Question: Do children respond best to an authoritarian style parent?

Answer: Diana Baumrind is a well-known researcher who described various behaviours through which parents are either demanding or responsive to their children and classified this into four main styles of parenting: authoritarian, authoritative, indulgent and unengaged.

Based on her research, the authoritarian parenting style is not the most effective approach to parenting. Children respond best to a more balanced parenting style described as authoritative, rather than authoritarian.

Authoritarian parents are demanding, but not responsive — which means that children have to follow lots of rules that don't necessarily consider their needs or wishes.

Indulgent parents are not sufficiently demanding of children, but are very responsive. These children live in permissive environments where they usually get what they want, when they want it, without expectations of responsibility.

Unengaged parents are described as neither demanding nor responsive and children neither learn responsibility nor get their needs and wants met by parents.

Authoritative parents are both sufficiently demanding and appropriately responsive. Children learn about boundaries and responsibilities, but their parents take into consideration children's input and are concerned about their special needs and wishes. Thus authoritative parenting has been found to be the most effective style for raising happy, achieving children.

You can see that either extreme of parenting causes children problems, but in authoritative parenting, while the parents are definitely in charge, their decisions are made with consideration to children's input, thoughts and feelings.

A developmental analogy I use in my book, "How To Parent So Children Will Learn" (Great Potential Press, 2008), is the V of love. When children are young you can view them at the base of the V with little power, little freedom, few choices and few responsibilities. As they mature parents gradually increase their power, freedom and choices, matched with increased responsibilities. Children thus feel gradually empowered as parents back off to treat them in a more mature fashion.

In our culture today, many children are brought up with the inverted V — thus having too much power, too many choices, and too much freedom before they can manage responsibility and project the future. Consequences alone are insufficient for learning that they've made mistakes. This early overempowerment often leads parents to punish children more severely as they get into trouble, thus taking power away that they've given too early.

By the tween and teen years, these children often feel powerless and are angry and rebellious, thus causing adolescence to feel like a constant battle. The tweens and teens feel powerless only relative to the overempowerment they wielded too early.

Unfortunately, alcohol and drugs temporarily cause them to feel empowered and they're very vulnerable to addiction and serious high-risk behaviours.

Question: I'm hoping you can help me with a problem in my classroom. I didn't see a book or DVD about bullying on your webs ite, but that is a problem in my classroom and other classrooms in my school. What are your recommendations for dealing with bullying that occurs out of sight and earshot of the teacher? What do I do when a student or parent of a student complains about another child's bullying that I haven't witnessed? I teach fourth grade, and every year there seem to be problems with bullying.

Answer: I've actually written a great deal about bullying in various books and I'll summarise those after I've answered your specific question about what you do about bullying you haven't witnessed.

The answer is that you take it as seriously as if you had witnessed it. Most bullies manage to bully kids out of sight and earshot of teachers and parents or they wouldn't be successful at bullying. They're smart enough to know that teachers and parents would make them quit, punish them and force them to apologsze.

Bullies don't win any peer credit by getting caught. Kids who habitually bully other kids are likely to have great problems later in life and to be in trouble with the law eventually. They often come from families that provided neither sufficient love nor boundaries, so you do them a great favor by providing caring and consequences. The caring is harder to provide than the consequences because bullies can be mean. Finding their strengths and engaging them in positive activities is a challenge.

Punishing them can keep others safe temporarily, but they'll soon be back if they can get away with hurting others. They've learned it's one activity at which they're effective.

The continuous victims of bullying need protecting and suffer great harm to their self-esteem. Children need to know how and where they can be safe and that they won't be considered tattletales for reporting their problems. They need engagement in activities to build confidence and friendships. Sometimes victims of bullying also need social skills counseling.

Anti-bullying programs in schools are effective at decreasing, but not necessarily eliminating, bullying. I have many other suggestions for children that teachers could include in their lessons. Bullying is particularly prevalent at the middle grade level, starting at around third or fourth grade. A chapter on bullying in schools starts on page 39 in my book, "Growing Up Too Fast: The Rimm Report on the Secret World of America's Middle Schoolers." Because overweight children are often victimized by bullies, Chapter Three ("Feeling Like a Blob and An Outcast") in my book "Rescuing the Emotional Lives of Overweight Children," has additional tips on bullying. Finally, suggestions that are directed specifically to kids, but will also be helpful to you, are included in "Gifted Kids Have Feelings Too" and "See Jane Win For Girls."

In addition to all these, I'll be happy to send you a free newsletter on bullying, and there is an article in the parenting articles section of my Web site www.sylviarimm.com titled ?Bullying Needs to Stop? which you may also find helpful.

Dr. Sylvia B. Rimm is the director of the Family Achievement Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, a clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, and the author of many books on parenting.