Parents Guide to Social-Emotional Development
Parenting Styles
Authoritarian
•Low responsiveness, high demandingness
•Sets high standards w/o moral support
•Parents uses expressive language and values, obedience, and punishment.
•Makes decisions for the child and does not listen to the child’s point of view.
Neglectful/Disengaged
•Low responsiveness, low demandingness
•Referred to indifferent or uninvolved.
•Parent does not provide any guidance or control over the child.
•Parent Example: A parent who is more worry about himself or is often busy therefore does not worry about the child's lifestyle.
•Student Example: A student who does anything to catch attention outside of the house.
•The child has lower levels of socioemotional competence and higher levels of psychological and behavioral dysfunction.
Authoritative
Preferred Parenting Style
•High responsiveness, high demandingness
•Promotes language, social, cognitive and moral development.
•Sets high standards w/ moral development.
•Joint decision making
•Encourage independence
Permissive
•High responsiveness, low demandingness
•Parents are highly involved with the child, but there is no structure, guidance, or discipline is given to follow.
•Parents seek to be liked and want to be seen as friends
•Children are allowed to do whatever they want: SPOILED
Activity for parents
For parents to better understand their own parenting style we will inform the parents of the different benefits and detriments to each style. We encourage parents to carry out the authoritative parenting style because research has proven the best results for the child. With this activity parents can learn exactly what they are doing correctly or what they need to work on to achieve the best fit for their child.
Peer relationships
During early childhood children are learning more about emotional and social development. According to Mildred Parten (1982) the formation of friendships has a major impact on a child during this stage of development. There are different levels of play and the levels of play are based on the social skills a child is capable of using with peers.
Unoccupied behavior: observing what is happened around them, but not engaging
Onlooker behavior: watching others play
Solitary Independent: engaging actively with toys that are different from others around them
Parallel play: playing next to a peer but not interacting with the child
Associative play: shsaring toys and interacting with peers, but lacking a common goal
Cooperative play: play with peers sharing a common goal.
Activity for parents:
For this section we let parents observe their children interact with others. This allows parents to be informed how their children socialize with their peer group. Once the parents recognize what level their child is placed in we then explain the pros and cons to their child's socializing skill. This is beneficial for parents because if needed we can help improve the childrens social development.
Morality
Children learn right and wrong through different forms of reinforcement that the receive from the environment. They also learn socially accepted behavior through imitation. Empathy and guilt influence children to behave morally. Moral knowledge is the childs understanding of right and wrong. A theorist Jean Piaget believed that children go through four stages of reasoning in relation to moral development.
(Age 3 and under) Premoral Reasoning: the inability to consider issues on the basis of their morality.
(Ages 4-7) Heteronomous Reasoning: moral judgements based on the dictates of authority
(Ages 7-8) Autonomous Reasoning: when children are unaware of the rules and realize that they must adhere to them to maintain their interaction with others rather than because an adult has told them what to do.
(Ages 8-12) Immanent Justice: the belief that unrelated events are automatic punishment for misdeeds.
Activity for parents:
Parents and children will participate in an activity to understand which stage of moral development their child is in. There are benefits to understanding this because it gives parents a reason why their child acts or responds to a behavior in a certain way. As their child is further along in development they will understand more about how to socialize and interact with others.
