Thanks Harshvardhan!  I especially appreciate the reference to maternal meta-beliefs about the role of negative emotions in her child’s life.  While I’d hypothesize that emotion-coaching is correlated with authoritative parenting and emotion-dismissing is correlated with authoritarian parenting, they certainly seem distinct because I can imagine parents with each parenting style having widely different ideas about emotions (especially permissive).  This is exactly what I’m looking for.  Best wishes, Kevin

Dear Kevin Grobman,

If I understood it well you are wondering whether there are dimensions or categories of parenting that predict developmental outcomes in addition to Baumrind’s parenting styles (authoritarian, authoritative, permissive).

I wonder whether you are acquainted with Martin Hoffman’s classical thinking about the discipline strategies parents use when dealing with misdeeds of several types committed by their children in their everyday life, namely at home. More precisely, Hoffman [see Hoffman, M. (1970). Moral development. In P. Mussen (Ed.), Carmichael's manual of child psychology (Vol. 2. pp. 261-360). New York: Wiley] studied children’s moral reasoning and development as a function of the type of discipline strategies parents employ while dealing with misbehavior committed by their children in their everyday life. Children’s moral development was seen in Piagetian terms [see Piaget, J. (1932). The moral development of the child)]. As you certainly know Piaget distinguished moral heteronomy, a morality oriented to the idea of fear, obedience and unilateral respect, from moral autonomy, a more advanced form of morality, a morality guided by the idea of equality, cooperation, and bilateral respect.

Hoffman conceptualized three types of such discipline strategies: Power assertion, withdrawal of love and inductive or explanatory practices. There is power assertion when parents “… try to control the child’s behavior by appealing to their physical power or their control of certain resources…” such as toys, fruit-gums, and the like (Hoffman, 1970, p. 285). (e.g., “if you do that, to lie, for instance, you won’t have toys anymore”. Withdrawal of love is a kind of blackmail in that parents try to control the child’s behavior by threatening him/her with unpleasant psychological consequences, such as, “if you do that -- to hit your sister, for example -- mom does not like you anymore”. Thus, in the withdrawal of love strategy “… parents give a direct, albeit not physical, expression of their disapproval of the child’s transgressions.” (p. 285). Contrary to what happens with power assertion and withdrawal of love disciplines or practices, when inductive or explanatory practices are used, parents try to get the child’s adherence by explaining to him/her the negative effects of his/her misdeeds on others (e.g.,” if you hit your sister she will be hurt”).

Among other things, Hoffman found that such discipline strategies or practices were related to different levels of children’s moral development. For example, he found (see p.292) that the frequent use of power assertion on the part of the mother was consistently associated with a low level of children’s moral development, such as is the case of moral heteronomy. In contradistinction, inductive practices were positively associated with the child’s moral autonomy. In a nutshell, discipline strategies a la Hoffman are a good predictor of children’s moral development. As there is mounting evidence that shows that one’s cognitive and social development are a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition of one’s moral development, Hoffman’s parenting  strategies are also, to an extent, a predictor of children’s cognitive and social  development.

Note that, along with the beautiful, the true and the good are universal categories, regardless of how they are understood in different times and at different places. Because of this, it is also a bit surprising that ResearchGate theorists and researchers rarely, if ever, raise questions having to do with the beautiful. In this respect, note that Kant wrote three Critiques, one dedicated to the true (Critical of Pure Reason); one dedicated to the good (Critical of Practical Reason), and one related to the beautiful (Critique of Judgment).      

As far as I know there is no standardized tool to assess Hoffman’s discipline strategies. This means that if you want to appeal to such strategies as predictors of developmental outcomes you have to conduct a clinical interview a la Piaget. This is not bad, I think. Actually, psychologists often make use, for example, of standardized like-Likert scales. By so doing, they believe and get the impression – I would say the illusion -- that they are really measuring a certain psychological construct, such cognitive, moral, social, emotional, or aesthetical development. This is one of the reasons why I think that in psychology we should say to evaluate or assess, not to measure. Suffice it to say that, for example, in a Likert-scale the same score (40, for instance) can be obtained or achieved by answering differently to the several items of the scale at hand. The belief mentioned above is greatly responsible for what the Neo-Popperian Paul Meehl once called “the slow progress of soft psychology “[See Meehl, P. (1978) Theoretical risks and tabular asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the slow progress of softy psychology. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 46, 806-834].

In short, to assess Hoffman’s discipline strategies, Baumrind’s parenting styles, and so forth, it is better to use a well conducted clinical or semi-clinical interview than to a supposedly or apparently rigorous standardized scale or test. Wittgenstein once remarked in his famous Philosophical Investigations that in psychology there are experimental methods [and many standardized scales and tests], but conceptual confusion. Psychologists and educators, let alone other social scientists, have not yet leaned from this Wittgenstein’s astute remark. Note that many questions on Research Gate are questions about scales and the like, an only a few are about the issue of conceptual, grammatical, epistemological and even philosophical questions, as Wittgenstein used to say.

Note also, that Piaget’s monumental theory of cognitive development never appealed to generally and theoretically ungrounded standardized scales or (mental) tests but rather to theoretically grounded interviews and developmental tasks. To see the difference between mental tests and developmental tasks a la Piaget, note that the former are referred to a (quantitative) norm, and the latter refer  to a (qualitative) criterion. In other words, Piaget’s idea was to assess the qualitative type of one’s intelligence (i.e., practical intelligence, preoperational intelligence, concrete operational intelligence, and formal operational intelligence) than the quantity of one’s intelligence (e.g., one's IQ., to know more of the same, and the like). This does nor mean, however, that Piaget see quantity and quality as two unrelated  issues.

