Biography
Biography: Riitta Sikiö
Abstract
Parenting is well discussed thing. Parenting may be complicated, clear, difficult or easy to deal with. Everyone at least every parent has some opinion about it and every child has some opinions atleast thoughts how their own parents have raised them. Does it matter how to parent? Mothers´ trust on their children’s abilities is important. It has been shown that the more Finnish mothers attributed to their children´s ability and the better were their children’s achievements. It could be said that if mother trusts the child´s ability, it will improve child´s self-confidence and the trust on her/his own skill. Finnish mother´s trust their children´s ability and they use positive and straight parenting styles with their children. Parenting styles are divided into three parts: authoritative parenting, authoritarian parenting and permissive parenting. Supportive, fair and logical parenting has been shown to effect best to reading scores at early grades at school. In this so called behavioral parenting, the adult gives a positive feedback to children after the right act or saying. And after the wrong act the adult puts the limits logically to the children. Opposite to this the authoritarian parenting has shown to be harmful to children´s school scores. In this parenting style parents use a psychological control in his/her parenting. Parent may dominate the child but also under rate child´s doing. Despite this psychological control is well used and accepted in many cultures. Parenting really matters even if it is only one factor on the path of child’s development. Nevertheless there is no one right way to do it. Now-a-days people move to other countries more than earlier. Different cultures have different ways to parent and the differences may be hard to understand or accept. Should we learn more about different cultural parenting styles to understand them better?