A case study of authoritarian parenting

A case study of authoritarian parenting From all the lines of the passage, clearly Sammy was raised under authoritarian parenting style. Authoritarian parents are adult-centered, demanding and punitive which based on their authority and power. This conclusion can be drawn from the scenario that Sammy’s parents had high expectations on her academic performance and let her further her study. Moreover, authoritarian parents would set straight standards of behavior and allowed little open dialogue. Because of this, Sammy rarely had a chance to express her wills and feelings. They adopted nagging and complaining once they noticed Sammy not working, but not other moderate method persuasion, such as affection, praising and rewards (Moore, 1992). Sammy recalled that she didn’t have a clue when their peaceful verbal interaction was, this not only because the parental control over Sammy was high, her parents spent little time on nurturance and giving response as they were both busy working. These are the major barrier s lead to poor communication. Also, rather than questioning why she was hindering behind on academic aspect, Sammy’s parents nagged and complained instead. The criticism of the parents had created lots of conflicts owing to the rebellious thoughts of Sammy. Hence, there was hardly a conversation between them. The lack of disclosure of themselves, made they not understand each other’s thoughts and feelings easily. This brought a lot of negative influences to their relationship, that, this caused a vicious circle to the link between them. Sammy did not know her identity and her interests. These were the symptoms complied with the idea of â€Å"Identity Crisis† suggested by Erikson (1968). Sammy stuck at the fidelity stage of Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development. By Erikson, it is the crossroad of transforming to adulthood from childhood. Clearly, Sammy was experiencing confusion in her roles which may haunt her in her mature years. Additionally, Sam my felt she was not as competent as her friends and classmates as well as not as pretty looking as her sister. These show that she lacked confidence. Clearly, Sammy was not satisfied with her body image, which body image was defined as the perception to one’s appearance, and it had a strong correlation to the concept of self. Additionally, female were more unsatisfied than male in terms of their appearance (Stowers and Durm, 1996), hence Sammy, a lady, maybe more negatively affected by her look. These factors have done lots of bad impacts to her physical self of Four Developmental Areas of Self (Hanna, Suggett, and Radtke, 2010). Moreover, the learning abilities, the motivation, beliefs and attitude towards learning of Sammy is surely low. This is a result of being raised under authoritarian parenting. Children under authoritarian parting are less individuated, perform more poorly on cognitive tests and see their parents as more restrictive (Baumrind, 1991). Moreover, a study of adolescents in the San Francisco Bay Area found that the authoritarian parenting style was linked with lower school grades for all ethnic groups (Dornbusch et al 1987). Consequently, Sammy was probably experiencing problems in her mental self of Four Developmental Areas of Self (Hanna, Suggett, and Radtke, 2010). Since Sammy was not doing well on both mental-self and physical-self, it poorly affected the integration with other two aspects, the emotional self and social self. Since the â€Å"selves† should be integrated in a complete model to form a whole self. Otherwise, the selves are mutually affected either. Hence, Sammy was poorly affected making her graded low in self-esteem. As a result, low self-esteem affects academic performance and classroom behaviors (Baker, Beer, and Beer, 1991), and also accounted for loneliness and depression ( Bothwell and Scott, 1997). She was not confident in her. By theory of fulfilling prophecy, she self predicted that she could never f inish tasks as good as others, though there was no evidence to prove she was biologically and physically worse than others.