I hope that I have got your points and that this helps.    

 Best regards.               

Thank you for the thoughtful response Orlando.  I appreciate the value of many methodologies, and certainly didn’t mean to imply that survey designs are better than other approaches.  My own preference is to have participants (e.g., children, parents, college students) actually do things rather than fill in surveys.  But that requires enough time with participants and can be labor-intensive for coding.  The current project is one where I’ll have a large sample size with limited time, so I would like to use a survey design.  I’m especially trying to measure parenting in as much depth and breadth as possible.  One survey I’d found is the Dimensions of Discipline Inventory by Straus & Fauchier (2007) and many of its sub-scales correspond with Hoffman. Thanks again for your help. ~ Kevin

I am finishing my master thesis about parenting and empathy, so if you are interested you can have a look at this.

Parent involvement in education and parent expectations for long-term educational attainment both promote the psychological and academic development of children and youth. Parent involvement includes a variety of activities, such as parent-child shared reading, providing books at home, developing positive and trusting relationships with teachers, helping with homework (although this can backfire if not done in an autonomy supportive or authoritative way), taking children to museums and libraries, and modeling an interest in literacy and learning. See this longitudinal study which includes many of these parent involvement variables as well as parent expectations

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258189361_The_long-term_effects_of_early_parent_involvement_and_parent_expectation_in_the_USA

Parent expectations predict the development of children's learning over the course of many years as well as future children's expectations. Importantly, parent expectations also predict students intrinsic motivation to learn and engagement with math courses as we found in this study below:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305893056_The_longitudinal_influences_of_peers_parents_motivation_and_mathematics_course-taking_on_high_school_math_achievement

Thanks for the great question.

:

Article The long-term effects of early parent involvement and parent...

Article The longitudinal influences of peers, parents, motivation, a...

Beware, oh beware, of most of the research purporting to relate to this area, which deals mainly with so-called "cognitive development". Forget about "scales" and reflect on the kind of descriptive framework used by biologists to study the thousands of varieties of plants and animals and their interactions with their habitats. Have a look at my Parents, Teachers, and Children or Managing Education for Effective Schooling or the Nature, Development and Assessment of Competence.

Hello Kevin,

Thank you very much  for the positive tone of your message regarding my considerations about your question referred to above. Fortunately, a given question or problem can be well addressed through different procedures and methodologies, though some methodologies are more appropriate that other ones. Because your current project is one where you have a large sample size with limited time, I understand well that you use a survey design.

In this vein, I think that progress in a science whatever depends more on the quality of the problems, doubts, questions, hypotheses we raise than on the scientific methodology we use to address them. The important issue is that we, as scientists, are capable of raising what C. S.Pierce called, as it were,  "irritating" questions, doubts, and the like, that is, questions and doubts whose responses are creative and innovative, and hence, lead us to a better understanding of what is sill unknown. 

Irritating questions generally require that we have, say,  a conceptual "enemy". (Parenthetically Piaget often said that his conceptual enemy was logical positivism). In  other words, if we want to get ahead we have to have a theory, or even a meta theory.

I also think that when an irritating question, doubt, hypothesis, and so forth, is one that can be tested and, hence, subject to falsification in Popperian terms. A non- falsifiable hypothesis in no hypotheses at all. Unfortunately, psychology is full with example of  untestable propositions, which is may be the main reason of what Paul Meehl (1978, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology) called the slow progress of soft psychology. When a proposition is true by definition, it is a waste of time to run an experiment in order to reject the null hypothesis. This means that when we run an experiment we should be first, say, students of logic before we are students of nature. I often substantiate this idea with the case of a my former student who wanted to run an experiment so as to show that Piagetian formal operations come only after Piagetian concrete operations.  As formal operations are operations on concrete operations, then it is true by definition that formal operations cannot but appear after concrete operations. As Wittgenstein once cogently remarked in his book "On certainty", where there is no place for doubt, certainty doesn't make any sense either.

I would be more than happy if these my thoughts  could be of help for you,

Kind  regards,

Thank you for your thoughts about how parenting styles interact with empathy, Mirjam, and parental involvement, John Mark.  John R. mentions a preference for descriptive frameworks.  Though, for the current study, I am interested in scales, I think you might be interested in how Baumrind original inferred parenting styles.  It was an intensive coding (i.e., description) of specific behaviors in numerous families.  Then statistical analyses revealed the 3 underlying clusters.  A non-technical but thorough explanation is in Dixon’s book, “Twenty Studies that Revolutionized Child Psychology.”  I have used it in lieu of a traditional textbook when teaching Developmental Psychology and I highly recommend it.  Like Orlando, I appreciate the guiding value of a good theory.  I find Piaget astonishingly brilliant and I wish we spent more time developing theory as he did.  I agree that formal operations must follow concrete operations, because of their underlying structure (e.g., Piaget’s “Genetic Epistemology.”)  However I do see it as an empirical question whether successful completion of Piagetian concrete operational tasks always precedes successful completion of formal operational tasks.  Many studies address this, as well as the stage-like discontinuous change with age, and patterns of horizontal decalage.  But I also find Information Processing approaches to development quite compelling in their precision, and there is something to be said for letting the theory emerge from the data (“bottom up”) rather than the other way around.  I apologize for the delay in responding; the semester has begun and my time has become more limited.  Thank you for all of your feedback. ~ Kevin