The trends around parenting swing like a pendulum from authoritarian to permissive. Instinctively we know either extremes isn't ideal, but we may not know the literature around it. Studies show that authoritative parenting produces the healthiest outcomes in teens. Authoritative can be found in between the two extremes but leaning more towards authority than permissive.
We all yearn for a harmonious family environment, but have you ever thought about the role hierarchy plays in achieving this? It's often seen as negative, but can be essential to maintaining order. Parenting isn't all about softness and leniency, sometimes it requires firmness, boundaries, and non-negotiable expectations.
The power of proactive parenting can't be overstated - it's not just about reacting to issues, but preventing them. Just think about how establishing safety and structure within the family can nip potential problems in the bud. Let's explore together the concept of authoritative parenting as a tool for creating a safe environment for our children to grow. The journey of parenting is a marathon, not a sprint. So let's invest in it intentionally and positively shape the future of our children. Come along and let's redefine our parenting journey together.
The trends around parenting swing like a pendulum from authoritarian to permissive. Instinctively we know either extremes isn't ideal, but we may not know the literature around it. Studies show that authoritative parenting produces the healthiest outcomes in teens. Authoritative can be found in between the two extremes but leaning more towards authority than permissive.
We all yearn for a harmonious family environment, but have you ever thought about the role hierarchy plays in achieving this? It's often seen as negative, but can be essential to maintaining order. Parenting isn't all about softness and leniency, sometimes it requires firmness, boundaries, and non-negotiable expectations.
The power of proactive parenting can't be overstated - it's not just about reacting to issues, but preventing them. Just think about how establishing safety and structure within the family can nip potential problems in the bud. Let's explore together the concept of authoritative parenting as a tool for creating a safe environment for our children to grow. The journey of parenting is a marathon, not a sprint. So let's invest in it intentionally and positively shape the future of our children. Come along and let's redefine our parenting journey together.
There are as many ways to parent as there are parents in this world, but there is one way to parent that wins every time, and that's doing it intentionally. This show is about helping things go right before they can go wrong. Each episode is chosen to help parents like you who may be overwhelmed or uninspired, bringing the ideas and motivation to give their best efforts to the people and place that matters the most. I'm Dr Tim Thane, author of the book and host of the podcast Not by Chance. I believe that a family's success and happiness is not by chance, so welcome to the podcast, built especially for intentional families. Let's jump in. Hi everyone, thank you for joining me for the Not by Chance podcast and I have to say I'm sorry for the big gap between the last podcast and this one. I've been through some stuff, had a neck injury and that laid me up for about a month and a half, but the mojo's back, I'm feeling better and I'm able to come in and do this podcast, so I'm excited. I'm actually really excited about the podcast today because I think that we'll discover, we'll discuss, some things that can help you, as a parent, get a little more nuanced in your parenting approach and how you approach difficult situations. It may be a little bit controversial because I'm going to talk about some limits to what we think is the golden mean of parenting and how we do it. So thank you for joining me for this podcast.
Speaker 1:I would love to get your thoughts, any comments you might have about this. I'd love to have some back and forth. In fact, I had a little back and forth on this subject with AI this week. If you ever want to have some fun, ask AI a question and don't agree with the first answer that you get. In fact, try and push it and see where it goes. What I love about it, honestly, ai was not reactive. It didn't get emotional, it didn't get all dramatic on me or anything. It just said, oh good point, let's add that into this. If you want to win an argument or a debate, try doing it with AI on something you really have some knowledge in, because the first answer you get is going to be generic. From there you start to realize there are all these nuances that you can go into.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we're going to talk about the three approaches or philosophies of parenting. We know back in the 50s and 40s who knows how far back. This goes, but the parenting style was very authoritarian. That basically means that the parents were trying to teach obedience and respect. They were quite rigid as a whole in our society. They just would set the rules and expect obedience to those rules. Now, obviously, I'm talking in generalities here and I'm going to be talking in generalities through most of our podcasts today. There's always exceptions to everything I'm going to say here, but in general that's what was happening.
Speaker 1:Over time, research came out. More information came out on the effects of that kind of parenting. There were some downsides to it. It limited the child's ability to explore and get creative and really find out who they were. Maybe it was more of a control mechanism for the parents to get them to a place in their life they needed to be. But there was a lot left on the table for the development of that child and the research did definitely point that out.
