By Hu Wo (Cuckoo’s Song)
I n my teaching experience, I have encountered diverse kinds of students, particularly those who are in different parenting styles. Some children are pretty easy to teach, while others are quite difficult to educate, strange to say.
Of course, in Myanmar society, parents are often considered the first teachers who instruct their children for good or evil. Personally, as long as children are under the age of 18, their parents ought to take overall responsibility for their personal cases. In actual fact, parenting styles are the life of children’s all-round development for certain.
According to psychologist Diana Baumrind, she suggested four types of parenting styles at home, namely authoritarian, authoritative, indulgent, and neglectful. Firstly, authoritarian parenting style is assumed to be a kind of pessimistic parenting style in which parents are found to get involved with everything their children do, from food and clothing to talking and behaving in public.
In my teaching experience, we often do not need much class control over children in an authoritarian parenting style. Usually, such children stay silent or do not even answer back to teachers at class time, whether they pay attention to school studies from their teachers. And hence, we are not required to teach them good manners in most cases. But on the negative side, children who are controlled too much by parents mostly remain so silent that they cannot even easily reply back to some simple questions frequently asked by their teachers.
Worst of all, authoritarian parents tend to use their coercive power in their child control. Really, too much coercive power everywhere tends to retard or affect children’s intellectual development.
Also, overly controlled children are prone to hesitate about not only asking for money for school-related financial cases but also spending their pocket money at school. Secondly, an authoritative parenting style can be seen to be a sort of optimistic parenting style in which parents seem to favour a close friendship with their children rather than a parent-child relationship as in an authoritarian parenting style.
Despite this, authoritative parents like to set some limits on the relationship with their children, especially meaning a give-and-take relationship or sometimes maybe the carrot and the stick, which can be used in an authoritarian parenting style. In my teaching experience, children who are in an authoritative parenting style discipline themselves at school; they are well-mannered or well-behaved children. In other words, these children have self-discipline, self-control and self-reliance.
Unlike those in an authoritarian parenting style, they feel free to say something important or be independent of their parents and teachers in decision-making and studying, respectively. But on the other side, if children in an authoritative parenting style are free from the control of parents on their actions, they may have intrapersonal overconfidence, which can lead to failing the examination unexpectedly.
Thirdly, indulgent parenting style is found to be a type of negative parenting style in which parents are highly involved with anything their children are related to but impose fewer limits or restrictions on their behaviours than authoritarian and authoritative parenting styles. As always, indulgent parents allow their children to do whatever they want, beginning with what to wear, what to eat, what to say, and how to live. It does not matter at all if these indulgent parents are the ones who are economically advantaged.
In my teaching experience, children in indulgent parenting styles are less expected. Additionally, they do not usually look interested in school subjects, yet they enjoy following trends and fads such as trendy clothes, smartphones or motorcycles. Their willingness to learn looks like a flash in the pan as usual.
Sad to say, children of too indulgent parents don’t have a dog’s chance of passing the exam as often as possible. At the very worst, most children who are in an indulgent parenting style are badly-behaved ones with poor personality.
Finally, neglectful parenting style is known as a neutral manner of parenting style in which many parents are almost always busy making a meagre living or running their own business, so they can be uninvolved with their children’s several cases. This means that neglectful parents are unable to take good care of their children, whether they are rich or not, or if their children are good or bad. In my teaching experience, many children who are neglected by their parents have a low expectation of education.
That is, it will be okay for them even if they do badly in an exam. But on the other side, no wonder their parents stay mute about their academic achievement or educational success; the parents have been unaware of their children since the beginning. As a result of parental ignorance, their children are prone to have no manners – they respond to whatever situation they are facing either aggressively in a moment or moodily in ages. And sometimes, they may develop certain emotional problems or meet emotional disorders like playing truant, smoking, drug or alcohol abuse, bullying, delinquency, risk of pregnancy, risk of sexually transmitted diseases, sexual identity, and even dropping out.
Actually, there have been four great influences on children: parental influence, peer influence, environmental influence and self-control. Even though authoritative parenting style is generally supposed to be the best among the four parenting styles, each of them has its pros and cons for diverse children.
Some children could do with an authoritarian parenting style, while some thirst for an indulgent or neglectful parenting style. Whatever kind of parenting style it is, children can hardly refuse both their peer influence and their environmental influence. Despite this, any child-friendly parenting style will protect children against the bad influence of their peers and the environment.
Above all, self-control is the most essential need for children’s allround improvement in whatever type of parenting style. Only children with self-control will surely achieve self-directed learning throughout their lives, which is also the maximum educational goal for a student’s lifetime.
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