Parenting continued ...

Parenting

(2nd post - taken from my notes from a parenting course we took in 2007 called "Growing Kids God's Way")

The Parent Factor

Unfortunately, many adults parent in response to their own unresolved childhood fears, conflicts and disappointments. As a result, they sometimes parent their own past more than their children. For example, if the growing-up years were pleasant, there is a strong tendency to employ training techniques similar to those by which you were raised. If your childhood years were stressful, the tendency is to swing to the opposite extreme of your parents' methods when rearing your own children. For example, parents brought up under unfair, restrictive or even abusive methods often unknowingly move toward permissive parenting, allowing their children to become self-centered. These parents in many ways become more concerned about their children's feelings than about their actions. They elevate psychological health above moral health, and any standard of right and wrong is subject to how their children feel, not what they do.

Parenting Extremes

Permissive/child-centered parents fear inhibiting the child, so they go to the extreme of creating an environment of unrestrained freedom, resulting in an under-controlled child. On the other hand, authoritarian parents fear spoiling their child, so they see their salvation in the power of rules and limitations; resulting in an over-controlled child. Both extremes deprive the child of basic skills necessary for healthy adolescence.

Authoritarian Parenting

• predominantly concerned with restraining evil, and little attention paid to elevating good
• although children typically conform and do virtuous acts, they do so out of the fear of reproof, not because of the love of goodness. The child hears "You will do it or else." The "or else" becomes the motivation for right behaviour, not a resident principle of the heart

Permissive Parenting

• predominantly concerned with creating the right environment for the child, and not behavioural results
• for them, child-rearing is reduced to avoidance of all the negative emotions and pursuit of all the positive ones. Thus right and wrong training are measured by how parents think their child feels rather than by the end product - their child's behaviour