Authoritarian parenting is not the best way to raise children Recently, a Hollywood's leading actress, Angelina Jolie, divorced with Brad Pitt because she was upset with the authoritarian parenting of her husband. This news brings the issue, the parenting style, to public’s attention. Authoritarian parenting can be regarded as strict parenting style, which means imposing a rigid structure of rules upon children. There is no doubt that this style can be a good way to raise children but I do not think it is the most suitable method to bring up their children. I am going to explain in three aspects, namely social skills, personality and academic achievement. First of all, authoritarian parenting will lead to reduction in social skills of children. …show more content…
There is a saying that goes, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.”, which means children will only grow better when parents are harsh. It seems that severe parenting is essential in cultivating their child which making room for them to achieve success. In point of fact, children relatively get a poor academic result under strict parenting comparing with other parenting styles. Supported by a study from two kindergarteners, Melissa Kamins and Carol Dweck (1999), children performed worse on problem-solving tasks when they were given sets of rules. Another study of adolescents in the San Francisco Bay Area also showed that authoritarian parenting style was linked with lower school grades (Dornbusch et al 1987). That means authoritarian style is not an effective way to help children seek for accomplishment. Indeed, other parenting styles are the better way to perform more outstandingly. Kingsley Nyarko (2011) suggested that there is a positive relationship between authoritativeness of parents and academic performance of their adolescent. These parents might have high expectation on children, but they will give appropriate support to them and praise them in response to good result. In addition, some experts mentioned that people perform better from positive comments rather than negative (Schmittmann et al 2006; van Duijvenvoorde et al