What Is the Best Parenting Style?

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How we parent our children can affect everything from our kid’s physical health to their relationships. How we parent should support and encourage healthy development and growth, interactions and communication, and discipline and correction. You might not have thought much about your parenting style, but this article will discuss the four main parenting styles and which one is best for raising kind, well-adjusted adults.

In the 1960s, Diana Baumrind, a developmental psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley, first defined the main categories of parenting. In the 1980s, Maccoby and Martin refined her model into four separate parenting styles.

Those four categories are:

-Authoritarian

-Permissive

-Authoritative

-Uninvolved/neglectful

1. Authoritarian Parenting

The authoritarian parent desires complete control over their offspring. These moms and dads rarely invite input or feedback from their children. This parenting style invokes stern discipline, often in the form of corporal punishment. According to a 2009 study, in the US, 26% of parents identify as authoritarian.

Common characteristics of the authoritarian parent:

-Strict rules with little thought to children’s feelings

-Expects obedience without regard to children’s social, emotional, or behavioral needs

-Rarely explains reasons behind consequence or rule

-Communication is nearly always from parent to child

-Uses tough love

-Very rigid, allowing for little flexibility

2. Permissive Parenting

Parents who raise their kids in the permissive style typically focus more on keeping their children happy above all. These parents often avoid conflict and will give in to their children’s wants at the first cry of distress. Permissive parents also consider themselves their children’s friends rather than their mother or father. According to a 2009 study, 18% of parents in the US say they are permissive moms and dads.

Common attributes of the permissive parent:

-Child-centric household

-Demands little of a child

-Communicates openly

-Usually allows children to make all decisions

-Rarely sets or enforces rules or expectations

-Lets kids do what they want

-Offers limited guidance

3. Authoritative Parenting

Moms and dads who ascribe to the authoritative parenting approach are often more in tune with their children’s needs. They prefer to guide their kids, using honest and open communication methods to impart their values. Children with authoritative parents are usually self-disciplined and can express their own ideas. Authoritative parents recognize the value of being the leader in their home, disciplining their children through teaching and love. According to a 2009 study, 46% of moms and dads in the US parent authoritatively.

Common attributes of the authoritative parent:

-Sets clear rules and expectations

-Practices flexibility and understanding

-Communicates frequently

-Listens to their children

-Allows natural consequences to actions

-Are nurturing and supportive

4. Neglectful Parenting

The neglectful parent is sometimes called the uninvolved parent. These parents limit their engagement with their children and rarely enforce rules. They come across as uncaring and cold, although not always on purpose. These moms and dads usually have their own struggles, which supersede their ability to be warm toward their children. According to a 2009 study, 10% of parents in the US are uninvolved.

Common traits of the neglectful parent:

-Kids fend for themselves

-Is uninvolved or overwhelmed with other things

-Provides very little attention, guidance, or nurture

-Struggles with self-esteem issues

-Has difficulty forming attachments

-Exhibits an overall sense of indifference

What Is the Best Parenting Style for You?

Research supports authoritative parents as having more success raising children who are independent, socially competent, and self-reliant. Also, these kids are less likely to experience relationship difficulties, poor self-regulation, low self-esteem, and substance abuse—these traits appear more often in the children of permissive, neglectful, or authoritarian parents.

Here’s why. Authoritative parents position themselves as the leaders in their homes, using the characteristics of effective leadership in a business, corporation, church, military unit, or educational institution in their child-rearing tactics. Being the final authority in your home as mom and dad doesn’t mean you’re a dictator—that would fall under the authoritarian parenting style—but it does mean you make the hard decisions with which your kids won’t necessarily agree. And that’s okay because your primary goal as an authoritative parent isn’t to have your kids like you all the time—it’s to provide the guidance they need to become successful and productive members of society as adults.

Want to know the number-one way to ensure you’re the leader in your home? Make your household marriage-centered, not child-centered. This means the marriage relationship is the priority over the parent-child relationship. If you’re a single parent, this means developing and maintaining a life separate from your child.

Questions to ask to see if you’re operating a marriage-centric or child-centric home.

• Do you always consider how your decisions impact the kids?
• Which relationship do you spend more time on—your kids or spouse?
• Do you regularly take off your mom/dad hats and put on your husband/wife hats?

If you realize you have a child-centered home, here are six ways to change it into a marriage-centric home.

1. Start viewing the children as separate from you, seeing them as free agents capable of making decisions independent of you as the parent. This means you allow them to make choices when appropriate and to live with the consequences of those choices as their own person. Examples include whether or not to play a particular sport, participate in an activity or sign up for an afterschool event. In middle and high school, your kids should be free to pick their own classes (even when they don’t choose the ones you think they should take).

2. Create physical boundaries between you and your children. This helps your kids become more self-reliant. One major way to install these boundaries is to ban your kids from the marital bed. This doesn’t mean the kids can’t snuggle with you in the mornings or that you refuse them comfort at night when they’re sick or had a bad dream. It does mean that the kids are not sleeping with you on a regular basis.

3. Recognize that mothering doesn’t have to consume all of your time. By mothering, I mean the way we were when our kids were babies. We’d have to do everything for them—feed, change, dress, soothe them to sleep, entertain them when cranky, etc. As our child grows older, we need to hand off more and more of their own care to them. Children are more capable of doing things themselves than we realize. Mothers especially must stop trying to do things for the child that they can do for themself, including entertaining themselves.

4. Focus on being the world’s greatest spouse, not the world’s greatest parent. When we concentrate more on the marriage relationship over the parent-child relationship, we’ll actually be better mothers and fathers. This sounds counterintuitive, but numerous studies have shown that children are happier and feel more secure when they know their parents’ marriage is strong.

5. Stop enabling your children. Being a leader in the home also means you assign the emotional and practical responsibility for a child’s misbehavior to the rightful owner—the child. Stop trying to solve your child’s problems. Children will not grow up problem-free. Learning to solve their problems helps kids know how to handle frustration, too—an essential emotional life skill.

6. Have a relationship with your children, but don’t be in a relationship with your kids. The distinction is when we’re in a relationship with our kids, we prioritize the relationship over everything else, which leads to permissive parenting. When we have a relationship with our children, we enjoy being around our kids, but we know there is a subtle barrier between us because we’re not peers. The good news is that when your child becomes a young adult, we segue into the friendship season. The friendship part of your relationship with your kids will come, but we can’t rush it when they’re young.

Take inventory of your parenting style and make the switch to being an authoritative parent—and watch your children blossom and grow into who God has called them to be.

Sarah Hamaker is a national speaker and award-winning author who loves writing romantic suspense books “where the hero and heroine fall in love while running for their lives.” She’s also a wife, mother of two teenagers and two college students, a therapeutic foster mom, and podcaster (The Romantic Side of Suspense podcast). She coaches writers, speakers and parents with an encouraging and commonsense approach. Visit her online at sarahhamakerfiction.com.