The four parenting styles are fairly well-known.
Permissive (top left) is an approach to parenting where there’s a lot of warmth, nurture, and affection but parents don’t impose a lot of limits or insist on personal responsibility. Parents might do everything for a child or young person who’s capable of doing things for themselves or at least helping. Children might decide their own bedtime before they’re able to weigh up the impact of being tired the next day.
Authoritarian parenting (bottom right) is pretty much the opposite. Rigid rules are enforced with punishments and there’s not a lot of empathy or emotional support. Parents might typically impose consequences for broken rules without paying attention to the context or whether the rule was fair in the first place.
NVR parenting matches up with the authoritarian style (top right) where parents are attuned to their child’s emotions and potential, set realistic limits that stretch but don’t overwhelm, and clearly communicate unconditional love. Clear boundaries that parents reflect on and set with a degree of flexibility and collaboration.
In some families parents aren’t attuned to their child’s inner world and they don’t impose limits either. This aligns with the bottom left image which is sometimes referred to as uninvolved. Parents might not know where their child is or what they’re doing. They tend not to worry about what might be going on.
None of the parenting styles are automatically abusive but they can be associated with risky behaviour, relationship problems, poor mental health etc.
As Alfie Kohn says - what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children.
In NVR we think about the way we’re perceived when we’re together and the way we’re remembered when we’re apart. We want to parent in a way that our children feel sure of our unconditional love. We want them to carry our positive values as that guiding inner voice that influences their life choices. We want to be remembered as a compassionate source of safety, nurture, guidance and help. And that means offering warm and firm authoritative parenting - high expectations scaffolded by high support.
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