Last Updated on January 2, 2025 by Emma
Being a parent can be challenging at times, even with the most willing and receptive child. Children must grow and display positive and negative emotions, which helps teach balance and societal rights and wrongs. Authoritative parenting means feeling the weight of your responsibility by effectively and productively guiding your child through life’s ups and downs.
Parenting is always challenging, but it will be rewarding if done correctly. Here are the basics of authoritative parenting and why you should consider practicing it.
What Is Authoritative Parenting?
Authoritative parenting is about setting firm, healthy and productive boundaries and applying them through reasoning, positive reinforcement and proactive discipline. You can understand it better by learning about the types it is not.
- Authoritarian parenting: Displaying productive authority doesn’t mean bringing out the wooden spoon or the belt or confining your kid to the bedroom whenever they cross the line. Constantly punishing children means you’re enforcing negative discipline and only encouraging learning through fear. Being too strict can result in your child becoming a bully and being socially inept in many situations.
- Permissive parenting: If you love and pamper your child so much that they can do no wrong, you’ll likely softly scold them or laugh at their bad behavior. Allowing kids free rein to do as they please means you’re enforcing no boundaries, and your children will expect that life is there to serve their purposes and be ill-prepared for any hardships that may come their way. Spoiling your kid can result in narcissistic tendencies later in life.
- Uninvolved parenting: You might be too busy with work to pay attention to your kid. Although you love them, you will be dismissive and ignore their attempts to spend time with you. You discourage their attachment, making them feel unworthy and unloved. Your lack of attention could cause your child low self-confidence and self-esteem. They may develop attachment issues or have a higher chance of substance abuse later in life.
Authoritative parenting is all about identifying the deficiencies in these other three styles and ensuring you improve on them with less destructive punishment, healthier boundaries and a wealth of productive attention.
You’ll want to lead by example and show your child the benefits of behaving well by reacting to their misdemeanors in ways that encourage their adoption of the learning culture you’re instilling.
Authoritative Parenting Encourages Two-Way Communication
While explaining and involving them in your boundary-making decisions, your love and affirmation will encourage your child to work with you and not against you in their formative learning and education process. Doing so will motivate open communication and greater trust, as kids will realize you’re actively and authentically there to help them navigate life.
There will be difficult times. Every child pushes limits and boundaries during periods of self-discovery, but these will be shorter-lived if your reactions to their testing are genuinely motivated by love and caring. As your kid grows up, your active and positive authority will encourage them to share their life’s goals and dreams with you more quickly and frequently.
This style can also help your child become self-disciplined. Research shows that self-discipline is a better predictor of academic gain than other factors, like intelligence. While you’ll remain actively involved in discussing their future and essential life choices, you’ll also help them to be independent and self-sufficient.
The Benefits of Authoritative Parenting
Authoritative parenting is the most rounded and successful style. While the other three methods include aspects of authoritative parenting, they tend to be vastly different from each other.
Authoritarian parenting involves boundaries and discipline, but it is too extreme to benefit growing kids in the long term. Discipline often indicates love, but if it’s too frequent or excessive, it can blur a child’s understanding and cause them to fear you and failure. Doing so could lead to suicidal tendencies and self-harm as the years progress.
Permissive parenting displays an excess of perceived positivity, caring and love. You’ll promote little discipline without enforcing boundaries, and although you and your child may be close, you’re encouraging them to view the world through rose-colored glasses, which will work against them in later life.
Uninvolved parents are generally uninterested in their children and fail to meet their needs, which encourages independence at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. At a stage in life where kids need nurturing, communication and support, your absence means they must make decisions they aren’t capable of. Making too many wrong calls through a lack of guidance can create a destructive pattern of self-reliance in later life.
Authoritative parenting instills positive limits, expectations and consequences as boundaries while explaining why. Your kid will appreciate knowing and learning why these are important. You balance authority and friendship by showing love and care and disciplining and rewarding your child at the correct times. In this way, they know that failure and success are acceptable and remain motivated throughout life’s challenges.
You are also highly involved in your child’s decisions, allowing them the independence to choose, make mistakes and learn from them through your understanding, proactive guidance and corrections.
Promote Balance in Your Child’s Life
Authoritative parents allow their children to find their feet as they learn life’s essential lessons. With your constant love and support, they will more easily understand why boundaries and discipline are necessary after testing the waters between right and wrong.
Maintaining the ability to guide your kid through productive discipline from an early age while displaying a constant nurturing and loving attitude means taking vital steps in creating a lifelong bond.
Author bio: Cora Gold is a parenting writer and the Editor in Chief of women’s lifestyle magazine, Revivalist. She has been featured on Scary Mommy, CafeMom and The Everymom. Follow Cora on LinkedIn, X and Pinterest.