Speaker 1:So what do we do in response to something that's too extreme? This way, we usually will let the pendulum swing again the other direction and in this case we came up with permissive parenting. Right, it's the opposite of authoritarian style of parenting and it's kind of the opposite in the sense that hey, we're going to allow a lot of freedom, we're not gonna have a lot of rules and expectations and we're gonna allow them to sort of grow up without that structure and that discipline. Now, obviously there are downsides to that as well, and we've seen the consequences of that in our society. We've seen many, many situations where teens were parents, were very permissive and maybe enmeshed as well, so they overly focused on the relationship and said let's just make sure we're friends or we're feeling good about each other. We're not having a lot of conflict. And because of the avoidance of conflict and the wanting to really let a child become who they wanted to be, the child actually didn't grow up in a situation where they would feel a lot of confidence in different areas of their life, because they weren't required to in a lot of cases, and so that's a very lacking as well. So then the pendulum kind of re-oriented again and this time settling into what is referred to as the golden mean of parenting. And so you look at that and you say this is the holy grail of parenting and that is where there is the nurturing, the communication, the loving and the relationship focus and all of that. But it's combined with boundaries and expectations and all of that. And that sounds amazing, doesn't it? And in most cases it really is the way to parent.
Speaker 1:It's similar to what I found with horse training. You're trying to build this foundational relationship of trust with the horse and or with the child, and from that foundation there's a lot you can do, because there's a trusting relationship. There's not fear in that relationship, there's security, there's safety. But then you're asking hard things of the horse. You're asking them to go to places they're uncomfortable going letting you get on their back, for example, or needing to urge them to jump a ditch or whatever it might be, and so you're challenging them at the same time and you're requiring good behavior of that animal. You don't want the risk-taking of having a horse that's not controllable at some level, because they can hurt you, so it's a safety issue. And so I think there's a lot of parallels between the relationship between good horse training and this authoritative style of parenting, which is the golden mean.
Speaker 1:Horses are looking for a leader. They need a leader. They need someone to kind of give them the boundaries and the expectations. They're also looking for peace and a good, confident relationship with you. It's exactly what children and teen needs in families as well. They need those leaders in their life in that way, and most of the time I would say 90% plus of the time that's exactly the realm we need to be in in terms of our parenting, and so that's a sweet spot that we need to learn about. We need to develop the skills for we need to have our emotional management in check so we can deal with the emotions that might get us to either stop requiring something of our child that's needed or be overly harsh and punishing of our child if things are not going well the way we want it to be. So emotions play a role in all of this. So there's all these skills we need to develop and awareness that we need to develop in order to live in that sweet spot of parenting.
Speaker 1:But what I wanna talk about today and this is possibly the controversial part of what I wanna talk about is that I don't think it is the holy grail of parenting every time. There are exceptions to this, and there are times when we need to maybe be a little bit more risk-taking and letting go to, and that might seem like permissive parenting, and there are other times when it means to be much more, in a sense controlling and setting clear, non-negotiable expectations for our teen. Now I'm going to get into some of those with you. Now We'll push this model of authoritative parenting kind of to its limits and see where those limits are when it hits the wall, and there needs to be some nuanced ways of approaching a situation. This is when I started the argument with the AI, because I would ask them what do I do in a situation like this? And the AI would respond with well, the parent should communicate effectively and clearly. They should set clear boundaries, they should negotiate with their child or help their child understand rationally why that boundary is set and resolve it that way. And that seemed to be the repetitive answer I kept getting back. So I wanted to push it a little bit here.
Speaker 1:So I argued with the AI a little bit and I said you know, it seems to me that there's struggle in people's minds about power inside families and hierarchy. They think hierarchy is a bad word when in fact that is exactly what's needed, especially at certain points in time. And in my eyes the hierarchy needs to be mom and dad at the top of the hierarchy, with benevolence and love, looking over the needs of their family and at times they need to use that power to create safety, to help a child get out of a really stuck situation where they're not going anywhere, and that's where they need to step in. So hierarchy is one of the kind of the questionable things that in our day and society, it seems is kind of a bad thing. The other thing that goes hand in hand with that is that you need to have both a masculine and feminine presence in the family to get the very best ingredients to this whole equation, and I'm going to do a whole another podcast just on that subject, but for today let's just say that in the past, you might say, traditionally speaking, men have kind of brought the discipline factor into it, possibly, and a lot of other fun things and nice things, but maybe they're the ones saying here's the law and this is what needs to be followed through on, just by their sheer presence. Sometimes they're bigger. That has an effect in a home where a teenager's overwhelming their mother because the teen is 50 pounds heavier and three inches taller.
