There are many different styles of parenting in the world and often I am asked by parents which is the best for their child's development.  While there is no easy answer to this question, I will take the next two posts to describe some of the important things to consider when making this difficult choice and relay some of the science that was undertaken with exactly this question in mind.  But it is important to say that choosing a style of parenting is a very personal thing and it must feel right to you first and foremost.  We are all different people with unique strengths and weaknesses, we often live in very different communities, and sometimes we just want different things in the end for our children.  All of this will need to be kept in mind when choosing which style of parenting is right for you. 

Here is a list of factors that will likely influence how you parent your child: 

  • What kind of adult you are hoping your child will grow into
  • How you were parented, including conscious and unconscious adoption of your parents values, as well as conscious or unconscious reaction to/rejection of those values
  • The culture around you
  • Your child's temperament
  • The developmental stage of your child
  • Your temperament and development stage as a parent
  • Your experience as a parent (parents often evolve in their parenting style with time and experience)

 

Another important factor is what you believe about the nature-nurture debate.  Some people fall far to the nature side and ascribe to some version of genetic behaviorism.  This is a belief that people are born the way they are and that parenting has very little to do with how they turn out.  Others fall far to the nurture side and feel that parenting has everything to do with how the child turns out.  Infant determinism is one such perspective that views the child's mind as very malleable in the first three years of life, and parental interactions being the strongest of influences.

 

"The human brain is a construction project in which genetics supplies the building blocks but social interaction largely determines how they are put together." - Dr. Daniel J. Siegel.

 

Many others believe that nature and nurture interact to produce the personality and behavioral repertoire of the child.  One very powerful framework is that put forward by the field of Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) headed by Dan Siegel.  This view holds that children do in fact come in with a certain set of genetic and/or constitutional factors and that these are often already embedded in a newborns nervous system.  And they also see plenty of evidence that our experiences in life —- both prenatally in the womb and postnatally outside the womb -— do impact the "firing and wiring" up of our brains and nervous systems over time.  IPNB observes that nature and nurture are totally interactive and are both very much a part of a human beings journey towards maturation.  Nurture actually ends up being part of our nature as our neurobiology unfolds partly under the direction of our experiences —- especially relationships. 

My take-aways from all this are:

  1. A certain amount of attention to should be paid to the quality of interactions you have with your children because it does contribute to how their brains become wired up and how they will think, feel, relate, and behave across their lifespan.
  2. But also, the child has both an inborn temperament and an engine that drives development within them and we should not whip ourselves into a frenzy believing that their personality or their maturation is entirely up to us. Life has an intelligence and a momentum all its own.

 

In the end, our primary job is to enjoy our kids, to provide the necessary nourishment needed for their development, and stand back in awe as our children's innate intelligence matures them from the inside out.

Part two of this post will continue with a description of some of the classic research that illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of three common parenting styles.