In this next section of the course, we're going to move beyond theory and experimentation, and really into the applications of self-determination theory. There's really no better place to begin than with the topic of parenting, something that concerns almost all of us at some point in our life span. One of the fundamental assumptions about self-determination theory, is that we think we have within us the necessary ingredients for growth, like an acorn has what it takes to become an oak tree, the child has within it all the ingredients to grow into a full and healthy human being, but that will only happen if there are certain nutriments provided to that child. In the psychological sphere, those nutriments are the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Perhaps the most important figures of all in supplying those nutriments are, of course, parents. Parents are important, first and foremost, because they're the people who select the environments for every child to grow up in. But even more directly, how they go about parenting, and what they teach their children will have a big impact on whether those children experience satisfaction of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. So, how is it that parents go about supporting those basic needs? Well, way back in the 1980s, Wendy Grolnick and I started a model within SDT, of what parent behaviors really lead to need satisfaction, and thriving in children. Like other broad strokes of our theory, we're going to talk about this really at a bird's eye level, but there are three basic things that parents really do to provide support for children. The first is that they supply involvement. Involvement, is that they dedicate their time, resources, care, and concern to their children. They know what their children are up to. Their paying attention across development, and they're providing help whenever they can. Involvement helps support the feeling of relatedness insignificance in the child. But another thing that good parents do is they provide structure. They help scaffold their child's environments, so that the challenges and the problems that beset the child are developmentally appropriate. They provide help and guidance when needed, and when there are issues or troubles in terms of mastery, they provide informational feedback rather than being evaluative or controlling. Most important in self-determination theory, however, is that parents are also autonomy supportive. They understand the child's perspective. They listen to the child's point of view on different problems, and where they can, they offer the child choices about how to go about doing things, and they support the child's initiative. When they must demand something from the child, they supply meaningful rationale, and they're empathic in their limit setting. These three things: autonomy support, structure, and involvement, really have been validated across many studies as really important to children's well-being and satisfaction of basic psychological needs. Originally, we validated this in some basic interview studies with parents. Wendy Grolnick and I interviewed parents in their home, mothers and fathers separately about how they went about motivating their children for school, or motivating children for chores, and we found that in households where parents were more autonomy supportive, where they provide structure, and where they provided involvement, these children are better adjusted in school as rated by their teachers, they were more self-motivated in schools rated by themselves, and again by their teachers, and they actually achieved higher achievement test scores and better grades in school. In fact, meta-analyses today show broad support for those early speculations by Wendy Grolnick, and myself. Recently, a meta-analysis by Vazquez and others, summarized 36 different studies showing that, across school years, when parents are more autonomy supportive, children are more autonomously motivated to do their schoolwork. They're more committed to school. They perform better in their academic work, and most importantly, they show better mental health and well-being. This process really begins even early in infancy. Wendy Grolnick and her colleagues, here at the University of Rochester, studied infants some 30 years ago, and saw that parents are being more autonomy supportive, or are more responsive, and supportive of their children's initiations even in toddlerhood, had kids who were more prone to exploration, had higher curiosity, and persisted longer independent play. This has been shown in other laboratories as well. Other studies have shown, and here I'm going to cite particularly, Bindman and others, they really show that when parents are autonomy supportive during the first three years of life, children develop in a more healthy matter. Particularly, they show a more fully developed executive functioning. They have better abilities to delay gratification, direct their attention, inhibit various impulsive behaviors, and this shows up longitudinally as a function of greater autonomy support. In other words, when parents are autonomy supportive, they're helping their children build the capacity to self-regulate, and this capacity, this executive function capacity predicts later achievement and adjustment in schools. Even in the realm of social behavior, parental autonomy support turns out to be really important. Longitudinal studies by George, May Kastner, and colleagues in Canada, have shown that when children who were assessed at five years old for parental autonomy support, this predicted greater well-being and adjustment three years later. In fact, when parents are less controlling, Georgia May and colleagues have shown that they actually become less aggressive over time relative to their peers. They become more appropriate, socially as a function of having more support for autonomy during their development. I've done a lot of studies. I have teenagers as well, as well as other colleagues in SDT, and it still remains true in the teenage years. During teenage years when parents are more autonomy supportive, their adolescent children are more likely to turn to them for help and for guidance, they're more likely to internalize the parents values, they're more likely to show adjustment and achievement in schools. On the contrary, when parents are not autonomy supportive, when they're really controlling, we see that teens are more likely to engage in deviant behavior, to rely on their peers for advice for guidance and for ideals, and more generally, be more problematic in their relationships with their parents. So, in some autonomy support, especially when it's combined with high degree of structure, and when it's high degree of parental involvement, is really an important ingredient to help a child thrive. We can see this across cultures, and really across different kinds of parents setting, and this might lead us to wonder, "If autonomy support is so good for children, why is it that parents are so often controlling?" I mean, I know from working with a lot of parents that nobody really gets up in the morning and says, "Gee, how can I make my child thrive less well?" or "How can I make their life more miserable?" So, instead when we think about why parents get controlling, we have to look inside their dynamics, and be compassionate with why they might get to that. One of the fundamental causes we've seen with parental control is basically intergenerational transmission. If their parents were controlling or evaluative with them, they tend to look back on that as a negative experience. They report less well-being as a function of having parents who are more controlling. But nonetheless, people who've had controlling parents tend to pass that on to their children. They use the same techniques with their kids, even though they'll express resentment about their parents having done so. Unfortunately, as they repeat that tendency, they also repeat the results that came to them. Another thing that leads parents to be controlling, is just the feeling of pressure on them to get the best outcomes from their children, and we can see this is a really well-meaning motivation. Parents can feel pressure, ego, involvement, worry about their kids future, and this can lead them to be more controlling and demanding of their children. For instance, Grolnick did some experiments based on SDT, where they just looked at mother's perceptions of environmental threat, and mothers who saw the environment is more threatening, or the future of children has potentially more insecure, or more controlling where their children in a laboratory task involved cognitive capacities. Ironically, of course, that more controlling style led the children to perform less well. We see a lot of that psychological push on children in many cultures. There's a famous paradigm for pressuring parents that's called the Tiger Mom. It was made famous by Amy Chua in her best-selling book by the same name. She described her Tiger Mom's approach, to producing a high achievement child, and of course, many people have taken this as a potential model for parenting, thinking this is really my produce successful children. I just want to add an SDT perspective on that, which is recent evidence, casts a lot of doubt on the efficacy of the Tiger Mom approach. A large study by Kim et al found, first of all that, most Asian-American parents don't use the Tiger Mom approach. In fact, they tend to be more supportive, and furthermore, that Tiger Mom approach is pressuring your children to be certain ways, or really demanding high standards from them in that strong ego involved way, is actually likely to backfire. The best performance outcomes, the best achievement outcomes, were not shown by tiger parents, but rather by parents who were autonomy supportive. So, I would just say one more thing about parents, because having been one, one knows that it's hard to be autonomy supportive some time, because your kids make that difficult, they pull for control. So, when kids act out or they misbehave, kind of the immediate response for many parents is to get more controlling. Of course, sadly, what the research shows is that it's exactly at those times that you want to come through, understand a bit of your child's perspective, bring some compassion to the situation, and then set limits in a way that's supportive rather than really controlling or harsh with children. That's not easy to do but, of course, when you do that, you produce better outcomes. The controlling parent under bad situations tends to deepen a cycle of defiance and misbehavior. So in some, we know parenting ain't easy, but effective parents provide support for autonom., they provide structure, and they provide involvement. There's myriad empirical supports within the SDT literature, showing why these things are associated with greater child thriving.
