You want to prepare your child to think as he gets older. You want him to be critical in his judgments. Teaching a child, by your ...example, that there's never any room for negotiating or making choices in life may suggest that you expect blind obedience--but it won't help him in the long run to be discriminating in choices and thinking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My father was frightened of his mother. I was frightened of my father and I am damned well going to see to it that my children are... frightened of me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In child rearing it would unquestionably be easier if a child were to do something because we say so. The authoritarian method doe...s expedite things, but it does not produce independent functioning. If a child has not mastered the underlying principles of human interactions and merely conforms out of coercion or conditioning, he has no tools to use, no resources to apply in the next situation that confronts him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Authoritarian methods do not produce independence: they reinforce dependence. Independent functioning is not simply the ability to... do something, but also the ability to decide what to do. It is not only the ability to take care of oneself. It is also the ability to take responsibility for oneself. Autonomy and independence do not grow out of being told what to do and when to do it. It is only by having his needs considered, by becoming a participant in the decision-making process, that a child develops the capacity for autonomy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We all know children who grew up in authoritarian families and have never stopped rebelling against restrictiveness wherever they ...find it. And they seem to be more prone than others to find it!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see around... them so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children's future--fear that they'll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »