The conceptual apparatus of children's and parents' relations is rather wide and ambiguous:
- parental attitudes and corresponding types of behavior;
- parental positions;
- types of parental attitudes;
- types of relations "mother-child";
- types of positive and false parental authority;
- types (styles) of children's upbringing;
- features of pathogenic types of education;
- parameters of the educational process;
- family roles of the child; styles of communication offered by adults in the family and school.
The optimal parental position should meet three main requirements: adequacy, flexibility, and prognostic. The adequacy of an adult's position is based on a realistic and accurate assessment of the characteristics of his or her child and on the ability to see, understand and respect his or her individuality. A parent should not focus only on what he or she wants to achieve from his or her child; knowledge and consideration of his or her abilities and aptitudes is the most important condition for successful development.
Parental flexibility is seen as the willingness and ability to change communication styles, the ways in which a child is influenced as he or she grows up, and the various changes in family circumstances. A "hardened", infantilizing position leads to communication barriers, outbreaks of disobedience, rebellion, and protest in response to any demands. The prognostics of a position is expressed in its orientation to the "zone of the nearest development" of the child and to the tasks of tomorrow; it is a leading initiative of an adult aimed at changing the general approach to the child taking into account the prospects of his or her development.
Most often, psychological and pedagogical research uses two criteria to determine and analyze parental attitudes: the degree of emotional closeness, the parents' warmth to the child (love, acceptance, warmth or emotional rejection, coldness), and the degree of control over his or her behavior (high - with a lot of restrictions and prohibitions; low - with minimal prohibitive tendencies).
There is one important stage in every person's life that determines his or her future fate. This is the stage of early childhood, from birth to 5-7 years old. At this stage, the main tutor of the child is the family: parents, siblings, grandparents, and grandparents. It is at this stage, in the family, that the foundations of education are laid, and what parents did before the age of five, it is, in the opinion of A.S. Makarenko, 90% of the educational process
For an early child, the main source of information about himself or herself and others are adults who literally determine who he or she is. "Parents name the child, give him or her their own name, accustom him or her to respond to him or her, thus organizing a system of his or her reaction. They help him/her to realize both what belongs to him/her (parts of his/her body) and his/her own belonging - sex, family, etc. Evaluating the child's actions, they develop a certain emotional attitude towards themselves, a sense of their own value. The future character of an adult largely depends on the emotional climate of the first months and even days of life", concludes the famous philosopher and psychologist I.S. Kon.
The concept of parental attitude has a general character and indicates the mutual connection and interdependence of parents and children. The father and mother show different kinds of love for children. Maternal love is most often unconditional. Fatherly love, especially towards his son, sometimes has a conditional character: "I love you when you meet my expectations, fulfill my requirements.
Parental attitude has the most general character and indicates the mutual connection and interdependence of parent and child. Parental attitude includes subjective-evaluation, conscious-selective idea about the child, which determines the features of parental perception, the way of communication with the child, the nature of methods of influence on him/her. As a rule, emotional, cognitive and behavioral components are singled out in the structure of parental relations. The concepts of parental position and parental attitude are used as synonyms of parental attitude but differ in the degree of consciousness. The parental position is more likely to be associated with consciously accepted, developed views and intentions; the attitude is less unambiguous.
The nature and degree of influence on the child determines many individual factors and, above all, the personality of the parent as a subject of interaction: his or her sex (the same as the child, or the opposite), age (young, underage mother, elderly parent, late child's parent), temperament and features of the parent (active, impatient, ardent, ardent, powerful, indulgent, careless, restrained, etc.).); religiousness; national-cultural belonging (European, English, German, Japanese, American and other models of education); social status; professional belonging; level of general and pedagogical culture.