What type of parent are you? Buried beneath a litany of books detailing how to raise children ‘the right way,’ you’ll find an endless array of parenting identities: there’s the ‘helicopter parent,’ ‘gentle parent,’ ‘crunchy mumma’, and ‘tiger mum’. These labels are used to encapsulate what kind of mum, or dad, you are. It’s easy to dismiss them as a bit of trendy, light-hearted fun. But their impact runs deeper. By pigeon-holing parents, we risk forgetting what it means to actually raise a child.
Parents are forgetting to follow their instincts
At its core, parenting is about attachment; the bond between parent and child. Like any meaningful relationship, it is a dynamic that must be nurtured, not a formula to be followed. You can read all the parenting books in the world, but it doesn’t mean you will be a good parent. You can read no parenting books, and still be a good mum, or dad. Yet by obsessing over ‘parenting styles’, we have reduced our core relationship to a rigid set of guidelines and frameworks. Parents are forgetting to follow their instincts.
Raising a child is an entirely natural process, one for which we are biologically and cognitively equipped. Our children are born primed to attach to us; we, in turn, are wired to meet their needs. That is not to say that when our children arrive, we as parents are the finished article. In life, we are constantly learning, adapting and reacting to challenges. Parenting is no different. But to have a parenting ‘style’ promotes a textbook view of raising a child that prioritises behavioural management skills over attachment.
To consider how misguided this, think about how our other relationships would be affected if we labelled ourselves in the same way that some parents do. Imagine you are a ‘permissive parent’: you impose few rules, trusting your children to navigate their own responsibilities independently. Now picture your spouse asking if you’d like a cup of tea: you respond ‘yes’, only for them to reply, ‘Well, you know where the kettle is.’
Calling that ‘permissive marriage’ sounds ludicrous. That’s because we intuitively understand that ignoring the other person’s needs will threaten the strength of our attachment, which is the authentic motivator for our behaviour. This is why giving your partner a star chart to encourage them to unload the dishwasher is equally ridiculous.
A rather odd belief exists that if we don’t have rules and regulations to adhere to, our parenting becomes wild-west. But focusing on attachment is not the absence of action: it is merely asking ourselves what we want the reasons to be.
Do we want our children to put away their clothes, to ‘take control of their own autonomy’ or to earn their pocket money? Or do we want them to help us out without the need for external pressures? It is hardly surprising that family breakdowns are now so common when the well is often poisoned by a shallow relationship paradigm in childhood.
Recent data shows that almost three quarters of millennial parents practice ‘gentle parenting’. ‘Gentle parenting’ calls for a distinct lack of discipline, where we position ourselves as our child’s friend, rather than an authority figure.
While this now appears to be the ‘norm’ for many modern mums and dads, it is not natural. Children need an anchor: it is an evolutionary instinct that says an immature brain requires a compass point. When we remove ourselves from that role, it invites unsuitable candidates in that may threaten that role further, such as a child’s peers. When we replace our power to parent, we remove the biological tools we were given to be effective parents.
A hug from someone we are attached to will activate love hormones and cause stress hormones to plummet as the brain engages its deep attachment pathways. A hug from someone we are not properly attached to is likely to do this at a rate which is far weaker, because only social bonding pathways are being strengthened. It’s little wonder we have a generation of children with record rates of depression, who are drawn to social media, and lacking in respect for authority figures like teachers.
Before I had my own children, I was a teacher. Teaching is a profession that requires you to impart certain learning techniques, but attachment is also required for children to be able to freely express themselves while also acknowledging my dominant role in the classroom. Children with whom I had this relationship with invariably made the most progress.
Some parents would ask me where they were going wrong at home. These were often mums and dads who started out as ‘gentle parents’, but had since realised their unnaturally submissive role had resulted in aggressive, domineering children. They then tried their turn at ‘authoritarian parenting’ to attempt to control their children, but couldn’t, because their attachment to them was dysfunctional. A few, borne out of frustration, had even progressed to borderline ‘neglectful parents’, believing their parenting was now an act of futility. The answer to their question is in what nature already gave us, not in a 300-page manual. Trying to get a developmentally premature child to behave in a certain way is like standing in front of a high-speed train and commanding it to stop.
A lot of labels serve to protect us from harm: ‘do not drink’, ‘do not touch’, ‘must be cooked before consuming’. Some labels, however, can cause us harm. Helicopter parenting stifles a child’s adaptability, crunchy parenting – which rejects all non-natural products like processed food, technology, and even medical intervention by doctors – deprives children from the marvels of modern medicine. Even authoritative parenting, praised for balancing warmth with boundaries, still requires an operative attachment to be effective. I’ve even heard some attempt to categorise ‘attachment parenting’, but this is equally misguided.
In 1978, the psychologist Mary Ainsworth conducted the innovative ‘Strange Situation’ experiment, identifying different parenting styles in infants based on how they responded to caregiver separation. The great irony is that the approach to parenting that showed better emotional regulation, confidence, and social skills, is the approach that needs no prescribed methodology: securely attached children. It is no coincidence that this is the only outlook that existed well before the ‘How to…’ handbook and instead relies on parenting how nature intended.
We live in an era where every thought, emotion, or collection of symptoms carries a label. But when it comes to raising children, we should spend less time obsessing over definitions and more time spending time, and developing relationships, with our children.
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