Child psychology has been the focus of attention for quite a while now, and research studies show that your parenting style can have a long-lasting impact on your child's development. That is why child psychologists pay a great deal of attention to your child's behavior.

The main purpose is to observe how your child behaves and interact with you, their surrounding, and when they are alone. This gives a child psychologist essential identifiers to access your child's mental development and wellbeing. 

Paying Attention to your Children's Psychology

If you wish your children to lead a healthy physical, emotional, and mental life, you must focus on their psychological development. This is where a child psychologist comes into play to help you understand how your interaction with your child affects them and why they act the way they do.

Not always, but some behavioral abnormalities have a close association with the parenting style you practice. Therefore, identifying the abnormalities in your parenting behavior can help you understand your children better.

Moreover, you can also learn to connect and communicate with them more positively and constructively.

By knowing your child's mind, you can also help them develop strong coping mechanisms in difficult situations. Some of the most common issues bad parenting style may cause in your child are.

• Aggression
• Depression
• Anxiety
• ADHD
• Learning issues
• Hyperactivity

Parenting Style and Role in Child's Development

Your parenting style affects every aspect of your child's development, i.e., physical, emotional, and cognitive. Let us look at how.

Cognitive Effects of Parenting Style

Did you know that newborns are aware of their surroundings and show interest? It may come as a surprise, but it is true. How you parent your infant will definitely affect their cognitive ability to understand and observe.

Plus, it will also impact their thought processing abilities pertaining to learning language, decision making, memorizing, and imagination. 

Emotional Effects of Parenting Style

Emotional development in your child refers to the feelings, understanding, and expression of emotions. You can observe this by some basic emotions of anger, joy, fear, or sadness. Moreover, emotional development goes hand-in-hand with social development as social interaction helps your child develop complex emotions.

This phase determines the emotional state of mind in terms of hope, guilt, confidence, pride, self-esteem, etc. Having the right parenting style can help you develop your child's ability to be empathic and feel and understand their emotion as well as others.

Yelling is not the answer. Think about it, when you yell at your kids for being aggressive, misbehaving, or being of the line by shouting at them, are you not contradicting yourself? Even if the child may comply out of fear when young, they may develop disliking towards you and other behavioral problems.

Thus, it is absolutely critical for you to work on the emotional development of your child, and the best way to do it is a healthy and positive parenting style. 

Parenting Style and Social Development of a Child

As a parent, your attitude towards the child also determines their development in terms of values, social awareness, and mingling skills. The parenting style helps your child relate to people around them, such as who is in-charge, who has the authority, the peers, and whom to avoid, such as strangers.

Moreover, the right kind of parenting also instills friendship, trust, conflict management, and respect for authority in your child. 

4 Types of Parenting Style

Child Psychology expert Diane Baumrind classified parenting style into four categories, which are.

• Authoritarian – As an authoritarian parent, you will be extremely strict in rules and show the least affection, love, or warmth toward the children. You rule with an iron-hand and have zero tolerance for disobedience, insubordination, and errors. You believe in actions and consequences, which can result in harsh punishments at times.
• Authoritative – You are an authoritative parent if you have set high standards for your child to follow. However, you also display a high level of affection, warmth, and admiration. You support two-way conversations and discuss any discrepancies in your child's behavior.
• Permissive – In a permissive parenting style, you act as your child's best friend, not a parent. This is mostly due to your fear of being disliked by the child, which may have its roots in how your parents treated you. However, this can negatively impact your child's psychology, and he/she may lose respect for authority, rules, and consequences.
• Uninvolved – You have nothing to do with your child and do not care how they act, what they do. We can all be neglectful at times, but that does not make you an uninvolved parent. The uninvolved parenting style actually means you are completely uninterested in offering anything to your child, emotionally, mentally, and physically. No love, no warmth, no connection, no rules, this is what being a neglectful parent is. 

Which Parenting Style Do Child Psychologists Prefer? 

The authoritative parenting style is the most effective and preferred parenting style by child psychologists. This type of parenting style helps prepare your child to lead a well-balanced and successful life physically, cognitively, emotionally, socially, and academically.

What sets you apart from an authoritarian parent is that you expect highly from your child as an authoritative parent, but you also offer more. However, it can be very tricky and requires a lot of self-control, mental resilience, time, and energy to master the authoritative parenting style.

Be child-centered; work to develop mutual consent for rules and other aspects of life. Work on their behavioral control and emotional stability with consistent nurturing and communication.

Conclusion 

The take-away of the entire discussion is that as a parent, you must find a balanced parenting method to help your child understand the pros and cons of their actions. However, for that, you must first understand your actions and how they affect your child.

Be an authority figure to your child but pat their back and shower them with love, warmth, and praise when they deserve it. This will make your child respect authority but also become emotionally independent with higher self-esteem and confidence.