Diana Baumrind
American developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley
American developmental psychologist at Berkeley's Institute of Human Development. She described authoritarian, permissive and authoritative parenting and wrote a 1964 critique of the ethics of Milgram's obedience study.
Why this person matters
Her typology gave researchers shared terms for parental control and responsiveness, and Maccoby and Martin later extended it to four styles. Her 1964 article raised ethical objections to the distress and deception in Milgram's obedience research. Her family study was one of the first to include fathers as well as mothers.
Main contributions
Typology of parenting styles
Working at Berkeley's Institute of Human Development, she described authoritarian, permissive and authoritative parenting, distinguished by how demanding parents are and how warm and responsive they are. An early paper on authoritative parental control appeared in Child Development in 1966.
Ethical critique of Milgram (1964)
In American Psychologist she argued that researchers must weigh their own career and scientific interests against those of participants, that volunteering does not end a researcher's responsibility for participants' welfare, and that the findings did not justify the distress described. She also saw few parallels with Nazi death camps.
Family Socialization and Developmental Competence Project
She directed this project at Berkeley. Its study of families began in the early 1970s and was one of the first to include fathers as well as mothers. In work published since 2010 she described confrontive parenting, in which a parent takes a firm position while using reasoning and staying open to negotiation.
Context and limits
Critics call the categories broad. Kohn described her favoured approach as control-oriented, Grolnick separated coercive power assertion from structure, and Lewis argued that studies did not separate firm control from accompanying practices or from children's willingness to obey. Authoritarian parenting is usually linked to worse outcomes, but researchers argue that it should be judged within its cultural context. Adoption studies of warm parenting could not rule out that children's traits shaped parenting. Baumrind judged mild spanking within an authoritative style unlikely to cause harm; Gershoff replied in 2002 that evidence of benefit was still lacking.
In your introductory course
Lifespan development.Her three parenting styles appear in the lifespan development chapters. Her Milgram critique is cited in discussions of research ethics, deception and participant welfare.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 9.3. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1960
Became a research psychologist at the Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley, a post she held until 2018.
- 1964
Published 'Some Thoughts on Ethics of Research: After Reading Milgram's Behavioral Study of Obedience' in American Psychologist.
- 1966
Published a paper in Child Development on the effects of authoritative parental control on child behaviour.
- 1975
Published Early Socialization and the Discipline Controversy.
- 1988
Received the American Psychological Association G. Stanley Hall Award.
Sources
- University of California Academic Senate, In Memoriam: Diana B. Baumrind (1927 to 2018)University. Institutional biography inspected.
- The Open University OpenLearn, Psychological research, obedience and ethics: The case against MilgramUniversity. Reference article inspected.
- Whistleblower.org library, catalogue entry for Baumrind (1964), with APA descriptionReference work. Abstract inspected.
- Wikipedia, Diana BaumrindReference work. Reference article inspected.
- Wikipedia, Parenting stylesReference work. Reference article inspected.