Diana Baumrind


Diana Blumberg Baumrind was a clinical and developmental psychologist known for her research on parenting styles and for her critique of the use of deception in psychological research.

Life

Baumrind was born into a Jewish community in New York City, the first of two daughters of Hyman and Mollie Blumberg. She completed her B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy at Hunter College in 1948, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled "Some personality and situational determinants of behavior in a discussion group".
After being awarded her doctorate she served as a staff psychologist at Cowell Memorial Hospital in Berkeley. She was also director of two U. S. Public Health Service projects and a consultant on a California state project. From 1958-1960 she also had a private practice in Berkeley.
She was a developmental psychologist at the Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley. She was known for her research on parenting styles and for her critique of deception in psychological research, especially Stanley Milgram's controversial experiment.
Baumrind defined three parenting styles:
Baumrind studied the effects of corporal punishment on children, and concluded that mild spanking, in the context of an authoritative parenting style, is unlikely to have a significant detrimental effect, if one is careful to control for other variables such as socioeconomic status. She observed that previous studies demonstrating a correlation between corporal punishment and bad outcomes failed to control for variables such as socioeconomic status. Low-income families are more likely to employ corporal punishment compared with affluent families. Children from low-income neighborhoods are more likely to commit violent crimes compared with children from affluent neighborhoods. But Baumrind believed that when appropriate controls are made for family income and other independent variables, mild corporal punishment per se does not increase the likelihood of bad outcomes. This assertion has in turn attracted criticism and counterpoints from other researchers in the same publication, for example: Whether harmful or not, there is still no consistent evidence of beneficial effects.
She was influenced in her studies by Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, Nevit Sanford, Egon Brunswik, David Krech, Richard S. Crutchfield
Baumrind died in September 2018 following a car accident.