Parenting with Love, Limits, and Latitude: Proclamation Principles and Supportive Scholarship

Parents have a sacred duty to rear their children in love and righteousness. 

Rearing Children in Love and Righteousness

In order to promote optimal development and to rear children in love and righteousness, the following are crucial elements for each child, although specific implementations and approaches may be individualized based upon the needs and personality of the particular child:

• Love, warmth, and support
• Clear and reasonable expectations for competent behavior
• Limits and boundaries with some room for negotiation and compromise
• Reasoning and developmentally appropriate consequences and punishments for breaching established limits
• Opportunities to perform and make choices
• Absence of coercive, hostile forms of discipline, such as harsh physical punishment, love withdrawal, shaming, and inflicting guilt
• Models of appropriate behavior consistent with self-control, positive values, and positive attitudes

The optimal parenting style is the authoritative parenting style. Authoritative parenting fosters a positive emotional connection with children, provides for regulation that places fair and consistent limits on child behavior, and allows for reasonable child autonomy in decision making. This style creates a positive emotional climate that helps children be more open to parental input and direction, and allows for parents to individualize child rearing. 

Children and adolescents reared by authoritative parents tend to be better adjusted to school, are less aggressive and delinquent, are less likely to abuse drugs, are more friendly and accepted by peers, are more communicative, self-motivated, and academically inclined, and are more willing to abide by laws. They are more capable of moral reasoning, are more self-controlled and are more willing to abide by and reap the blessings of spiritual laws as well. 

Authoritative parenting consists of three well-defined and researched characteristics: connection, regulation, and autonomy which all can be referred to as Love, Limits, and Latitude. 

Love

President Hinckley said:

Every child is entitled to grow up in a home where there is warm and secure companionship, where there is love in the family relationship, where appreciation one for another is taught and exemplified, and where God is acknowledged and His peace and blessings invoked before the family alter. 

Research has documented that children are less aggressive and more sociable and empathetic if they have parents (particularly fathers) who are more loving, patient, playful, responsive, and sympathetic to children's feelings and needs. Children are less likely to push limits and seek attention through misbehavior when they feel that they are a high priority in their parents' lives.  

Limits

Finding ways to effectively help children learn how to regulate their own behavior in non-coercive ways is one of the most challenging parts of authoritative parenting. Determining how and when to tighten or loosen the reins requires considerable creativity, effort and inspiration. In all cases, discipline or correction should be motivated by a sincere interest in teaching children correct principles rather than merely to exert control, exercise dominion, or vent anger. As they apply limits to a child's behavior, authoritative parents must make a conscious effort and use good judgment by taking into consideration the developmental level of the child and the child's individual temperament.

In authoritative homes, parents are clear and firm about rules and expectations. They are confrontive by proactively explaining reasons for setting rules and by administering corrective measures promptly when children do not abide by the rules.

Setting limits and following through with pre-established consequences when rules are violated is one way that parents can help children learn to be self-regulating. 

Latitude

The third component of authoritative parenting is latitude or autonomy. Children benefit from being given choices and appropriate levels of latitude to make their own decisions in a variety of domains. Children learn and grow by learning how to make choices within limits that are acceptable to parents. Whenever possible, supporting children's autonomy helps children view adults as providers of information and guidance rather than as deliverers of messages of control. When children have been taught principles of truth, internalize correct principles, and have many opportunities to make choices within an environment of love and concern, they are more likely to learn to choose wisely.

Because authoritative parenting implies flexibility, this style is more effective than the others in dealing with children, since each child has unique characteristics and varying temperamental dispositions. In other words, each child is guided in a balanced style of connection, regulation and autonomy that best matches his or her set of strengths and weaknesses. 

Maintaining a Strong and Positive Influence on Children

Parents often wonder how they might maintain a strong and righteous influence on their children in a world where there are many other influences seeking for their time, attention, and loyalty. In the context of authoritative parenting, research suggests that it is within the moral and spiritual domains where parents can have the most influence, even though schools, culture, the media, and peer interaction can play major roles as well. For example, studies have shown that while peers have influence, they seem to matter more in superficial aspects of behavior like hair and clothing styles, the use of slang, and transient day-to-day behaviors, all of which can shift frequently with changes in friendships. Parents are more likely to have influence on core values that are reflected in religiosity, political persuasion, and educational plans, to name a few.

Rearing children in love and righteousness, as the proclamation admonishes, requires the best effort parents have to offer. Nevertheless, the rewards of such well-placed time and attention are eternal. President Hinckley said:

Of all the joys of life, none other equals that of happy parenthood. Of all the responsibilities which with we struggle, none other is so serious. To rear children in an atmosphere of love, security, and faith is the most rewarding of all challenges. The good result from such efforts becomes life's most satisfying compensation. 

From the textbook, Successful Marriages and Families, Hawkins, Alan J., Dollahite, David C., & Draper, Thomas W., 2012.