Have Authoritarian Parenting Practices and Roles Changed in the Last 50 Years?

Headnote

This study examined changes in authoritarian parenting practices and family roles in Sweden over the last 50 years. Data came from 3 cohorts (1958, 1981, and 2011) of young to middle-age adults living in a suburb of Stockholm who answered questions about how they were raised (N^sub 1958^ = 385, N^sub 1981^ = 207, N^sub 2011^ = 457). The results showed a dramatic decrease in parents' directive control. Also, over time, parents increasingly allowed children to express anger toward them. Parents' roles changed from stereotyped versions of fathers as decision makers and mothers as caregivers to both parents sharing decisions and garnering respect from children. Overall, the results suggest that authoritarian parenting practices have declined dramatically and moved toward more egalitarian family environments. Virtually all these changes in parental practices and parental roles happened between the last 2 cohorts.

Key Words: discipline, gender, marital roles, parent-child relationships, parenting, trends.

Western societies have been changing rapidly over the past 50 years. The social and economic conditions for families today differ substantially from those of families living several decades ago. Also, social policies about families have changed. This leads to the question of whether there has also been a clear trend in the way parents raise their children. Is parenting today fundamentally different from what it was some generations ago? In this study, we attempted to answer this question by focusing on parenting practices typically associated with authoritar- ian parenting, such as directiveness (Robinson, Mandleco, Frost Olsen, & Hart, 1995); harsh parenting practices (Amato & Fowler, 2002); and strictness, punitiveness, and constraining the expression of negative emotion (Schaefer & Bell, 1958). We also looked at how parental roles associated with authoritarian ideals have changed, and we examined how these aspects of authoritarian parenting have changed over the past 50 years.

Authoritarian parenting was the first parent- ing style to be described by scholars. The first systematic studies of authoritarian parenting date from the late 1940s (e.g., Baldwin, 1948), whereas references to other parenting styles started to appear at least a decade later (Baum- rind, 1966). It is also the type of parenting most likely to have changed in the last 50 years, because the practices associated with authori- tarian parenting style reflect, at the family level,...