What's Your Parenting Style: Authoritarian or Permissive?

Are you concerned about making the same “mistakes” in bringing up your children as you think your parents did in raising you? Do you watch other parents and wonder if the way they discipline their kids is the way you should too? Have you tried to be a strong disciplinarian but find that it doesn’t feel right to you and you aren’t getting the results you want?

If you have sought out this article then you are probably looking for a parenting style that fits your family’s values and still get you the behavior you want from your children. Below we share four steps to take to understand, identify and put into action a style of parenting that is neither punitive nor permissive.

We offer these steps with the understanding that for us, parenting is one of the most important, most rewarding, and most demanding activities that human beings ever undertake.

Many parents tell us that they learned from painful experiences with their parents what they don’t want to do with their own kids. In our book, Respectful Parents, Respectful Kids we point out that “whether their modeling was positive or negative, your parents’ actions are a primary motivating force for the way you are parenting and the life you are living now.”

It has been found that five percent of lifelong learning comes from instruction: 95 percent of what we remember comes from family and social interactions. Understanding that your kids learn more from what they see you do, than what you say, is the foundation for choosing a parenting style you will not only feel comfortable with but will bring peace and stability to your home and your children’s lives.

Step One: Evaluate Your Experience

When we are overwhelmed in a situation, we tend to fall back on what is familiar to us, regardless of whether it is beneficial or not. Before you can decide how you want to parent your children, a great first step is to look at your own experience.

Take some time to review for yourself, what were the positive and negative aspects of your upbringing? Having this information present in your mind will help you develop an idea of how you want to interact with your children. If you are raising your children with the help of a spouse, partner, friends or family member, ask them to share their experiences also.

Step Two: Remember You Have a Choice

Possibly during the evaluation of your experience you realized that much of the parenting style you were raised with included lecturing, advising, making demands and correcting behavior. You might be thinking in some ways these behaviors worked. “I didn’t turn out so bad….” and yet deep inside you know that there must be a happier, healthier way to raise kids.

We strongly believe that there is a refreshing alternative to managerial parenting. As we state in our book, “You don’t have to figure out how to change your kids’ behavior, and you don’t have to manage anything, in order to end conflicts.” The parenting we suggest is in many ways much simpler and comes from instinct. The end result is that it is more effective in meeting the needs of kids and parents.

The importance of step two is that you are at choice about how you parent your children. You don’t simply have to do what you were taught or what you see other parents doing around you. There are others out there that feel the way you do. Remember we are here to support you in your decision to try another approach!

Step Three: Decide Your Goal

Learning a new way of being can seem an impossible task, at first… but a great way to take the “impossible” out, is to decide on a goal.

We like to suggest a beginning goal is to live with a clear idea of what is important and true for you. Understanding what you value most about being a parent and using that as a guiding light can always bring you back to a center of calm even when things don’t go the way you had hoped. This means that you are not going for the goal of being the perfect parent. Giving up the ideal of being a perfect parent can be a HUGE relief.

When you decide that being clear about what is important to you and your family is always your first thought and not perfection, then when you do things that don’t match your values, which we all know is going to happen, you won’t blame yourself for not “doing it right”. Instead you will see it as an opportunity to deepen the connection with your children by being honest about what happened and together finding a way you can change it for the future.

Step Four: Set The Intention of Taking The Time That Is Needed

All change takes time. Are you willing to set the intention of giving these new ideas the time they need to become a part of your everyday way of being?

In our rushed, “gotta have it right now world”, we sometimes forget that patience, taking time and making mistakes is the only way to really learn something and have it stick.

You will begin to see small changes immediately. But the longer you hold your intention of taking the time that is needed, the stronger and more frequent those changes will become until you won’t be able to imagine parenting any other way.

Another aspect in setting an intention of taking the time needed is to seek out assistance. Educate yourself.

The more you learn about identifying your values, understanding your needs and hearing examples of different parenting styles, the better equipped you will be to make decisions for yourself and your family.