GUIDE

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The Guide component of the model focuses on the development of personal strength in children and the benevolent expression of authority by parents. Parents are faced with a difficult balancing act in establishing authority: to use their power to identify, introduce, and enforce reasonable limits while gradually giving freedom to children by encouraging them to be appropriately responsible for themselves. Parents have the responsibility to use their superior knowledge and wisdom to set limits that protect their children and show concern for the welfare of others. They may want to teach their children to inhibit destructive behavior and engage in more prosocial or worthwhile action.

Children, on the other hand, seek freedom from such constraint even as they need guidance and structure. Their growth as individuals depends on making choices and facing the consequences of their own decisions.

Assistance with this difficult task of communicating values, nurturing self-control, and responding to misbehavior is a common request by parents. This clear desire for assistance provides the rationale for making Guide one of the components of the model.

The Critical Guide Practices

• Model appropriate desired behavior.
• Establish and maintain reasonable limits.
• Provide children with developmentally appropriate opportunities to learn responsibility.
• Convey fundamental values underlying basic human decency.
• Teach problem-solving skills.
• Monitor children's activities and facilitate their contact with peers and adults.

Examples of Specific Program Objectives for Guide

The following parent behaviors serve as examples of more specific outcome objectives based on the critical practices for Guide:

• Make confident discipline decisions based on knowledge of options.
• Increase thoughtful or reflective responses to a child's misbehavior while decreasing impulsive reactions.
• Increase the use of prevention and guidance and decrease the use of punishment, especially spanking, in their use of discipline.
• Implement a four-step sequence for responding to misbehavior.
• Identify why limits are important.
• Understand that limits are based on values.
• Evaluate whether limits are based on values.
• Define misbehavior and learn to use three critical questions to determine whether misbehavior is taking place.
• Learn reasons why children misbehave.
• Learn how to use prevention as part of a discipline strategy.
• Differentiate between cruelty and reasonable consequences.
• Understand when consequences are necessary.
• Use reasonable consequences appropriate to the misbehavior.

What We Know about Guide

The most effective discipline style involves a delicate balance between parental warmth/acceptance and parental control/strictness. According to Diana Baumrind (Maccoby and Martin, 1983) this authoritative pattern of parenting includes the following elements:

1. Expectations for mature behavior from children and clear limits.
2. Firm enforcement of rules and standards, using commands and sanctions when necessary.
3. Encouragement of children's independence and individuality.
4. Open communication between parents and children, with parents listening to children's points of view, as well as expressing their own; encouragement of give-and-take.
5. Recognition of rights of both parents and children.

Effective parents make reasonable and firm demands that are accepted as legitimate by children. These parents encourage their children to make choices and regulate their own behavior.

A clear, reasonable structure provides security and stability. In ten years of working with distressed families in a treatment program, the Patterson group (Maccoby and Martin, 1983) found that the lack of compliance by aggressive children is central to family dysfunction. In order to help parents reestablish their authority they instituted a program on child management with the following characteristics:

1. Clear understandings of what would be considered acceptable and unacceptable behavior are established.
2. Children's behavior would be closely monitored so that both compliance and noncompliance with the understood rules can be noted quickly and consistently.
3. Consistent reasonable responses to the misbehavior would be established.
4. Positive consequences for the child's prosocial behavior would be emphasized.

Program developers believed that once parents established their influence in obtaining compliance from their children, they would be able to teach self-help and prosocial skills more effectively.

Hoffman (1975) advocates a "victim centered" discipline that encourages children to repair the damage they have done, apologize, and show concern for the victim's feelings. Children who experience this form of discipline are viewed by their peers as being kind people. Victim-centered discipline uses person-oriented instead of position-oriented reasoning (Bearison and Cassel, 1975). Person-oriented reasoning draws attention to the experience of those involved_their feelings, thoughts, needs, and intentions ("Hitting hurts. See how much your sister is crying now. She is sad."). Position-oriented reasoning makes an appeal based on rules ("You are not supposed to hit your sister.") or status ("Because I said so.").

