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Flexible Parents, Fit Kids?
The Link Between Discipline Style and Weight
By Kelly Burgess
Control. It's something that often comes up in issues involving the physical and emotional development of children. Toddlers who resist toilet training are sometimes thought to be trying to control one small aspect of their parent-led lives. One theory behind some adolescent-onset anorexic behaviors is the desire for young girls to control the changes their bodies are going through.
It's also thought by many parenting experts that parents can exacerbate this tendency for a child to exert control in inappropriate ways by being extremely controlling themselves. Examples include scheduling every second of a child's life, giving their children little privacy and few choices or rigidly enforcing a family dynamic where the child is always forced to be submissive.
A recent study is trying to make a more definitive link between parenting styles and control issues in children. The study, Parenting Styles and Overweight Status in First Grade, involved 872 children who were observed interacting with their mothers at age 4. The mothers were assigned to one of four parenting categories based on their answers to survey questions and their interactions with their children.
When the children were studied again in first grade, researchers found that the children of authoritative parents were least likely to be overweight. In the other parenting categories, children of authoritarian parents were five times as likely to be overweight, and children of permissive and neglectful parents were twice as likely to be overweight as children of authoritarian parents.
The idea of parenting styles was first described in 1971 by developmental psychologist Diane Baumrind. She identified only three styles: authoritative, authoritarian and permissive. Neglectful didn't begin to appear until nearly 20 years later. These four categories are defined as follows:
