provide adolescents with an essential impetus to becoming self-supporting and thus self-determining. Exploitation or indulgence of the child by the parent interferes with the child’s internalization of the norm of reciprocity and the child’s acknowledgment that her or his actions have consequences for self and others. A marked imbalance between what is given gratuitously and what is required of the child disequilibrates the social system of the family. Whereas unconditional commitment to the child’s welfare and responsiveness to the child’s wishes motivate young children to comply with their parents’ demands for maturity and obedience (Kochanska, 2002; Parpal and Maccoby, 1985), noncontingent acquiescence to children’s demands is likely to encourage dependency rather than to reward responsible self-sufficiency.

The reciprocal relations between the rights and obligations of parents and children have enduring philosophical roots and constitute the basis of Rousseau’s (1767/1952, p. 387) social contract:

The most ancient of all societies, and the only one that is natural, is the family: and even so the children remain attached to the father only as long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. The children, released from the obedience they owed to the father, and the father, released from the care he owed his children, return equally to independence.

Radical proponents of liberating rights for children (Cohen, 1980; Holt, 1974; Kohn, 2005) negate the principle of reciprocity by claiming simultaneously that because of their temporary dependence children are entitled to beneficent protection, and yet because of their inherent status as autonomous persons children should exercise equal self-determination as do adults.

The Moral Case for and Against Equal Rights for Children

The case for equal rights for children appeals largely to deontological universalist premises, which maintain that what is morally right and obligatory is based on principles (such as justice) that have prima facie validity, independent of whether they promote the common good. If children (like adults) are persons of unconditional value and persons have the right to equal justice in all situations, then children’s and adults’ rights are equally meriting respect. By contrast, the case for reciprocal rights for children appeals largely to rule-utilitarian consequentialist premises intended to maximize welfare (i.e., the welfare of the community and the family as well as of the child) at a given historical time and place (see Frankena, 1973, for a succinct discussion of these and other contrasting theories of ethics).

The justification for children’s equal rights is commonly grounded in the universalist theory of justice of Rawls (1971), who believed that to prove the validity of ethical principles of just treatment, these principles must be selected in the hypothetical “original position” behind “a veil of ignorance” in which individuals are ignorant of their own specific interests, circumstances, and abilities and cannot be biased by them. The “original position” assumes the priority of equal liberty as the fundamental terms of association of all rational persons. Maximizing liberty in equal distribution is a universal, objective end of human nature. This universalist view is the foundation for Rawls’s theory of justice, but giving priority to the ideal of the free, autonomous individual is also a uniquely Western notion that is at variance with the Eastern ideals of collective harmony and individual duty (Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Schweder, 1990; Triandis, 1990). A focus on individual rights is not equipped to address conflict between the rights of persons and the rights of the collective (Baumrind, 2004).

The children’s rights movement, which rose to prominence in the 1970s (Holt, 1974; Kohn, 2005; Worsfold, 1974), claimed for children all the rights of adult persons, including the rights associated with self-determination. In this view, children’s rights are entitlements and as such impose ethical obligations on parents and the state. As interpreted by Worsfold (1974), Rawls’s universalist theory claims that “in their fundamental rights children and adults are the same” (p. 33) and indeed that children “have a right to do what they prefer when it conflicts with what their parents and society prefer” (p. 35–36). This view of children’s rights is consistent with, and indeed derives from, the foundational deontological principle of maximizing individual liberty of Rawls’s theory. Worsfold supports his case for equal rights for children with two empirical claims and two moral principles. The two empirical claims are (1) the first motive of everyone is to preserve her...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface to the Third Edition
• About the Editor
• About the Contributors
• PART I Practical Parenting
• PART II Parents and Social Institutions
• Index