An authoritative discipline style is associated with a variety of positive outcomes for children. Baumrind (1991) found that authoritative parents were more likely than parents who were authoritarian or permissive to have children who were socially responsible and independent.

Children's moral development in grades 1-10 was best predicted by a parental discussion style that involved a give-and-take discussion and supportive interactions, combined with the presentation of higher-level moral reasoning (Walker et al., 1991). Authoritative parenting across ethnic groups also is associated with academic success by adolescents (Dornbusch et al., 1987; Steinberg, et al., 1989) and positive peer relationships (Dekovic and Janssens, 1991; Lamborn and Mounts et al., 1991).

Competent adolescents have parents who exercise reasonable control but who are flexible and encourage independence (Lamborn et al., 1991; Montemayor, 1986). Adolescents who abstain from using drugs have parents who maintain control by clarifying appropriate behavior, reinforce with praise and encouragement, and maintain warm, caring relationships (Baumrind, 1991; Coombs and Landsverk, 1988).

Dubow and his colleagues (1987) found that childrearing styles characterized by acceptance and a less dominating approach to punishment, and identification of the child with the parent are associated with higher levels of adult ego development twenty-two years later. Direct control techniques in both teaching and in response to a child's misbehavior are negatively related to the child's academic success at four, five, six, and twelve years of age (Hess and McDevitt, 1984).

A nationally representative sample of 3,346 American parents with a child under eighteen living at home found that 63 percent of the parents reported instances of such verbal aggression as swearing and insulting the child. Children who experienced frequent verbal aggression from parents exhibited higher rates of verbal aggression, delinquency, and interpersonal problems than other children (Vissing et al., 1991). Children four to eleven years of age who received frequent and/or severe punishment committed more aggressive transgressions (toward siblings, peers, adults outside family) and were more likely to oppose parental interventions than children who received infrequent and/or mild punishment (Trickett and Kucynski, 1986). Larzelere (1986) found a direct positive relationship between spanking and child aggression against others. But when mild or moderate punishment was coupled with reasoning, child aggression did not increase.

In a study reported recently in the Harvard Medical School Mental Health Letter, adults who had been raised with harsh physical discipline were found to be almost three times as likely to develop depression or alcoholism as were those whose parents had brought them up in gentler ways (Mellinger, 1989).

McCord (1983) compared over a forty-year period abused, neglected, and rejected boys with boys who experienced love and nurturing. Children who were not actively nurtured had higher rates of juvenile delinquency. About half of the abused and neglected children who were convicted of serious crimes became alcoholics, or suffered from mental illness. They also died at a younger age than those who were nurtured as children.

Consistency in guidance is important for children. Montemayor (1986) found that ineffective parents punish more than they reward although use of punishment and reward is inconsistent. Maltreating parents have been found to use ineffective and inconsistent punishment and discipline (Reid et al., 1981; Kimball et al., 1980).

Guidance is part of a relationship in which each person influences and is influenced by the other. Minton et al., (1971) studied disciplinary encounters in the homes of ninety two-year-olds. Mothers' initial responses to physical or verbal aggression, temper tantrums, or harm to household objects were initially mild in tone. Pressure on the child was escalated to a more forceful level if the child did not comply to the initial effort. Mothers responded more firmly at the outset of a conflict if they had to use force to gain the child's compliance in a prior conflict.

A child's propensity to comply and avoid defiance may be affected by the extent to which the mother's control strategies allow the child a degree of autonomy. Children are more likely to comply if they perceive they are participating in a reciprocal relationship. Their mothers are clear about what they want while listening to their children's desires. They show respect for their children's autonomy and individuality. These mothers reason, persuade, suggest, and adapt their requests to what they think their children will accept (Crockenberg and Litman, 1990).

Competent and cooperative adolescents will elicit authoritativeness in parents while difficult-to-manage children can trigger parental aggression or neglect (Lamborn et al., 1991).

