Reliance and Respecting your Parents

My goals for this paper are to conclude the effects of reliance before and after parenting the child in their childhood to adulthood. Understanding how a child relies on their parents can be interpreted on the parent's parenting styles. The different parenting styles can alter all sorts of things during life from social development to morals. The importance is excruciating as it will structure their whole lives. For decades, the medical community has understood the important influence an individual’s environment has on their health. This has led to many health promotion interventions which focus on improving health by improving the environment of a community. It has also led to increasing calls for future health promotion efforts to move beyond attempting to change individual behaviors and instead focus on creating healthy environments, which are conducive to health.

An individual’s social environment, including the social relationships, can also have a profound impact on the quality of parenting, which in turn affects a child’s health development and future achievements. Parenting styles can influence whether a child succeeds or merely survives. There are different styles of parenting: authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and neglectful. The authoritative parent is considered the perfect parenting style. The parent allows the child to act independently under their supervision, allowing for the parent and child to create a bond that the child will go the parent for survival, help, and comfort. Children are given positive reinforcement and praised for good behavior but not doomed if wrong is done as most authoritative parents let the children help consider and decide the punishment for misbehaving. The parents are warm and responsive, set clear rules, have high expectations, are supportive, and value independence. This style shows high responsiveness and academic performance, more self-esteem and social skills, and less mental skills and delinquency. The authoritarian parenting style may be an effective parenting style in theory, however like communism, it is not as effective in practice. Children need to learn through friendships and develop social skills. Being able to connect to the outside world expand the mind and imagination, giving the children skills that help them think critically. The parents set strict rules, expect blind obedience, set high expectations and are usually unresponsive to the child. There are many negative outcomes that come out of this style of parenting like lower academic performance and self esteem, poorer social skills, mental illnesses, drug/alcohol abuse, and delinquency. On the other hand, being a permissive parent can also damage the child’s development. While letting the children succeed on their own, they provide the child with a lack of drive and motivation to achieve. The parents are warm and responsive, set few or no rules, are indulgent and lenient. The negative effects of this style can lead to the child having impulsive behavior, being egocentric, having poorer social skills, and experiencing problematic relationships. Lastly neglection or uninvolved parenting is the most harmful style of parenting. The child gets nothing of what they desire, and the parent aids to none of their needs. A negligent parent is cold and unresponsive, sets no rules, and is uninvolved and indifferent. The can lead to the most severe cases of impulsive behavior, delinquency, drug/alcohol abuse and suicides. Despite these challenges, researchers have uncovered convincing links between parenting styles, and the effects these styles have on children.

I chose my mom, interviewee A, because of my somewhat unique situation of having split parents having to try to play the safe side of both roles separately. My parents often took to the authoritative style, which is known currently as the most successful approach. The authoritative parent is involved in their child’s life and is accepting as well as sensitive to their needs. Sometimes, I could see my parents as being authoritarian, which is common because many parents find a kind of medium between these two styles, my mom was one of them. I chose my stepbrother Dimitri, interviewee B, because he was still in the midst of relying on his parents for everything and anything as most sophomores in high school without a job do. I assume interviewee A would react with an ambitious long memory recall that lead to a longer interview as expected. As she is in adulthood she does not rely as much on her parents as she did when she was in her childhood. When recalling the memories they may not be as descriptive information as if it was a fresh memory yet, most people can recall the worst time they misbehaved. But I was under the assumption that most children get in trouble with their siblings as that’s what it was in my case but when trying to recall that event most people recall times individually as you did not share that hardship with a sibling but rather individually dealt. Therefore when asked for the siblings involved in the worst behavior it was more difficult to recall. I assume interviewee B will react more diligently and outgoing as having a different background, age, and lifestyle than interviewee A creating for the most indulging of comparisons throughout the interviews. Furthermore, interviewee B has the ability to include certain memory recalls and reliance structure than the opposing interviewee. Most questions for interviewees A and B were valid in the coherence of the questions’ suitability for both interviewees. While I was structuring what to research I had some questions. When figuring whether to incorporate my full intentions of the questions to the interviewees I was curious if it would alter the answers I would receive. I decided not to reveal my main objective until after the last question which would then serve as a “self realization” question answering what types of parent style they think they were exposed to after answering the previous ones about their lives. The relationships between both interviewees and their parents are quite different. Interviewee A’s parents are straight off the boat from Italy and had had children after making a secure life in America, while interviewee B’s parents were younger than most when they had kids in America with a Greek and Puerto Rican background.