Speaker 1:Times have definitely changed. I saw a kind of a humorous video on Facebook or as TikTok or something, where a guy mentioned that things have changed with parenting. In the past, the most common consequence children were given for a behavior that they needed to stop was go to your room. But now that has flipped completely. Now it's get out of your room. So if that doesn't give us an indication that times have changed and the problems our kids are facing and challenges they're having personally are different than I don't know what else does, but it really does kind of describe it.
Speaker 1:So my argument, or my debate with AI, was to kind of stretch it, to see if it could go beyond the authoritative model, to make it more nuanced and to stretch it both directions. And I basically said you know, in today's society where hierarchy is not seen as a positive, where I think it's a huge need, where you have parents at the top of the hierarchy together with their children underneath them, and that doesn't mean you're controlling them, it just means there needs to be a leader in the family and it's best if both are at the top. So I asked AI, I said how does the hierarchy in families affect this authoritative parenting style? And it agreed with me that that was a really important feature of family life and so it's nice to get that agreement. And so I kind of went from there and I said so okay, in relation to setting non-negotiable boundaries.
Speaker 1:Let's say the teen is addicted to gaming and spending seven to eight hours every day playing games. Let's say the parents have set this boundary that he only played two hours a day, but he disregards their request to stop playing and go to bed and get the sleep that he needs. But again he doesn't listen and he goes on playing. So I said what would you do here? It goes down through a list of communicate the concern, set clear and concrete boundaries, limit, and then it says limit access. So it's the first time I'd pushed AI to the point of saying, okay, there should be a downside to some behaviors.
Speaker 1:You can't talk everything out. There's some kids in some circumstances that there's no way that they can have a rational conversation about why it's important for them to go to bed on time and for them to willingly hand over the gaming system when they say you're right, mom and dad, I'm really messing up my life by spending too much time playing games and so that's rarely going to happen. So you have to kind of say then what you know if that doesn't work, where you're connecting and building the relationship and you're trying to help them see the benefits of going to bed on time. If that doesn't work, what do you do? Well, you really have to expand out towards the more authoritarian old model. Now here's something I really believe is there's a lot of things in traditional ways of doing things parenting especially, and marriage as well that we have abandoned, but that should be brought back because they are part of the antidote to the problems we have currently. Not everything we did in the past should be thrown away, and this is one of those things I also said use consequences and rewards. So acknowledge there ought to be probably some negative outcomes built into some non-negotiable boundaries that you've set, and so, after pushing it a little bit, it finally agreed yes, there should be some consequences and rewards.
Speaker 1:A little while ago, we released a short clip of our new app, trustee, onto social media and it was specifically about the tool of setting expectations, setting up positive outcomes or rewards for that, meeting that expectation, and negative consequences if that expectation is not met. I guess without the context of helping everybody understand that these expectations that you set, where they are non-negotiable and there needs to be clear negative outcomes if it's not followed. Without that context, I think that it didn't understand. We're really talking about maybe a small percentage of the time. This is the tool you need to reach into the toolbox and pull out. I got a comment from somebody that said, ooh, too authoritarian. And all they had done is seen the screen of how you set expectations, how you create positive rewards and how you create consequences, and that was too much for them. Ooh, we don't want to go there. But keep in mind, this is a tool not to be used every day on everything. It would really backfire. It would not work. You'd be back into the authoritarian style of parenting, which really doesn't work if that's all you do. But you need this tool in the toolbox for certain cases that are on the extreme. There has to be a downside.
Speaker 1:Ai told me that when safety is concerned, you can pull out the tool and don't do it unless there's a safety issue. So I said I'm going to take it one step further. I'm going to push it a little bit further Now listen to the question I ask AI here. I said let me challenge you on one more topic. You and many other parents may not think that extreme disrespectful behavior inside the home falls into the category of safety. I would argue that extreme disrespect in the home cuts up the foundation of the hierarchy and removes parents from the role they need to play, and would put them in a position of not being effective parents if they didn't address this extreme behavior with non-negotiable boundaries. These boundaries may also include the removal of freedoms and privileges the teen has, because no amount of collaboration, discussion, will change the situation. Ai says you raise a valid point, and it begins to agree with me again. But it reframed it a little bit and said you're right, but it's still a safety concern, because there's psychological safety at risk here. If there's not a safety in the home and if they're swearing and cussing and hitting, punching holes in walls and those kinds of things, you have to step in and make sure that there is psychological safety.
