Parenting.

If you saw the pictures of prince George playing (or ruling depending on your point of view) in New Zealand your heart would have been stirred. The Queen recently said that it reassured her that the monarchy was now secure into the future. Dr Arnon Bentovim the consultant psychiatrist and psychoanalyst from Great Ormond Street Hospital developed a research model entitled The Family Health Score. This put families on a continuum from enmeshed to disengaged. The optimum place was naturally in the middle. Overseeing families through a one-way screen enable the team to observe their natural way of parenting and scoring them accordingly. A more current method has been to divide parenting into four categories: laissez-faire, indifferent, authoritarian and authoritative. This longitudinal study was under the sponsorship of the Sutton Trust in Britain. The rationale for this study was to try and understand the underlining causes for the consistent failure of white working class children to do well in education? They discovered they was generally parented by either two methods. Firstly laissez-faire or secondly authoritarian, neither method was a good in promoting positive outcomes in education. The authoritarian method was similarly not successful because it was mainly one that was too concrete, there was no explanation, it was arbitrary. The most successful and most sophisticated was authoritative. This was where clear consistent messages to the child were given by both parents coupled with affection and love. This is principally communicated by the voice. In the voice are two simultaneous but importantly not contradictory messages - I am the parent and I love you. This is communicated by the timbre in the voice. It needless-to-say cannot be faked its instantaneous, the baby picks this up naturally. The study therefore demonstrated a causal correlation between the best parenting authoritative and good educational outcomes over time.