What I found most interesting in this topic is diversity because due to the amount of withstanding data on Italian and Puerto Rican backgrounds in parenting there is enough evidence to conduct another hypothesis. The differences in reliance and development many nationalities and ethnicities raise their kids differently and with different exposures. Interviewee A is my mother and Interviewee B is my step-brother. My mom is an adult living about a mile from her parents house and my step-brother is a sophomore in highschool living with his mom and dad sometimes. Since they both come from completely different everything and I live with them, that it would be easier and more knowledgeable to compare but with a strategy. In order to conduct the interviews successfully I had to sustain their attention while trying to get concrete answers to the ten questions I had previously written. I wasn’t making them do any busy work like surveys or have them complete a random task. My interview was more about the in depth therapy questions I would be asking them, where I try to appeal to them as individuals and kindheartedness as their family member. I found these features crucial to the validity and detail of the I would be given from them. My strategy was to ask broad questions at first, like question one, “How often do you depend on something from your parents?”, to break some ice and give the interview a niche as I got to the important questions, like question nine, “What type of parenting did your parents use and what would you have preferred?”, for my actual research.

At first I thought this would take not longer than about thirty minutes. But this was not the case in both interviews as interviewee A took about forty-five minutes and interviewee B lasted about an hour. Since the interviews were face to face this made the contact and emotion of tone and expression easy to note in order to decide how to word the next questions and get the most out of the answers. The reactions of the interviewees at first were confused and impatient. Interviewee A was more ambitious in the fact that she wanted to go to bed after the interview being around nine at night, leaving her somewhat tired and restless during it. Yet interviewee B was interviewed in the middle of the day around three but felt he had better things to do than be interviewed about his parents. The most revealing of questions were asked near the end of the interview. When asked for question seven, “Describe the worst behavior you’ve acted to your parents that greatly affected your relationship, and what happened afterwards?”, both interviewees A and B had very different answers. Interviewee A answered exactly with, “I started talking back as I got older, being disrespectful and created distant between us because it would hurt them. We had to find common group without punishment because I was getting older and making more realizations as being a helpful daughter and for myself because I knew that they were a different generation and they were strict and needed to learn on my on in moderation of what my generation was doing.” Typical to come from a mother when interviewing a son on parenting but this was an uncovering of information that bases my regret and sympathy towards a parent. Yet interviewee B did not show this in his answer. Instead to question seven he answered with, “One time I was playing my PS4 and I charged something on my account and her card was hooked up but I used a gift card to add to my balance but when it charged there was tax and it was charged onto my moms credit card. Her being on the couch upstairs at the time called me on my phone to say that she got a notification for forty-seven cents on her account, yelling and screaming. So we went at it for about ten minutes and even my brother got involved until I called my dad and had him pick me up. We didn’t talk for awhile but now everything is good. I don’t use her credit card anymore and I don’t need it either.” Again this is typical for a teenager to say about getting into an argument with his mother and having the show of power and strength and independence most teenagers do at that time of adolescence. Yet these predictable answers helped to plant the seed for their next question. Question eight consisted of asking the interviewee, “Would you consider your childhood as stressful and cold, or comforting and warm? Did this change(age, etc), and what affected this change?”. Interviewee A responded with, “Yes stressful and cold

. I experienced peer pressure around some friend groups as well as parent strictness because my parents weren’t lenient or knowledgeable about a teenagers lifestyle in America. I worked full time to help provide for myself and my parents and would often come home alone with nobody home because they used to go out to their friend’s houses. My life was always go, go, go. They never changed because I didn’t really grow with my parents because they stayed stuck in their own immigrant world and never really grew with me throughout all my days and all the changes that I went through from when I was little to starting college. When I had a family of my own they looked at me differently and kind of realized then and their that I was a different mother to them as you kids grew up as well.” Interviewee A exhibits an answer that shows the full spectrum of reliance on her parents throughout her childhood years. Her experiences and realizations show her experience in parenting from her own experiences and what she experienced. There’s no lack of knowledge about the involvement of both sides in the parenting formula. Interviewee B responded to question eight exclaiming, “Definitely stressful and cold and I don’t think it’ll ever change until I leave this house. When I was younger I was afraid of my parents. My father would scold me if I ever misbehaved. My mother would sometimes come at me with her shoe. I kinda live in a constant fear so I keep to myself most of the time and barely conversate.” Interviewee B exhibits an answer that shows the full spectrum of reliance on his parents throughout his childhood years as well, yet doesn’t result in the same amount of sympathy being given. The reliance on his parents are far superior to those of interviewee A. His response also shows his what he finds important in his life at the moment which would be friends and video games. His response shows no present or future improvement until separated, as he stated in his first sentence. He lastly fears to be in a constant fear where he isolates himself (video games) in order to find positive reinforcement and bondness from his friends.

