Children of domineering parents suffer from a tendency to depression and their grades do not exceed the average
Every parent struggles to find the right balance between positive reinforcement and disciplinary measures in raising their children. Last winter, a book by law professor Amy Chua from Yale University, "The Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother"*, received barrages of criticism. In the book, Chua states that successful parenting involves controlling most aspects of the child's life, from forbidding play dates with other children and sleeping in their homes, to yelling when the child does not return from school with high grades. And what do the researchers think about this?
"There is no evidence that over-involvement is acceptable in the cultures we have examined in the past, including China," says Brian K. Barber, a psychologist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. To understand the differences in parents' psychological control of their children in different parts of the world, Barber and his colleagues interviewed 120 teenagers from 5 different cultures, including Costa Rica, Thailand and South Africa, and then conducted a survey among 2,100 other teens. Their findings, recently submitted for publication in the Journal of Adolescence, reveal that some of the types of behavior described in Chua's book, such as insulting the child (in one case she called her daughter "trash"), denying their feelings and violating their privacy may be related to depression and antisocial behavior among The children, as has already been proven in other studies.
Barber distinguishes between "tyrannical" families, characterized by excessive restrictions and coercion, and between "authoritarian" families, where the restrictions are accompanied by affection and the encouragement of the children to follow their own path. In another study, in which 20,000 American students took part, Lawrence Steinberg from Temple University and his colleagues found that children who grew up in authoritarian families were mentally healthy, while children who grew up in authoritarian families were more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression. Also, no difference was found in the scores of children from the two types of families, which raises the possibility that you don't have to be a tiger mother to raise successful children.
The book was published in Hebrew in March 2011, translated by Dafna Levy and published by Zamora Beitan
