Parenting - Helicopters vs Bulldozers

Understanding a little bit about the effects of different parenting styles can really help us understand ourselves better. As well as help us to understand others.

Let's have a peek into some of the basics shall we?

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Parenting - Helicopters vs Bulldozers 0:02

And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the personal development podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate, and motivate you to be the best you can be. I'm psychotherapist Richard Nicholls, and today you'll learn a little bit about parenting. And if you are ready, we'll start the show. Good day people. How are you all doing? Have you got your Christmas decks up yet? Don't blame you if you have. Don't blame you if you haven't. You do you, I was chatting to my son last week. He's away at uni in a Young One's type house with a lovely group of folk and they've had their decorations up since probably mid-November, and I did question the need to put them up so soon and he said. Well, we're all going back to our parents for Christmas and New Year, so if we didn't get festive here now, we wouldn't at all. And I thought, oh yeah, of course. And so then driving around my town, seeing so many people with their lights on outside of the house, even though it was still only November, I was able to push away any judgment about it because you never really know the reasons why people want to do the things the way they do. We don't know other people's stories, do we? And who's opinion is that really anyway? Is it yours? Is it your parents? As with so many things in life, often what we think of as our own ideas and opinions. They're nothing more than hand me downs from our parents anyway. That's just what we do as children. We absorb and respond to everything that we experience. It's no surprise that a huge majority of people that come to therapy have issues relating to their childhood and in particular the way that they were treated by their parents, who in some cases, genuinely thought that they were doing the right thing. Over the years, I've had a lot of emails asking me to talk about parenting, but as there are already so many specific parenting podcasts already out there, I've tended to avoid the topic. Think I've only spoken about it once on here 'cause it seems a bit preachy for a parent to talk about parenting. Like I must be the perfect dad or something as if I know the secrets. Well, actually, parenting is one of those things where good enough needs to be good enough, and also is quite a specific topic really. A lot of listeners either don't have kids, don't want them, or they've had them already and now those kids are old enough to not need parenting anymore. One thing I need to remember and so do you maybe if you ever think a podcast topic isn't relevant for you, my strap line, even back in the old Motivate Yourself days has always been about guiding, teaching and inspiring. I say inspire, educate, motivate nowadays, don't I? But teaching and educating has always been a part of this. So, even if you think that some topics aren't useful for you to help you to understand yourself, they'll be useful to helping you to understand others. And if those others are your own parents, well maybe that can then help you to understand yourself too. So that's why you've got an episode about parenting today, whether you like it or not. So. Let's step back into a time machine for a few minutes back to the sixties. Let's meet renowned psychologist Diana Baumrind. Diana Baumrind started the ball rolling into the psychology of parenting with her three parenting style descriptions of authoritarian, permissive, and authoritative. With authoritarian meaning too hard. Permissive meaning too soft and Authoritative meaning just right. They've been expanded over the years now to include more neglectful styles. Baumrind didn't really take the extremes of bad parenting into account. She was more interested in challenging whether corporal punishment was damaging or not. Whether it's okay to smack your kids. 'Cause there was so much conflicting evidence about hitting children being neglectful or not. And people still sit on the fence nowadays about that. Although even back then in the sixties, it was said that even though mild spanking was not necessarily linked to creating problems in people. It wasn't linked to any benefits either. And anyone who was hit as a child seems to say the same thing that they turned out okay, even though they were hit. They don't say they turned out okay because they were hit. But people do sit on the fence about it. 'cause in some cultures, particularly in African American households for example, it was expected that if you did something wrong, you'd get a whooping. And it didn't mean that your mum didn't love you. But if you're brought up in a society where kids don't come to school and describe how they got a whooping the night before because they'd been caught, I don't know, playing on the railway lines or something, then the meaning behind being smacked by your parents is different. It suggests that there is something different about you compared to your friends, and that does have implications on personality development. It goes to show humans are messy and complicated creatures. So let's have a quick look at Diana Baundrind's early styles, and we can compare it then to some of the less academic labeling that we might talk about nowadays. So Baundrind's authoritarian style was the extreme that had, very strict rules, harsh punishments. That's when the child doesn't have any input over what the rules are and what any punishment might be. Children growing up in that sort of environment feel quite powerless. Very often that can result in lower self-esteem, which