Describe authoritative child rearing, and explain what makes it effective

What will be an ideal response?

Answer: The authoritative child-rearing style involves high acceptance and involvement, adaptive control techniques, and appropriate autonomy granting. Authoritative parents are warm, attentive, and sensitive to their child's needs. They establish an enjoyable, emotionally fulfilling parent–child relationship that draws the child into close connection. When necessary, authoritative parents exercise firm, reasonable control called confrontive control: They insist on mature behavior, give reasons for their expectations, and use disciplinary encounters as "teaching moments" to promote the child's self-regulation. They avoid using coercive control, which is arbitrary, rigid, intrusive, and punitive. Finally, authoritative parents engage in gradual, appropriate autonomy granting, allowing the child to make decisions in areas where he is ready to do so.
Authoritative child rearing seems to create a positive emotional context for parental influence in the following ways:
• Warm, involved parents who are secure in the standards they hold for their children model caring concern as well as confident, self-controlled behavior.
• Children are far more likely to comply with and internalize control that appears fair and reasonable, not arbitrary.
• By adjusting demands and autonomy granting to children's capacities, authoritative parents convey to children that they are competent and can do things successfully for themselves. In this way, parents foster favorable self-esteem and cognitive and social social maturity.
• Supportive aspects of the authoritative style, including parental acceptance, involvement, and rational control, are a powerful source of resilience, protecting children from the negative effects of family stress and poverty.