Role of Parenting Styles in Human Capital Development of Children: Evidence from the British Understanding Society Data

Abstract

The family psychology literature attempts to uncover the relationship between parenting styles and child development to a great extent. Parenting style is divided into three categories: Authoritarian, Authoritative and Permissive. Authoritarian style is the strictest form of parenting style in which parents solely set the rules for their children. Neither do they take their children’s opinions into consideration while setting the rules, nor do they explain the reasoning behind their rules. In such a parenting style, disobedience or misconduct is followed by harsh punishments such as shouting and smacking. In the authoritative parenting style, parents set rules for their children but they also take into consideration the opinions of their children. Authoritative parents are willing to explain the reasoning behind the rules and choices they make for their children. They are more nurturing than authoritarian parents and they do not inflict harsh punishments in case of misconduct. Permissive parenting style is characterized by a lack of rules and discipline. Permissive parents give complete freedom to their children to make their own decisions and they are more nurturing than demanding.

Most of the literature in Economics has focused on parental time and material investments for estimating the production function for child development. My aim is to contribute to the growing body of research that is being carried out on the association between parenting styles and child development. To my knowledge, there are limited papers published in Economics journals, which focus exclusively on parenting styles as a key input into the child production function, particularly for UK. In most of these papers, we find a significant association between parenting style and socio-emotional outcomes. In particular, an authoritative parenting style is positively related to positive socio-emotional outcomes and negatively related to negative socio-emotional outcomes. However, we do not a significant relationship between parenting style and cognitive outcomes such as performance in schools and university entrance schools in most of these papers.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the relationship between parenting style and socio-emotional outcomes of the child. I hypothesize that authoritative parenting style is negatively related to socio-emotional problems such as hyperactivity, aggression and anti-social behavior. Authoritarian and dismissive parenting styles are positively related with socio-emotional problems. To test these hypotheses, I will utilize the British Understanding Society dataset (Wave 3) for my research, which provides data on parent-child interactions. The dependent variables will be socio-emotional outcomes of children under 16 in the sample. In particular, I will be using the Strength and Difficulty Questionnaire (SDQ) Total Difficulties Score as one of the outcome variables. To disaggregate the association between parenting styles and socio-emotional outcomes, I will be using the following SDQ subscales as the other outcome variables: Emotional Symptoms, Conduct Problems, Hyperactivity/Inattention, Peer Relationship Problems and Prosocial Behavior. For the main independent variables of interest, I will be using the following parenting scales for each parent: Authoritarian Scale, Authoritative Scale and Dismissive Scale. I plan to run an OLS regression in STATA, relating the dependent and main independent variables mentioned above, along with the relevant control variables in the dataset. If time permits, I will also attempt to run a fixed effects regression by combining Wave 3 with other waves, and check whether there are any significant differences in the results when running an OLS model.