NosVies

My wife Vanessa and I were already talking education before our first child was born.

Now, with hindsight and experience, we can see that our discussions were the product of would-be parents with no experience or expertise in the subject.

A tender mixture of dreams, demands, childhood memories and adulthood desires. First child, first grief! Oddly enough, our little one didn’t quite behave the way our theory had envisaged!! Since then our discussions have been livelier…

I couldn’t find my own style as a father. I aspired to be the ideal father. But I was totally powerless before our first babe, who took full advantage. The more inches I gave him, the more miles he’d take. My wife took a more pragmatic line and had to make up for all my ditherings.

I had to come down to earth and find my own style. Not without effort on everybody’s part…

Since then, through my own experience, reflections, enraptured observations of our four children and copious amounts of reading, I’ve studied the four main styles of education that parents can adopt. Each of these styles has its effects. Powerful effects. Profound effects.

How to educate – in other words, how to teach a child to become an adult living in society – should be better explained to parents.

It would enable each of us to adopt the style that suits us best – to find the most natural, most authentic style for us. Nothing should be left to chance where such an important subject is concerned!

There are two main parameters in the four main parenting styles:

1) parents’ demands on their children in terms of mature behaviour and respect for the rules

and 2) parents’ sensitivity to their children’s needs and how they respond to them, recognition of their children’s individuality and the way they express their love towards them.

The four parenting styles are: the permissive or indulgent style, the authoritative style, the democratic style and the disinvested style. They are determined by being more or less sensitive to children’s needs and more or less demanding in terms of their behaviour.

These are pretty big categories, of course, and parents may recognize a bit of themselves in several of them, depending on the situation. In some couples, the father and mother may even consciously or unconsciously adopt different styles.

In any case, it prompts us to truly ask ourselves what style of parenting we want to adopt, fully aware of the decision’s likely implications for our children.

In our upcoming articles and illustrations, we invite you to explore these different parenting styles in detail and their effects on your children.

Meanwhile, don’t hesitate to write in with your own experiences about discovering parenting styles.