Authoritative Parenting Synthesizing Nurturance and Discipline for Optimal Child Development

Psychologist Diana Baumrind's revolutionary prototype of optimal parenting, called authoritative parenting, has become the bedrock of parenting research. In contrast to other parenting styles emphasizing responsiveness alone (permissive parenting) or demandingness alone (authoritarian patenting), authoritative parenting combines high levels of both responsiveness and demandingness. The result is an effective mix of warm nurturance and firm discipline.

Robert E. Larzelere, PhD, is a professor of human development and family science at Oklahoma State University. He has done research on parental discipline of young children for over 30 years and has collaborated with others to improve the methods used to support social scientific conclusions more generally. His research focuses particularly on comparing the emphasis on consistent consequences in some scientific perspectives on parenting with the emphasis on gentle verbal correction predominant in other scientific perspectives. He recently collaborated with Diana Baumrind to clarify the long-term effects of authoritative parenting and the specific types of power assertion that differentiate it from authoritarian parenting. He benefited from postdoctoral research training from Drs. Murray Straus and Gerald Patterson.
 
Amanda Sheffield Morris, PhD, is a professor of human development and family science at Oklahoma State University. She is a developmental scientist with research interests in parenting, emotion regulation, and developmental psychopathology. Her research focuses on the role of emotion regulation in child and adolescent adjustment and the ways in which children learn successful regulation skills. She was mentored by Drs. Laurence Steinberg and Nancy Eisenberg in her doctoral and postdoctoral work at Temple University and Arizona State University.
 
Amanda W. Harrist, PhD, is an associate professor of human development and family science at Oklahoma State University. Her research centers on the development of children's social competence, specifically the early social antecedents of children's competence and maladjustment exhibited in preschool and the early years of school, and the role that social cognition plays as a mediator. To this end, she has explored the relation of children's behavior in the peer group to early family interactions (parent–child and marriage), observed both naturalistically and in the laboratory. She also is interested in interventions for children at risk in early social settings and has pursued this through several funded projects, most recently in the Families & Schools for Health Project, a longitudinal study of the family and rural school contexts of child obesity. She worked with Drs. Gregory Pettit, Kenneth Dodge, and John Bates while at the University of Tennessee.