Psych professor explores science of good parenting

What you do matters. You cannot be too loving. Be involved in your child’s life. Adapt your parenting to fit your child. Establish rules and set limits. Help foster your child’s independence. Be consistent. Avoid harsh discipline. Explain your rules and decisions. Treat your child with respect.

Temple psychologist Laurence Steinberg can’t guarantee that people who follow those principles will be perfect parents. But he can promise that the more consistently they practice them, the better off their children will be.

Perfect parents, he said, just don’t exist.

“Most parents are pretty good parents,” said Steinberg, a nationally prominent expert on adolescent development and parenting. “But I’ve never met a parent who is perfect 100 percent of the time. We all can improve our batting average.”

That’s why Steinberg, the Distinguished University Professor and the Laura Carnell Professor of Psychology, wrote the newly released The Ten Basic Principles of Good Parenting. Chapter by chapter and principle by principle, the succinctly written, easy-to-follow guide outlines what top social scientists know about how to raise happy, well-adjusted children.

“Raising children is not something we think of as especially scientific,” Steinberg said. “But parenting is one of the most well-researched areas in the entire field of social science. It has been studied for 75 years, and the findings have remained remarkably consistent over time.

“The advice in the book is based on what scientists who study parenting have learned from decades of systematic research involving hundreds of thousands of families,” he continued. “What I’ve done is to synthesize and communicate what the experts have learned in a language that non-experts can understand.”

Driving the point home

When he first considered writing the book, Steinberg researched the market at some local bookstores. He found three types of parenting books: those based on people’s opinions, which, he said, “were often just plain wrong”; those that were “highly detailed treatments of single development periods” like infancy or preschool and, sometimes, adolescence; and those that focused on “specific problems” like sleep difficulties, ADHD or drug use.

“I could not find a single book that covered parenting in general and that was evidence-based,” said Steinberg, whose other books include You and Your Adolescent: A Parent’s Guide for Ages 10 to 20, Crossing Paths: How Your Child’s Adolescence Triggers Your Own, and Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need to Do.

“Few popular books are grounded in well-documented science,” he said.

And even fewer are written in a style that is easy for today’s busy parents to read, added Steinberg, whose concept for the book stemmed from his own desire to improve his golf game.

“I was reading, probably for the 10th time, Harvey Penick’s Little Red Golf Book,” he explained. “It is built around a series of very short essays that cover very basic principles.

“As I was reading it, I was thinking that this might be a good way to teach people how to be better parents,” he continued. “I thought that today’s parents are too busy to read long books and are used to reading material that has been ‘chunked’ into short, manageable, memorable parts.”

According to Steinberg, good parenting is “parenting that fosters psychological adjustment—elements like honesty, empathy, self-reliance, kindness, cooperation, self-control and cheerfulness.

“Good parenting is parenting that helps children succeed in school,” he continued. “It promotes the development of intellectual curiosity, motivation to learn and desire to achieve. It deters children from anti-social behavior, delinquency, and drug and alcohol use. And good parenting is parenting that helps protect children against the development of anxiety, depression, eating disorders and other types of psychological distress.”

The fundamentals of effective parenting are the same regardless of the age, sex or birth order of a child, said Steinberg, a former president of the Society for Research on Adolescence.

“And they are the same regardless of whether the primary parent is a mother, father or some other caregiver,” he added. “They even hold true for people who work with children, like teachers, coaches and mentors. The evidence is that strong.”

More than just gut reactions

Himself the father of a son who is now a young adult, Steinberg recognizes that not all parents do a lot of thinking about their parental skills. With this book, he wants to change that.

“A lot of parenting is driven by instincts, our gut responses,” he said. “But some parents have better instincts than others.

“The more parents practice good parenting when they do have time to think before they act, the more natural good parenting will become during those moments when they are responding instinctively,” he continued. “Although the principles certainly make sense, their use is anything but common. In fact, many parents violate them all the time.

“There is no more important job in any society than raising children, and there is no more important influence on how children develop than their parents.” — Barbara Baals