Parenting Practices and Shyness in Chinese Children

Abstract

This chapter reviews recent literature analysing relationships between parenting styles and developmental outcomes. As opposed to traditional results obtained with Euro-American samples, evidence from emergent research in South European and Latin American countries indicates that adolescents from indulgent families scored equal or even better than those from authoritative families in many key indicators of psychosocial adjustment, and that the indulgent parenting appears as the optimum parenting style in these samples. This research suggests that authoritative parenting is not always necessarily associated with optimum developmental outcomes and that relationships between parenting styles and developmental outcomes also depend on the ethnic and cultural context where the socialization process takes place. Further research based in sound parenting science is needed to understand socialization processes better across different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.