What is the Best Parenting Style?
Parenting styles can be a difficult, contentious topic to discuss. People can be defensive about it, especially if they haven’t ever been taught how to parent effectively. Thankfully, there has been extensive research done on parenting styles, their efficiency, and how they impact our children.
There are 4 main types of parenting styles:
Authoritarian
Authoritative
Permissive
Neglectful
It can be pictured on an axis with 2 variables - warmth and expectation.
Authoritarian = high expectations, low warmth
Authoritative = high expectations, high warmth
Permissive = low expectations, high warmth
Neglectful = low expectations, low warmth
Expectations are basically the boundaries that you set and maintain for your children. It’s important for these expectations to be developmentally appropriate, of course. Otherwise, they are setting you both up for failure. Having reasonable, clearly communicated expectations and holding your kids to it is how to establish great expectations and set you both up for success.
Warmth is fairly self-explanatory. It’s how much affection, empathy, and compassion you show your child. It’s whether you speak to them in kind tones (versus harsh ones) and handle their feelings with care. It’s being able to support them and their emotions, give them space and autonomy, and ensure that they feel heard. Giving your children high warmth is beneficial to them, even if your expectations are not appropriate.
Here’s a scenario that might help make it a bit more clear: Imagine it is Saturday, and your child has been tasked with cleaning their room by the end of the day. They get a call from a good friend who moved away, saying that they will be in town for tonight only, and want to see your child. Your child wants to go, but they have not finished their room, and won’t have time to do it before they leave. What would you do?
An authoritarian parent would likely not allow the child to go, because their room wasn’t clean yet. This adheres to the high expectations, but does not demonstrate any understanding or flexibility.
A permissive parent would likely allow the child to go, without expecting them to come home and clean their room.
An authoritative parent would find some way to collaborate with the child to come to a mutually beneficial solution. Perhaps the child agrees to clean their room first thing the next morning, or agrees to take on an additional chore in exchange for being allowed to go out. This approach shows understanding while also maintaining standards. It also teaches mutual respect and priorities - in this scenario, this is a meaningful connection that your child doesn’t get to see often. That sort of social meaning is more significant than whether or not the bedroom gets cleaned that day or the next.
If you look at it this way, it seems pretty clear that authoritative parenting is the best option. Generally speaking, the evidence backs that up. That being said, many of us were parented in a way that we don’t know what high versus low warmth or expectations might look like. When you grow up in a low warmth environment, you start to normalize it. It might take time or therapy to unpack that and realize what high warmth actually looks like. It’s important to take these steps in order to ensure you are giving your child their best chance at a happy, healthy life.
So what does an authoritative parent really look like?
An authoritative parenting approach is one that takes into account the child’s developmental capabilities before setting expectations. It provides children with support and tools to meet those expectations without issue. Typically, this approach includes discipline focused on reinforcement rather than punishment. When children have questions, they are answered with reason and not simply dismissed. Decisions are often explained to the children in ways that they are able to understand it. Authoritative parents might discuss solutions with children rather than making unilateral decisions and handing them down.
Doing so not only teaches autonomy, but also personal responsibility. It should model accountability - for example, the parent might take ownership of a mistake that they made and apologize to their child. This models for the child how they should react when they make a mistake that hurts someone else in the future. No matter what, children will always learn more from what they watch us do than what they hear us say. Treating your child with respect lays the groundwork for them to treat others with respect.
Ultimately, authoritative parenting is about cultivating a relationship of mutual respect and compassion. While you do hold them to standards and expectations, you’re also flexible when life gets in the way, because - let’s be real - life gets in the way for all of us some days. Children are certainly not going to be able to handle obstacles better than adults, they have to learn how to do that by watching us do it. That’s why it’s so important to ensure your expectations are developmentally appropriate and reasonable, without being overly rigid or restrictive.