Global Courant 2023-04-11 06:00:20
The styles are the result of a co-creation, of a joint effort in which the children play a decisive role that materializes in everyday life.
What distinctive nuances does parenthood have today? What notes define today’s mothers and fathers? Are the traditional typologies valid or are they no longer enough to explore and interpret contemporary parenting?
Studies on parenting styles go back to the 1960s with the pioneering work of Diana Baumrind, which was redimensioned decades later by Eleanor Maccoby and John Martin.
His investigations laid the foundations of a model that is projected to this day, in which two determining variables of the type of parenting assumed are identified: responsiveness and demand.
The first refers to an effective response to the child’s needs that consolidates a favorable environment for child development. And that not only covers material factors, but also emotional ones. The second has to do with the manner and degree of control maintained over the children, the pressures placed on them, and the expectations regarding their conduct and performance.
From the intersection of these two axes emerges a pattern with four characteristic styles: authoritarian, democratic, indulgent and negligent. The parental ideal scores highly in responsiveness and demand, evidencing that affectivity can be combined in a healthy way with the setting of limits and behavior patterns, a thesis repeatedly confirmed in the literature.
Is this scheme still active? The truth is that new labels are circulating, such as that of helicopter parents, which, being responsive, exacerbate the control variable to fly over all filial movements.
Hyper-demand is another phenomenon of recent data, which provides us with girls, boys and adolescents with a full schedule, hostages of the logic of performance that goes through family dynamics today. It has also been proven that excessive parental expectations can hide postponed desires and a search for personal fulfillment through children.
Ulrich Beck called zombie categories certain elements of analysis inherited from the past that have become stagnant, that are neither alive nor dead. They are matrices of thought that no longer allow us to understand societies, nor to elucidate the complexity of the challenges and risks that are at stake in the present. Perhaps these canons survived intact and are fossilized. What’s more, it’s always been known that pure types don’t inhabit reality. That is why we emphasize that parenting styles manifest themselves in a hybrid way, overlapping and mixing. They involve an evolution, because they are inherent to the interpersonal bond and people change throughout our existence. The story of each bow is unique.
We know that in the practice of parenting, a prevailing style and a secondary one can be revealed. Or that even fathers and mothers tend to swing between opposing styles, as proof of our human contradictions.
But we cannot fail to notice that the styles are the result of a co-creation, of a joint effort in which the children play a decisive role that materializes in everyday life. So it can happen that we embody a different style with each son, with each daughter.
Perhaps we should sharpen our observation skills to penetrate the data that reality produces. What is clear is that positive parenting is an aspiration that drives us to know ourselves in order to reaffirm their being and their identity to children, establishing coherent and reasoned rules, and promoting non-violent discipline.
Both in research and in intervention in the family environment, categories explode. The models can be a good magnifying glass to look at, but it is necessary to move towards a broad approach, which does not label, or pigeonhole, or corset. That it be considered in front of each case as what it is: unprecedented, particular, exclusive. Because beyond the approximation strategies deployed, the reality of families demands, today as never before, innovative and personalized approaches.
Director of Studies of the Institute of Family Sciences of the Austral University