Parenting strategies need to change depending on the social, political, and economic circumstances so that children can one day live as adults according to the demands of contemporary circumstantial factors. However, parents face three significant parenting challenges in the modern world, and those challenges include changes in parenting strategies over time, the evolution of family structures, and conflicts with their children during adolescence. Although some of those challenges could be interpreted as consequences of changes in social attitudes, parents need to develop parenting abilities and self-confidence in their abilities to raise children. If those two criteria are met, contemporary parents will increase their chances of successfully helping their children grow up.
Coleman (2015, p. 392-393) outlines various changes in parenting strategies that occurred during the second half of the 20th century, and those changes still persist today. One of those changes is the contemporary perception of children. It was previously thought that children must learn to handle stress to build character, but contemporary parents view children as fragile beings in need of protection. Another change is that children used to believe that they need to earn the respect of their parents, whereas contemporary parents are trying to earn the respect of their children. Today’s parents use a variety of parenting strategies that are consistent with the aforementioned views about child-parent relationships. Therefore, parenting in modern America usually tends to take a heavy-handed, controlling approach for protecting children or a loose approach that gives children too much autonomy relative to their stage of development. In order to help children in their personal and social development, parents need a balance between the two extreme approaches (Yardi & Bruckman, 2011, p. 3239).
The evolution of family structures determined how children are raised and what their position inside the family is. Whereas traditional families were structured as hierarchies, the transition of children into adolescence needs to be accompanied with a transition of the family structure from a hierarchical to a more egalitarian structure. The authoritative parenting style, which combines clear and strict rules with responsiveness to the needs of the children, proved to be the most effective parenting style in terms of psychological and social outcomes (Yardi & Bruckman, 2011, p. 3239). Cultural factors and family values can determine which parenting style parents select to set rules and raise their children (Yardi & Bruckman, 2011, p. 3245), but children whose parents used the authoritative parenting style were found to be happier, more capable, more socially competent, and more self-confident compared to children who experienced different child-rearing practices.
If parents manage to implement authoritative parenting strategies and transition from a hierarchical to an egalitarian structure, they will increase the chances of raising their children to become healthy and functional adults, but they will also experience positive personality changes themselves. According to Hutteman et al. (2014, p. 172), parent-child and parent-adolescent conflicts are one of the major challenges parents in modern America face. If parents fail to manage those conflicts effectively, they will experience decreases in the personality traits of Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability (Hutteman et al., 2014, p. 175). However, if parents develop the parenting abilities necessary to overcome conflicts with their children, they will mature in terms of Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability (Hutteman et al., 2014, p. 175).
The challenges and problems of parenting today are associated with changes in the perception of children. Whereas overcoming stressful challenges during childhood was considered a positive experience associated with growing up and building character, modern parents tend to be overprotective because they perceive children as fragile. Alternatively, modern parents may perceive the need to earn their children’s respect, so they could provide their children with more freedom than they are capable of managing. In order to overcome the challenges of modern parenting and help children mature into healthy and competent adults, parents need to learn how to balance heavy-handed and responsive parenting strategies.
References
Coleman, J. (2015). Parenting adult children in the twenty-first century. In: B. J. Risman & V. Rutter (Eds.), Families as they really are (2nd ed.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
Hutteman, R., Bleidorn, W., Kerestes, G., Brkovic, I., Butkovic, A., & Denissen, J. J. (2014). Reciprocal associations between parenting challenges and parents' personality development in young and middle adulthood. European Journal of Personality, 28(2), 168-179.
Yardi, S., & Bruckman, A. (2011). Social and technical challenges in parenting teens' social media use. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3237-3246). Vancouver, BC: ACM.