Speaker 1:I decided to push AI just a little further beyond. We only pull out these tools and techniques when we are dealing with a red light issue, something that's really a safety issue, because I said what about preventative? Now this is a little more nuanced and we have to really be in tune with our kids and we have to have a solid relationship in place and everything else. But we need to have a sense of when our child or our teenager is getting off track and do some early intervention, and so we might create these non-negotiable expectations sooner than when there's a true safety risk already in our home. We may need to do it quite a bit earlier than that, and again, you need all the foundational relationship, the communication skills and all of that to do it, but, let's say, in a preventative way.
Speaker 1:You see a family rule being broken and you want to get ahead of it. Some of these are obvious, like, oh, we have a rule in our family not to use substances and you start to find out that your child is getting involved with substances. The sooner you can intervene and help them in that situation, the better, and you need to figure out what is your role and how do you play that, while maintaining a trusting relationship but helping them get out of a bad situation that they're in. Another one could be this disrespectful behavior that I talked about. Another one is screen time. That's a slippery slope, isn't it? When they start to play games and they're pushing the limits. Instead of the hour you said that they could do it, they're pushing it to two hours and they get really angry when you ask them for the gaming system or you say we can't do that, the sooner again you intervene there and create something where you're checking in on it regularly, you're following up, you're setting a clear expectation, you're holding them accountable to that, the better.
Speaker 1:Ai agreed with me, and AI called it proactive parenting, and so you can be a little bit more in that camp of a little more authoritarian in those situations where you're trying to help prevent something you see coming. You have to be really careful, though, because a lot of parents are very fearful. The first time their kid makes a mistake, they think the very worst and they take it all the way to they're going to be in jail down the road, and so they overreact to that situation. So, with everything I talk about, there are exceptions. You have to know yourself. You have to understand am I the parent that's going to take this and run with it and go too far, or I'm the parent that's going to? You know I'm uncomfortable with that idea, and so I'm never going to use that tool. So, whatever, wherever you're at, please assess that and then take these principles in and apply it appropriately within your own family. So, in the end, what I propose to you and to me and everybody else is to look. Let's look at authoritative parenting as what we should be trying to do most of the time, as it's defined in the literature and as we read about it.
Speaker 1:But there are extreme cases where we need to have the ability to address very difficult behaviors in a really clear, with clear boundaries kind of manner. The other day I don't remember if it was a Facebook post or something, but I saw a real of a military guy in uniform and it turns out that he's talking to a 10-year-old boy who I think he's the uncle to, and this boy had been very, very disrespectful to his mother and he was basically uncontrollable in any way. And so here's this sort of masculine presence coming into the story and he lets the boy know where the boundaries are. He said you will not treat your mom like this anymore. This is not going to be okay, and it was interesting to see that there were many, many people who are like bravo, finally there's. There's a line. It's not. There are some things that kids can't continually cross over, because it does create a situation where there's not going to be a good outcome for any buddy involved.
Speaker 1:So my, my argument is let's call it authoritative plus. That's where it's really authoritative 90% of the time, just as we read in the literature. But then having the ability at certain points in time to draw a line that you absolutely mean and is non-negotiable. It doesn't mean you forget about the relationship anymore because it's non-negotiable. It means that you, you still prioritize the relationship, but it is one that you have to create that psychological safety within the home that there is parents at the top of the hierarchy.
Speaker 1:Now, in the future, I'm going to talk about the other side of this, which is a lot of times parents are trying to control too much and they they don't allow their children, their, their teens, to take positive risks in their life and they're trying to keep them from making any mistakes, and that's also another problem that we need to address in a later podcast. But I hope this has been helpful to you as you've thought about where do you land in all of this? You know what's your style of parenting. Do you default more to the authoritarian side? Are you too permissive on the other side, or do you find yourself in that golden mean most of the time and can you see yourself being able to in those cases where you need to. Can you see yourself being able to manage your emotions, nevertheless persisting with that boundary and expecting that boundary, and doing whatever you need to to help that happen? Because in the end, as you do that, you'll be able to see that your your teen who's been addicted to video gaming or whatever that problematic spiraling is you'll see them start to get a grip on that and start to get confidence that they do have a leader in the home helping them overcome something that, deep down inside them, they know is not taking them in the right direction.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I hope this has been helpful to you. If you, if you, found this helpful to you, please like and subscribe to this YouTube channel and that you share it with other people. Thank you again for listening to my podcast and I wish you all the best in your parenting journey. Parents, your time is valuable and I'm grateful you spent some of it with us. What you're intentionally doing in your home life is inspiring and unmatched in its importance and long-term effects. Ask yourself what am I going to do? What am I going to do because of what I've learned today?