Questions to Guide your Reading

Adolescence:  Steinberg et al, Authoritative Parenting

Class discussion 10/15 extended to 10/22

• “You can’t talk to your teenagers.  It’s all their friends.”  One popular parenting myth about adolescence is that parents are devoid of influence.  What does this chapter say about that? 

• How are Baumrind’s four styles of parenting associated with outcomes for adolescents and how do these compare to what Baumrind and others found for younger children?

• How is authoritative parenting particularly well suited to the developmental tasks of adolescence?

• How do Steinberg and colleagues show that parental influence is not limited to middle class white kids?

• Steinberg and colleagues do not suggest that friends are not important to adolescents.  In fact, the peer group appears to have a role in the influence of parenting.  How does that work?  What are some of the differences between majority and minority youth?

• How do the structure of neighborhoods contribute to parental influence and what is meant by family social integration and value consensus?

• What do you think are some of the limitations of Steinberg’s observations and his data and how might those be studied further (e.g., the suggestion on p. 459 that social integration might not always be an adaptive goal).