The Authoritative Parenting Style

The most influential proposal about such styles has come from Diana Baumrind (1972), who has looked at combinations of four of the dimensions I've just described: (1) warmth or nurturance, (2) level of expectations, which she describes in terms of "maturity demands," (3) the clarity and consistency of rules, and (4) communication between parent and child. Baumrind saw three specific combinations of these characteristics: • The authoritarian parental style is high in control and maturity d...

 Los Angeles's Air Quality Regulations

Los Angeles air quality has improved in recent years because of new regulations on automobile and plant emissions, but the American Lung Association still ranks the Los Angeles area as the metropolitan region in America most polluted by year-round particles, short-term particles, and ozone. This persistent ranking contrasts with other data on Los Angeles's environmental progress. For example, the number of "exceedance" days in the Los Angeles / Long Beach area of southern California (days tha...

 We Cannot Return to Nature

This much is certain: The future of the planet wall not be a reprise of the past, a return to "a state of nature." The future will certainly be technological, increasingly globally homogeneous, and, in the short run at least, will embody the connectivity of the computer chip and the contrivances of genetic engineering—in conformity with Chaisson's law of rising complexity. American conservationists frequently offer Native American attitudes toward nature as the solution to our environmental...