Adolescent behavior also influences parenting style. Whereas a cooperative, motivated, and responsible teen may be more likely to have parents who exercise an authoritative parenting style, an uncooperative, immature, and irresponsible teen may be more likely to elicit a parenting style that is authoritarian or uninvolved.
Like most important topics in psychology, research on parenting styles is not immune to the nature-nurture debate. On the nurture side, developmental psychologist Eleanor Maccoby admits that many studies in the past have placed too much emphasis on the effects of parenting style and children’s psychological outcomes. An overestimation of these environmental results was due, in part, to the fact that researchers focused on one child in a family but almost never studied more than one child in the same family. For example, on the nurture (environmental) side of the debate, researchers interested in examining the effects of parenting styles on adolescents may have focused on a 13- year-old boy in a particular family, but not on his 8- and 10-year old siblings.