can have all sorts of implications in later life, obviously. On the other end of the scale, we see a permissive parenting style that has very few, if any, rules or punishments. Where parents don't really demand or even expect anything from their children, and that can make the children quite anxious because there are no boundaries. It can make the children feel more responsible for their lives than they should feel when they're still very, very young. And so, at that age, we need somebody to help guide them. So in the middle we've got the Goldilocks zone, we've got the authoritative style of parenting where rules are set, and punishment is expected if the rules are broken, but the child feels safe enough to be able to ask for a compromise, and the parents are flexible enough and responsive enough. And I think that's the key there. They respond well to their child and that child's needs. And yeah, the parents do have the final say over things and the kid knows that. But those children are listened to, they're understood. They feel a sense of empowerment and control. At least as much as is appropriate for their age anyway. This style of parenting is linked to higher self-esteem with greater maturity, greater self-reliance. But a caveat here, there's that phrase I go back to often, correlation does not imply causation. We can't do studies that force parenting styles just to see what happens to the kids along the way. That's unethical, obviously. So all we have is a correlation, and maybe there's something genetic at play here. We know that half of our personalities in our genes from all of the twin studies that have been done over the years, and maybe there's something in some children's genes that causes some behaviour problems. Which can lead to some children needing stricter rules than others do. Especially when, obviously, there's gonna be shared genes too. And if both parents and child are predisposed to not being very good at compromise, if stubbornness is genetic, then of course it's gonna be difficult. So these were the early styles and neglectful was eventually added, but I think not until the 1980s, rather bizarrely. Probably 'cause neglect was not really thought of as a style of parenting. It was more a style of not being parented at all. And these have been expanded upon massively over the years. We now hear about child centered parenting, nurturant parenting, over parenting, alloparenting. And then we've got these weird names that feel like they should be in a nature documentary. We've got Dolphin Parenting, Tiger Parenting. And then Helicopter and Bulldozer parenting. And from a parent's perspective, I think these two are the most interesting to look at in a 15 minute podcast episode, which I'm sure is gonna probably end up being more like 20 this time. So helicopter parenting really means over parenting, having too much control over the children's lives, and bulldozer parenting is similar, but much worse. So by helicopter parenting, it's meant to suggest that the parent is constantly hovering overhead on the lookout for what's not being done right. So a helicopter parent would know when their kid's homework was due in and they'd be there to remind them that they hadn't done it yet. They'd notice if their kids had not got their PE kit ready on the right day. And they don't let them take responsibility for things themselves. And I know some of you might have just winced a little bit 'cause you might have seen yourself in there somewhat. I get it, but it's not helpful and I know it's tempting as a parent to try and take charge of everything. But it very often backfires. Research suggests that helicopter parenting contributes to increased anxiety, an increased fear of failure among children. By constantly swooping in to rescue them from challenges we're actually preventing them from developing any resilience and problem solving skills. And bulldozer parenting is even worse. People call it that, or sometimes snowplow parenting, it's called from time to time. 'cause that's the sort of parenting when a parent removes any obstacles that are in the child's way, so that everything is a simple track to walk through. Now, don't get me wrong, make your life easier for the people that you care about. That's a good thing, but preventing them from learning how to deal with obstacles isn't good. As with the swooping in of the helicopter parent, stopping the development of resilience isn't good. Parents like this are in constant contact with the kids' school to make sure that those kids are being rewarded and praised. Maybe writing notes to excuse them from things that sort of parenting. And that style is kind of running backwards. It's the wrong way round. Instead of preparing the road for the kid, you need to prepare the kid for the road. And it's a hard habit to stop, but stop we must. 'cause if you don't stop once they get to school, it's even harder once they get to college. And if you don't stop when they get to college, it's gonna be even harder when they go off to university. Even harder still once they've started work. And I have met lots of people over the years who do speak to their adult children's boss about things. And it's no surprise that both parent and child have anxiety issues. The thing is, if we micromanage our children and we snowplow everything difficult out of the way for them, it teaches them one very nasty message that they are nothing without their parents. That's the message. You are nothing without me. Yet, of course no one wants to actually say that no one means to explicitly say You are nothing without me. But that's the way the kid feels for their whole life sometimes. 'cause it can create a dependent personality trait or dependent personality disorder if things are taken too far, which can absolutely ruin somebody's life. 