Ineffective discipline choices are associated with a variety of personal and family stressors. Adolescent mothers who had experienced rejection and physical punishment during childhood and little or no support from a partner after birth were more likely to exhibit angry and punitive parenting. Their children were more angry, more noncompliant, and more emotionally distanced from mothers than were children of nonpunitive mothers (Crockenburg, 1987).

Child misbehavior is associated with marital conflict (Reid and Crisafulli, 1990). Parental isolation also can contribute to parent-child conflict. A national survey of 6,000 households revealed that single parents are more likely to use abusive forms of violence toward their children than are parents in dual-caretaker households. Abusive violence appeared to be a function of poverty in mother- but not father-headed homes. In households where one parent does all the disciplining_whether it is the mother or the father_punishment is likely to be more severe (Mellinger, 1989).

Parents who are abusers are more likely than those who are not to have been abused as children (DePanfilis and Salus, 1992). Also, they are more likely to have experienced more stressful life events in the preceding twelve months (Smith and Adler, 1991). The more physical punishment a parent experienced as a child, the higher the proportion who engage in abusive violence toward their own children and spouses (Herzberger and Tennen, 1985; Straus, 1990).

Substance abuse also can contribute to a high-risk environment for children. Drug abusing mothers have experienced cycles of victimization themselves and have few job skills, poor self-esteem, and, often, many children. Drugs can interfere with the user's ability to parent (DePanfilis and Salus, 1992).

Certain situations cause overload, frustration, and parental retribution. Parents of three- and four-year-olds were more likely to report probable spanking for physical aggression by the child than for any other area of misbehavior (Sims and Mason, 1991). Due to their size and immaturity, young children are particularly vulnerable to maltreatment. For children living in high risk families, innocent acts of colic, awakening at night, separation anxiety, normal exploratory behavior, normal negativism, normal poor appetite, and toilet training resistance can trigger dangerous or even deadly abuse. Difficult-to-manage children can be at risk for abuse if their parents are isolated and overloaded with stress.

Having a history of abuse as a child, being a single parent, or having a difficult-to-manage child, for example, does not necessarily mean that a parent will become an abuser. However, when these risk factors are combined with stress overload and social isolation, the result is a potentially explosive environment in the family.

The ideology of physical punishment is currently in a stage of transition. Carson (1989) found that 80 to 90 percent of the population considers parents to have not just the right, but the moral obligation to spank or slap. Nonspanking parents tend to be the objects of social control efforts by friends and relatives in the form of polite but pointedly expressed doubts about consequences for the child. Parents have to develop socially acceptable accounts to justify their unwillingness to use physical punishment to themselves and others.

About 90 percent of the parents in a 1975 National Family Violence Survey expressed at least some degree of approval of physical punishment (Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz, 1980). Dibble and Straus (1980) found that 82 percent of parents expressed at least some degree of approval of slapping or spanking a twelve-year-old.

Wauchope and Straus (1990) found that more than 90 percent of parents of children three and four years of age used physical punishment; physical punishment is still being used with 33 percent of fifteen-year olds. Enormous variation exists in how often children experience physical punishment.

This violent paradigm of the dominant culture may be changing, however. In their New Hampshire Child Abuse Survey, Moore and Straus (1987) found that almost half of the parents interviewed strongly disagreed with the statement, "Parents have a right to slap their teenage children who talk back to them." According to a more recent National Public Opinion survey conducted by the National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse, 72 percent of the American public believes that physical discipline of a child can lead to injury (Cohn, 1990). Carson (1989) found that 40 percent of parents who regularly spanked their children thought that spanking was rarely, if ever, effective. One out of three felt guilty and blamed themselves after spanking a child. The more parents use physical punishment, the greater the percentage who worry that they might be carried away to the point of child abuse (Frude and Goss, 1979).

Advocates of physical punishment may, however, resist change and ignore alternatives. Cudaback (1992) found that those who believe in physical punishment express significantly less desire for information about discipline.