So there are lots of parents. Obviously, there is a variety between all of them. One of the biggest difference in determining these is 'nurture', which states each distinctive difference everyone has come from they way they were nurtured. This heavily contrasts with the idea of 'nature', that much of our differences come from our biological genes. These two factors, together, determine each of us as people. For example, my small mouth is due to nature, but my habits of not opening my mouth wide come from nurture.
Parenting, however, is heavily dependent on our nurture. One of the reoccurring ideas in many developmental theories is that each parent's parenting styles our a model of their own parents. This correctly supports the notion that people abused as children abuse their own children when they become adults.
Our own parent's are no exception to this idea, which is why parents in different culture raise their kids differently. For example, the common stereotype of Asian parents, easily summed up in the phrase, "tiger mom", is that Asian mothers tend to focus heavily on academics and getting to a good college. However, this is only a cycle of what they had gone through.
For one thing, my mother was not study intensive as a student. She loved books: Not your common light romantic novels, but recordings about the kings of Korea, or classic pieces of Western literature translated in to her native language. While we, as students, often read these books in order to get grades, her parents were not so happy about all these books, as they were posing as distraction to her studies. Her conservative father heavily affected her, and she, like the majority of her generation, was hit whenever she made him angry, in this case reading a book.
This reflected her ways of parenting. She took time to get me to read books. Furthermore, according to her own words, she "took time to make sure I didn't get hit." However, corporal punishment is still widespread in Korean parents, and its really only because they were raised in that way.
I really agree with you on the idea that parents base their parenting strategies on how they were treated as children, either to counteract the actions of their parents, or to replicate them out of admiration. Good post :)
ReplyDeleteI agree with you too; parents tend to do the opposite of what their parents did. We can see this evident in The Glass Castle, and our lives. I like your connection to nature versus nurture. Nice post.
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