Nathan Clark
Pronouns:
Research Mentor(s): Wenche Wang
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Sport Management / Kinesiology
Program: UROP
Session: Session 7 (4:40pm – 5:30pm)
Authors: Susan A. Gelman
Abstract
The way parents communicate with their children can have a profound effect on them, and past research has found some evidence that style of communication varies depending on a parenting style. We examined how three different parenting styles relate to how parents communicate with their children. Ninety-four parents completed the Revised Parental Authority Questionnaire to determine their attitudes about different parenting styles. A score was calculated for each parenting style, including permissive (gentle, little discipline and involvement), authoritative (responsible, sets limits) and authoritarian (strict rules and expectations) beliefs. In addition, we calculated participants’ “relative†attitude by subtracting their authoritative attitude scores (the most preferred style across parents) from their permissive and authoritarian attitude scores. Parents also completed a simulated story book task, which included ideas like recycling and helping people in need, where they typed what they would say to their child about each page. We coded participants’ responses for their use of questions, as well as their use of tagged questions (e.e., questions that included a presumed answer at their end). We predicted that the parenting style scores will correlate with the communication devices used, though we did not have specific predictions for how question use would vary across parenting attitudes. Our data revealed a significant negative correlation between parents’ permissive attitudes and their use of tagged questions. Parents that score higher on permissive attitudes, and preferred permissive over authoritative parenting attitudes, were significantly less likely to use tagged questions These findings offer insight into linguistic differences between those with different parenting styles. From these findings, we may be able to infer parenting attitudes from people’s language choice.