The main purpose of this topic is to research the amount of reliance a child has on their parent at certain time periods in their lives. In order to find how that reliance was constructed there was a set of interview questions that was presented to the interviewees. Many insights were surfaced in the interviews leading to many breakthroughs in the observations in correlation with their reliance amount. Parenting has an ability to bring a child to success or hold them in negligence. Psychology Today states in their successful parenting section of their article “Parenting”, “To parent effectively, it’s not enough to simply avoid the obvious dangers like abuse, neglect, or overindulgence. Numerous studies suggest that the best-adjusted children are reared by parents who find a way to combine warmth and sensitivity with clear behavioral expectations. Parents may find the Four C’s to be a helpful acronym: care, consistency, choices, and consequences.” These can be most helpful in expressing a healthy relationship and child. There has always been a controversy over the fact that parent just, “Don’t get it”, as was the case for interviewee B. “Misperceptions are a natural part of parenting. Mothers and fathers see their children as they want to see them—often, as they've seen them since birth... There is no single cause of parental misperceptions, but one place to start looking, experts agree, is in the mirror. As egocentric creatures, we see the world through the perspective we know best—our own. We have far more information about ourselves than we do about other people, and this influences our assumptions and judgments about the people we interact with every day, our offspring most definitely included.” (Friedman) I found this true as interviewee A was experiencing breakthroughs as she was answering modern questions about her parents that were hard to answer due to their “old school” upbringing leading to many misconceptions in her childhood as she described. Interviewee B’s response to question eight influenced me to conduct me research on the effects of hitting your children and the information surfaced is concerning. “Hitting children teaches them that might makes right... Adults frequently get out of control when they hit children...

Hitting your children may stop their bad behavior but will damage them and your relationship with them in the long run... It is illegal to hit children in over thirty countries worldwide, but entirely legal in the U.S... There are more effective ways of getting the behavior you want.” (Cummins Ph.D) This information is relatable to the study and location as interviewee B is exposed to this parenting styles and these possible effects. Interviewee A responded to question seven like any normal teenager would that they were the type to occasionally take risks and “free themselves” from authority, if it wouldn’t be doing one thing, it would be another. Yet some teenagers don’t feel this need to break authority while some experience this too much, this can be unhealthy. Repeatedly, parenting influences these sentiments. “But we will be better served, I think, when we steer our kids towards healthy risks (e.g., the gymnastics or football team, playing in a rock band, performing theatre, rocking climbing on the weekends with proper gear, etc.), which can sometimes be dangerous but are nothing compared to driving drunk or having unprotected sex. I want parents and teachers and clinicians to recognize that most kids are driven to take some risks (although there’s a lot of variation), so we need to be a bit more empathic, structure our world so that we can protect our kids, and find healthy ways to channel need for speed.” (Pierre M.D.)

The interviewees both represent experiencing this phase, as teenagers will experience times of risks and leaving their comfort zone to continue to adulthood under their parents. Pierre makes valid ideals in the exclamations on how important it is to maintain surveillance of the risks taken as well to ensure guidance. Lastly, a study showed many of the effects of parenting with a qualitative approach, in other words naturalistic. This study explores the new trends of parenting style in the society and its impact on the child behavior. This research aims to enlighten parents with information on parenting style used in the society. The study consisted of fourteen male and 6 female interviewees. Many of these results unmask some difficulties in the current experiment. “During the process of interviews and transcription it was noted that respondent respond that the environment in which the children are brought up have the major impact on child behavior... In second case when asked by personal traits of child, most of the interviewee stated that social environment plays a role in shaping the personal traits of the child than parents self reflexive followed by inherited practices. The exploration of parenting knowledge, it has cleared that majority of people were aware with the term parenting and have the sound knowledge about parenting.” (Zaman, Rashid & Arslan, Muhammad & Malik, R.K. & Mehmood, Asif) The studies conducted showed many different traits of findings ranging from good parenting practices to the outcomes of a child's personal traits.

There are many factors that lead to the temperment, ability, and most of all development of a child, as every child is different. But the care that they receive from their parents are the most influential in the present and future reliance from that child. The opportunities provided to them, the environment they grow up in, and the support they receive from anything to individualistic change to a band-aid, a parent needs to be relied on to provide for all of that in order to a prevail a nourishing relationship with their child. Parents play the most vital role in the child’s life. 

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