To extend research on Baumrind’s parenting styles, a scenario study was conducted to determine if the gender of a stimulus child and the parenting style employed by stimulus parents would relate significantly to biblical interpretation style and preferred worship style. A 2x3 independent groups factorial design was employed for analysis in two different procedures. Respondents (152 undergraduate students) were provided with one of six scenarios, each of which varied by gender of stimulus child and by one of three parenting styles employed by the stimulus parent. Respondents were then directed to complete the Scriptural Literalism Scale (Hogge & Friedman, 1967) and the Worship Style Index, which provided measures of biblical interpretation style and worship style respectively. The results suggested that parenting styles relate to how one comes to interpret the Bible and worship style and that gender also relates to worship style. The authoritarian and authoritative parenting styles related more and the permissive parenting style the least to a literal approach to biblical interpretation and to a structured worship style.

Though Quintilian introduced the term in loco parentis in his Institutio Oratoria by suggesting that teachers think of themselves as parents of a student's mind, composition scholars have let parenting as a metaphor for teaching fall by the wayside in recent discussions of classroom authority. Podis and Podis have recently revived the term, though, and investigated the ways writing teachers enact Lakoff's "Strict Father" and "Nurturing Mother" authority models. Unfortunately, their treatment of these two opposite authority styles reduces classroom authority styles to a mutually exclusive binary of two less than satisfactory options. I propose clinical and developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind's taxonomy of parenting styles as the ideal way to reform our thinking as a field about the authority model we should adopt in our writing classrooms. While Baumrind includes the inferior models Podis and Podis work from in her authoritarian and permissive parenting styles, she found that the authoritative style, which is both strict and nurturing, promises the best results for parenting children: autonomy and academic achievement. By applying her descriptions of authoritative parents and the outcomes for their children to the practices of composition instructors and their students, I reveal how useful Baumrind's taxonomy of parenting styles could be for a field that often uses nuanced terms for authority without either clearly defining them or backing claims with replicable, aggregable, data-driven (RAD) research. If our field chooses to adopt Baumrind's terminology and definitions, then, we will be able to communicate about classroom authority in terms anchored in a coherent paradigm and garner more respect for our field as we probe the outcomes of Baumrind's authoritative parenting style as a college composition teaching style through our own empirical research.