Styles of Parenting
According to the research, there are 4 basic styles of parenting. These styles are based on demandingness (how much you require of your children in terms of setting rules, boundaries, and creating structure) and responsiveness or nurturance (the amount of care, love, and positive regard you show your child). The chart below briefly describes the results of each style of parenting:
Authoritative (high demands, high responsiveness)
- Most effective style of parenting.
- Parents create a consistent structure, have realistic rules and expectations for their children, follow through on boundaries, and set appropriate consequences.
- Parents are responsive to their child's needs, genuinely care about what is going on in their child's life, and show unconditional positive regard (I like and love you no matter what you do, I will not withdraw my love from you if you do something bad or something I disapprove of).
- Parents are willing to listen to their child and take their opinion/point-of-view into account when making decisions that affect the child.
- Parents are often referred to as drill sergeants for their "Because I said so" approach to setting rules and boundaries.
- Don't spend a lot of time building a positive relationship with their children and often withdraw love and attention when the child does something they don't want them to do.
- Often have very rigid rules and are unwilling to look at things from their child's perspective.
- Parents are shouters/yellers and cold-shoulder-ers.
- Swift with punishment, but very slow to pay attention to what their child is doing right.
- Take the attitude that you can always do better, so whatever their child does is never good enough.
- Parents show lots of love, attention, and devotion to their children, but have very few (if any) rules and boundaries.
- Their home life is often not very structured and most of the time, the child has a lot more power in the home than the parent.
- Kids are allowed to do pretty much whatever they please with no consequences or inconsistent consequences.
- Parents will often swoop in to "save the day" when another adult tries to set or enforce boundaries with the child (e.g., if the child gets in trouble for misbehaving at school, the parent goes out of their way to excuse the bad behavior and get the child out of being punished).
- Parents are more focused on being their child's friend than on being a parent; they don't ever want to be perceived as the bad guy, so they avoid stepping up to discipline.
- Parents don't require much of their children, but they don't show love and regard to them either.
- Most of the time, they don't pay attention to the child at all.
- Parents are often the ones that leave their child unattended at home while they go out and do what they want.
- The child's needs almost always go unmet, so they are forced to seek to get their needs met from other sources, often in very unhealthy ways.
- Parents provide no structure or boundaries, therefore consequences are usually non-existent as well.
Discipline
- What are appropriate vs. inappropriate forms of discipline in your eyes?
- Do you and your partner agree on discipline techniques? If not, how are you going to find common ground?
- How can you avoid being pitted against each other or undermining each other's discipline?
- How were you disciplined as a child? How will that affect the ways you do and don't discipline your own children?
- Each one of your children will have a different temperament and, therefore, will require a different type of parenting and discipline in order for discipline to be effective. The same tactics may not work for every child! How will you adapt to different demans as partners and parents?
- Here are some tips on avoiding common parenting discipline mistakes: Click Here
Family of Origin Influence
- Your parents (or guardians, depending on who raised you) will be the most influential people with regards to your "automatic pilot" in parenting. You may tell yourself that you will never do such-and-such like your parents did, but you'll most likely find that you'll slip into those patterns if you don't actively and deliberately make an effort to parent in other ways.
- What things did your parents do that you liked and would like to continue? What things did your parents do that you didn't like and want to do differently?
- Avoid the "My parents did X and I turned out just fine" argument/defense. Just because your parents used a particular method doesn't necessarily mean that you turned out fine because of that method; sometimes it means that you turned out fine despite that method. To use an extreme example, some children who come from abusive homes turn out fine, but it doesn't mean that abuse is a healthy or effective parenting method. Don't just do something because your parents did it. Be proactive in your parenting approaches!
- Has anyone ever kept eye contact with you too long and made you feel uncomfortable? Or, have you ever been around someone who is always saying things that are socially inappropriate? We feel uncomfortable in these situation because these people are breaking implicit (unspoken) social rules. The same way that we have implicit social rules, each family has implicit family rules. The hard part is identifying what these rules are in your family because they are implicit, unspoken, and happen on a largely unconscious basis by nature. Ask yourself what the unspoken rules are in your family of origin: Can only Dad express anger? Does the oldest child have to take on a parenting role to the younger siblings? Are certain emotions or topics not acceptable to talk about or experience? Does no one talk about Big Sister's alcohol problem? Were girls allowed/expected to do some things that boys weren't allowed/expected to do and vice versa? A good cue to figuring these things out is to notice uncomfortable moments in your family of origin and ask yourself why they feel/felt uncomfortable. Oftentimes it's because someone has broken an implicit family rule. It's important for both you and your spouse to be aware of these implicit family rules because they often guide your own parenting behaviors and the messages that you send to your own children.
Healthy Self-Awareness
- Nothing brings out your own issues more than becoming a parent. Parenting is wonderful, but because it is such a challenging, personal job, it's going to trigger some of your issues, whether you are aware of them or not. It is incredibly important to be aware of your own issues before becoming a parent so you can address them appropriately. Otherwise, you may force those issues onto your children or attempt to solve them through your kids, which is never fair or healthy for them. For example: Do you frequently feel like you are not good enough? Do you struggle with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, or other kinds of mental illness? Do you have unresolved trauma or anger in your past? Are you a habitual people-pleaser or doormat who doesn't know how to behave assertively? Do you tend to be aggressive or passive-aggressive in your relationships?
- In addition to being healthy as an individual, get to a healthy place as a couple. If you aren't dealing with your couple issues consistently, you are more likely to triangulate your kids into the relationship. Triangulating is when you take your couple issues and somehow bring another person in to the relationship to ease the tension. This may manifest as one parent complaining about the other, or complaining about the marriage, to their child, using a child as a middle man to talk to your spouse when you are angry with them, expecting your child to make you feel better after a fight with your spouse, and fostering an unhealthy closeness with your child to make up for a lack of closeness with your spouse.
Rolling with the Punches
No matter how good your intentions are to be a super-parent, the challenges of parenthood are constant, ever-changing, and different for each child (sometimes each day for the same child). So, if you can learn to integrate some flexibility into your parenting style and have realistic expectations for yourself, your partner, and your child, you'll feel like a failure as a parent a lot less often. Just like anything else in life, allowing room for yourself to learn and grow at your own pace will encourage you to be kinder to yourself when you make mistakes (and I can guarantee that you will make mistakes as a parent).
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