Obviously I have little contact with families with children, and the contact that I do have is usually as a witness to behaviors in public, but it troubles me when I think of all the times I've witnessed "directives" in the form of profanity-laced yells directed at kids who are hardly more than toddlers.
I suppose that's an extreme on one side, just like the extreme on the other side would be helicopter parents who control every aspect of their kids' lives. I read somewhere lately that there are even parents who call their kids' employers to negotiate on their behalf!
I'm not sure I buy the part about teaching children to "respect and take the advice of people in authority." Maybe back in the mythical 1950s, but today? Independence is a good thing, but what about when that independence results in gangs of adolescents beating up people in the subway?
I've read about this book in a number of different places, and I think that actually her point is a bit more complex (I quoted the Wikipedia excerpt because it succinctly covered the major points). I think that stye of parenting emphasizes a more "you" (children) vs. "them" (parents, teachers, employers, cops) attitude toward authority. That is, they focus on having children follow parents' directives, as well as those of school officials and later bosses. One of the primary goals is to keep the child from getting in trouble. But of course, that can backfire if the child decides to reject, rather than obey, that authority (by breaking the law, for example). So the result is far from guaranteed.
The more typical middle-class style, according to her theory, would be parents teaching children that they're equal to authority figures. Of course, most middle-class parents don't want their children to get in trouble, either, and basically they do want them to follow the teachers' rules so they can succeed in school. But the children are more likely to be encouraged to negotiate with or question authority, because it's assumed that one day the kids will grow up to BE those authority figures. Again, it doesn't always work out that way, but that's the idea.
Here's an example. A friend of mine said the first time she saw my son (at school; her son was a classmate of his), he was correcting his 5th-grade teacher's pronunciation of some word. And my son's pronunciation was correct. I later mentioned the anecdote to my son. "I'll bet the teacher loved being corrected like that," I said. "He encourages it," my son said. That seems like a very middle-class situation, according to this author's analysis. And, in fact, it was in a school that served mostly middle- and upper-middle-class families.