The aim of this paper is to explore the role that family and parenting styles have on development of children and youth. Great importance during research of cognitive and socio-emotional development of children, is given to family factors for which is considered to take great influence if not main on development of children. Family factors undoubtedly include parenting styles and parenting actions which have impact on growing up and overall development of child. Therefore, this paper cover systematic theoretical overview of parenting styles that includes classification on authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and neglectful parenting style. Also, it gives sight on all four parenting styles and how they impact on school and academic achievement, relation with peers, behavior problems as well as development of personality traits. To get better insight of complexity of this problem, theoretical extracts are complemented with domestic and foreign research papers. Authors of many researches quoted in this paper, agree that authoritative parenting style of upbringing is optimal, due to best results of children developmental outcomes. Not only that they achieve better school results, children of authoritative parents develop more stable relationships with others, are more resistant to bad peer influence and they are more creative, cooperative and optimistic than peers that are raised by another parenting style.