Best Answer
There is a substantial amount of evidence that authoritarian parenting is a sub-optimal parenting style because of its negative impacts on children. To understand why, it is important to understand the authoritarian parenting approach. Authoritarian parents take a strict approach to their children, with an emphasis on obedience from their children. Authoritarian parents rely on punishments, threats, and shaming to elicit desired behaviors. They are often described as cold, lacking warmth and responsiveness to their children. The three other parenting types are permissive parents who are described as warm but lax; authoritative parents who expect their kids to follow the rules but encourage questions and show warmth; and uninvolved parents who are lax and cold.
While authoritarian parents may emphasize obedience, they actually create children who are disobedient. Authoritarian parents are more likely to create children with behavior problems, with lower academic achievement and poorer social skills than children raised by some of the other types of parents. That may be because the type of punishments that are part of the authoritarian parenting approach actually seem to elicit and reinforce the very same negative behaviors that they are trying to extinguish. In addition, children raised by authoritarian parents seem to have fewer social skills, which not only creates some problems relating to their peers but also sets them up as both more likely to bully and more likely to be bullied by others.
Clearly, all of these factors suggest that the authoritarian parenting style is likely to be damaging to kids and it seems reasonable to assume that this would be exacerbated at the most pivotal ages in a child’s life, which includes the junior high experience. One helpful resource about the relationship between parenting style and childhood self-esteem that could be helpful in your research paper would be Jane Achi’s paper Parenting Styles and Self Esteem of Junior Secondary School Students in Rivers State
