The relationship between parents and children has changed significantly in recent decades. While before not too long ago were slaps, house arrest and other penalties in many families on the agenda. There are now only just under a quarter of all parents who make occasional use of such educational measures. If 10 to 15 year old children are punished at all, mostly with television ban. Only 1 to 2 percent of all children have to be afraid of a beating. However, these children are affected then the more of it because they have to deal with this behavior as a minority of parents. The number of unreported cases in this area should not be underestimated.

Research team that has scored in a survey of 2,663 children aged 10 to 15 years these results has also been found that the sentences with the age of the young people lose weight. While 28 percent of the 10 to be punished to 12 year old, the value drops at 14-to-15-year to 17 percent. The social status of the parents has no influence, the criminal behavior is similar in all social classes.

However, new forms of violence are likely to have developed in the modern parent-child relationship. So practice parents reinforced psychological pressure on their children, threatened with withdrawal of love or try to bribe their children. The refusal to communicate is one of these new forms of punishment.

Views of Children is Respected

But not only the traditional punishments are less and less, and respect for the interests and wishes of the child has become in the modern family as the cornerstone. The German research team has also come to the positive conclusion that already supply two-thirds of respondents to be respected by the parents in their opinions. In conflicts, parents are often willing to yield, when the child can justify his opinion.

Here, however, can be a different setting in the social status groups see that in families of high social status, young people may join in the discussion frequently when it comes to the solution of parent-child problems. The researchers suggest that in these layers a little better trained language competence is responsible.

Strong Child Relatedness of Parents

In only one-third of all families a great distance between parents and children can be seen and the interests of the parents are dominant dominant. In the family of today, the interest of the child is most important and must not withdraw from the outset after the affairs of adults. The parents try to understand their children and try to make themselves understood.

Those children who belong to the third of the parent-centered families

• They have little room for freedom,
• There is often trouble in the family,
• The mother has too little time for them,
• Father and mother hardly exchanged caresses with them,
• Father and mother are different degrees of severity.

About half of these children are sure that they will raise their children very differently than they themselves have been brought up. In the other group, ie those children who are fully respected by their parents, think only 18 percent from applying in their children a different parenting style.

Study: Peter Buchner, Burkhard Fuhs, Heinz-Hermann Krüger, “Teddy Bear From the first kiss”, Opladen 1996, pages 1 74-192