'cause parents aren't always going to be there for their kids. That's not how our society works, is it? So when parents aren't there, they're not in the right place to encourage and give support, children feel unable to summon up the prodding and encouraging themselves. I do wonder though, sometimes if when we have children, we don't all fall into the trap of wanting to live our own life through our kids to some degree. I know, I do. I'm quite envious of my son's youth and his time that he's got, he's got his whole life ahead of him and so many opportunities. And if I ever find myself about to say the words, I know what you wanna do, mate. I have to stop and remind myself that I might not know what he wants. Going back a long way. I remember him starting drum lessons at school. I think he was 10, long time ago. And after a while I asked him if he'd like his own drum kit. Would playing drums be something he'd like to do more? Well, yeah, of course. A 10-year-old with a drum kit in his bedroom who'd say no? And it was electronic so he could use headphones. Wasn't as good as a real drum kit to play, but much better to tolerate from a room away, I'll tell you that much. Well, he soon became very uninterested because in truth, he wasn't that interested in the first place. I was. I'd have loved to have been his age again and learned to play the drums. There have been many things that I felt the urge to force upon him, and when I've told clients these stories, they understand themselves or their parents that little bit better, and maybe you need that too. Interestingly, I didn't suggest he studied psychology, which he did at A level and then started a uni degree in it, he just figured that it was a useful degree that could help him further down the line once he knew what he wanted to do in life. But when he was choosing his A Levels, I remember encouraging him to look at his strengths and he did really well in his GCSE, so he could pretty much choose any subject that he wanted to do as long as it didn't clash with any of the other ones in the college timetable. And I do remember suggesting English literature and history, those are subjects that interest me. Literature because, deep down, I'd have loved to get better at creative writing and been a novelist. I love stories. I'm literally telling you one now and history probably for the same reason. It combines my love of stories with my interest in people and cause and effect. It's a great way to learn about the mistakes that people have made over the years so as to prevent them in the future and explains so much about who we are as a society. Again, these are things that interest me, not him quite so much. So, actually no. Dad, I'm, I'm not gonna do English literature, not gonna study history because that was my thing, not his. Back in 2020 when we all locked down. I suggested he take advantage of some of his free time. I found him a, a graphic design course 'cause he was interested in art as a hobby, just not that interested in graphic design, it seemed. And I felt a bit let down. Oh, well let's find him something else. I found him an online course about sign language. Would he like to do that? No. No, not at all. Why would he? He was 15 and at the time he got no interest in childcare, deaf kids or not. He just wasn't interested. But I was, when I was young. I wanted to play the drums. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an author. I wanted to learn sign language, and now he's wasting his time by not living my life for me. No, he's living his own life and he's doing the things that he's interested in. It's gonna mean that the things that he practices get learned. That's how we develop skills. We repeat things that we enjoy. That's the difference between what we call intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic meaning your inner desires drive you forward and extrinsic is when outside forces are the motivating factor. And we all know what it's like to be pushed into something. And at any age, people are far more likely to succeed at something if it's because they want to do it rather than if you want them to do it. So fan the flames of their existing passions. Don't try and light a new fire under them if there's no fuel in the first place. Interestingly, a year into my son studying psychology at uni, he found he wasn't as interested in it as he thought, and he switched courses and he's now in his final year studying creative writing and history, and he's loving it because he chose to do it. Maybe I did give him the fuel, but he needed to light it when he was good and ready. I'll end on something here that I found quite interesting, both as a parent and as a therapist, 'cause they do have something in common. I've noticed over the years, both parents and therapists have the same goal, which is to put ourselves out of a job. Now, like I say, parenting is a huge topic and very specific, but if today has stirred something for you, if you are interested in more, then there are plenty of parenting podcasts around to listen to soak them up. But you might find that a lot of parenting is about psychology, especially attachment theory obviously. Which hopefully you're pretty clued up about by now. 'cause I do go on about attachment theory quite a lot in these episodes, especially if you are a patron of mine on Patreon. And if you are, click on the collections tab. You'll see there are three very specific episodes about attachment theory that I made a couple of years ago. It's only an hour's worth of audio, but you might find it really interesting. So let's leave that there for today. Enjoy your week, and as always, I'll be back with a short bonus episode on Friday and on Patreon with full episodes every single Monday. I will speak to you then, if not before. See ya.