Parenting & Family Quote by Kent McCord

Kent McCord points to a simple, demanding truth: children watch more than they listen. They draw their map of how to act from the adults in the room, absorbing tone, choices, and the way conflicts are handled. When a parent models patience, respect, curiosity, or accountability, those qualities become tangible, imitable behaviors. When a parent relies on control, intimidation, or rigid rules, children may comply, but they often learn fear, secrecy, or resentment rather than judgment and conscience.

As an actor best known for playing a calm, principled police officer on Adam-12, McCord also evokes a distinction between authority and authoritarianism. Authority can be earned through consistency and fairness; authoritarianism demands obedience for its own sake. Developmental research backs this up. Social learning theory shows that kids internalize norms by observing consequences and empathy in real time, not by hearing lectures about them. They remember how you apologized when you were wrong, how you set limits without shaming, how you treated a waiter or a stranger. Those moments teach self-regulation and moral reasoning far more effectively than a rule shouted from above.

There is a linguistic wrinkle: in psychology, authoritative parenting means high warmth and clear expectations, a style associated with the best outcomes. McCord seems to be using authoritative in the everyday sense of heavy-handed and top-down, closer to what researchers call authoritarian. His point still stands. A home ruled by fear may produce short-term order, but it strains the very relationship that makes guidance possible. A home where adults lead by example creates conditions for trust, dialogue, and the gradual transfer of responsibility from parent to child.

The challenge, then, is not to wield power but to embody the values you hope to see. Children rarely become what they are told; they become what they have witnessed.