His update a few days ago caught my eye. He mentions a new study put out by the Journal of Adolescence where they say parents generally fall into one of three categories. And through the magic of cut and paste, here they are, straight from Mr. Olson's blog:
a) Authoritarian parents are demanding and highly controlling. They are detached and unreceptive to their children’s needs. These parents support unilateral communication where they establish rules without explanation and expect them to be obeyed without question.
b) Authoritative parents are demanding and controlling. They are warm and receptive to their children’s needs. They are receptive to bidirectional communication in that they explain to their children why they have established rules and listen to their children’s opinions about those rules.
c) Permissive parents are nondemanding and noncontrolling. They tend to be warm and receptive to their children’s needs, but place few boundaries on their children. If they do establish rules, they rarely enforce them to any great extent.
Now, the study says option B is the soundest, giving kids the direction they need and the supporting, sympathetic shoulder they need to grow in to good people.
And to a certain degree, I guess I can agree with this. I mean, if forced to choose, I guess most responsible parents would want to find themselves safely in style B. A Ward Cleaver, a Bill Cosby, a Dick Van Patton. But my feeling is that, while the study does a nice job of trying to put all of us into a nice, neat category, the reality is that every dad, at one point or another, exhibits traits of all three, and maybe even a few more.
Let's start with option A, authoritarian parents. C'mon dads. Unless you're still ruling over kids in diapers -- which really isn't even parenting yet, but that's another discussion entirely -- you've probably had days when you're absolutely, temporarily authoritarian. I'm thinking here about those times when you've done everything in your power to be reasonable. You've exhausted your quiet patience, your cool confidence is spent. And now, after you've told your child for the 1,000th time that it's time to get responsible with this paper route (or with homework, or to stop tormenting your little brother) your ability to reason with the child is gone, and it's time to get authoritarian on their a$$.
Dads, you know what I'm talking about. Because it happens. Sometimes your child is just so completely irrational that the only way to deal with them is by being demanding and highly controlling. You need to detach yourself from the situation and become unreceptive to their needs for a while. Communication, during these times, needs to be one-way: my way. And during these times the rules I impose need no explanation and absolutely, without exception, will be followed without question.
Most of us probably fall into option C as well, the so-called permissive parents. Truth be told, I've probably been accused by more than a few people of being an overly permissive parent. It's true, I let the kids watch "South Park." And unless a rated-R film has explicit sexual content, I'm generally OK with letting them watch (and, gasp, they're still good kids! How could it be?) So yes, most of us can be categorized as permissive some of the time. It's called having fun with your kids. And as long as you've done the work of teaching them what it means to respect others, taken time to expose them to everything and then talk about in a way that makes them happy to be discovering new things, then you can be permissive without the fear of having one of them going to school and flipping off the teacher.
I'm big on making sure my children respect those around them, especially adults. And call me old-fashioned, but I'm also trying to impress upon my son the value of treating girls and women with even more respect (Why? Maybe because he's bombarded every day with images of women portrayed as sex objects ... Maybe I'm trying to bank a little extra respect for women before our media culture completely erodes it out of him, but I digress).
Unfortunately, I see examples all the time of an utter lack of respect by young people. The girl at the mall who can't even look at you or say high while ringing up your goods. The kid who knocks over your soda and looks completely perplexed how to respond. The kid who can't look up from his phone long enough to say hello.
The other day I was standing in line at Chipotle with my daughter and her friends. It was a day when freshmen get a rare opportunity to leave campus for lunch. So I'm standing there, waiting to order my burrito bowl (carnitas, navy beans, extra rice, corn salsa ... yummo!) when I hear a group of high school boys behind me start talking as if they're in a locker room. I ignored it for the most part. Harmless jocks speaking in street slang and using four-letter words, loudly, which seemed to have no other purpose than to attract attention, to send a message to the people around them that they're cool enough to curse in public.
But then the discussion by one moved in a direction that I had a hard time ignoring. This one particular individual (and by the way, I know who you are Mr. Mankato West Athlete Guy) decided he need to take it a step further with a few choice words, loud enough for us all to hear, about a girl who'd just texted him. To keep this blog within its assigned PG-13 rating parameters, I'll simply say he ended his little talk by letting everyone around him know he'd been successful in a recent night of romantic pursuit of the lady in question.
Now, I get it. Boys will be boys. And I don't even mind that much. Boys have had those discussions for as long as there have been girls. But in public? In front of strangers? And with 14-year-old girls literally four feet away?
My dad would have gotten AUTHORITARIAN on me pretty darn quick if I'd been caught talking like that in public. But my guess is that, if this kid feels it's OK to do this in a family restaurant, there's probably been a whole lot of permissive parenting going on in his house. Maybe a little too much.
"BEAT YOUR KIDS?"
ReplyDelete