Post #13 INTRODUCTION TO PARENTING STYLES
Before heading to Russia, as I have written about in earlier blogs, we set up our idea of a child’s dream room and downloaded computer games, indulging in a parental fantasy that has never entirely dissipated. In fact, even to the present day, we keep running ahead of each future possibility with fantasies. Dave would say, “Speak for yourself.” But…
When we returned to Canada, we took him here and there to show him off. Dave bought him a glove and bat too big for him, convinced he had to learn how to deal with the real thing. Yasik couldn’t lift the bat. When Yasik approached his teens, he and his dad made plans to fix up my little Civic when I moved on to a newer model. I imagined Yasik playing the piano and singing “O Canada” to open hockey games before his childhood buddy took to the ice to play goalie for the Canucks.
Of course, there is a ‘but’ coming. We may have been playing dollies with Yasik for the first day or two, dressing him up and bouncing him around like children with a Ken doll as they try to bridge the gap between fantasy and reality, but even while doing ‘tourist’ around Moscow there were indications that our priority was not the thrill of the art museum but that we must constantly watch this little sprite darting about. With all Moscow offered tourists, we were at MacDonald’s feeding Big Macs to the birds.
Could we have articulated what we wanted to do as parents? Was writing out goals part of the pre-adoption course we took? If it was, I don’t remember but we probably would have nodded enthusiastically to suggestions that we might want to deliver into adulthood a good and happy human being, stably independent and contributing to society, enjoying healthy relationships with others. We were not even challenged to think about how we planned to parent by the social worker who did our post-adoption interviews. We were asked about Yasik’s medical visits, physical and mental development, eating and sleeping habits, his personality, our child care plans and family adjustments but nary a question about how we were dealing with discipline and helping him with the character development needed to develop into a good and happy human being.
Could we have articulated how we would parent our little man developing into such a normal vision? Certainly, no manual was tucked into the non-existent bag sent along with Yasik as he left the orphanage. Nor did we expect one. If the local radio journalist who interviewed us outside the courthouse in Yaroslavl had asked us how we planned to parent, we would have planted a look on our faces that tried for “We’ve got this.”, hoping she didn’t look too deeply into our eyes where something less confident, somewhat quizzical was starting to show through. But the question never came up, everyone benignly assuming our son of one hour was in good hands because we would ‘just know what to do’.
And we did have resources. As noted in Post 12 A, it doesn’t take a Google search to know that we humans parent like our parents parented us. Yes, we may have tried to update their technique or improvise in situations in which their methods were found wanting or because there were two sets of parents speaking to our parenting, maybe the techniques were debated, but our parents had up to 20 years to worm their techniques into our hearts and minds. We may not have been able to easily identify what exactly they did that we now found ourselves doing, but try to find solid confirmation that their techniques had not found some ground in our methods. What is even scarier is trying to objectively recognize that this is what they did, even if as children we heartily disapproved, and then we went right ahead and reverted to as well. They spanked, and yes, we spanked Yasik. The time out chair was after their time.[i] We did it, but it is unlikely Yasik will continue that practice for it is not much more acceptable now than spanking. Now there is “time in”.[ii] We fought to have meals together as was regular with my parents and siblings, but scheduling and television often lured us from that technique. We helped Yasik with homework, put him in sports. Our parents could not easily afford sports nor had much homework help been modeled for them in their homes (and my grandmother was a school teacher!). That is not to say that they didn’t try to help or at least hope that we could manage.
Other resources were at hand as well. The Origins of You: how childhood shapes later life dedicates a whole chapter, Chapter 5, to presenting their study or “adventure” in “Why Parents Parent the Way They Do” or a study of “intergenerational transmission of parenting”.[iii]
Parenting is multiply determined. In addition to a parent’s own child-rearing history, parents’ health and well-being, their occupational experiences, the quality of their intimate relationship, and the social support they secure from friends, neighbors, relatives, and co-workers may all influence how parents parent…. too … how children themselves behave matters when accounting for why parents parent the way they do.
I am including the infographic below for it is a good summary of how expansive the considerations for a child’s setting are.[iv]
Gabor Mate goes further, assuring us that “all of us, by virtue of being human, are endowed with a natural drive and talent for child-rearing…. Both men and women have latent child-nurturing circuits in their brains, …” Mate was referring to “the body’s natural opiates – all of which awaken in parents nurturing habits that are essential to the survival of the young.”[v] That is a relief. Parents come equipped.
Adopters too? Yes, although we may not have dramatic hormone changes, bio-fathers, adoptors and other consistent care-givers “show bonding to the same degree as biological mothers” which “awaken in parents nurturing habits that are essential to the survival of the young”.[vi]
Gordon Neufeld points out that by the time of our adoption there was lots of research and information available, as well, had we thought there was a need to go beyond our naïve confidence in our readiness to parent.[vii]
It is beginning to look like we came into parenting with some juice in our brains to vitalize a motivation to parent and we came into parenting with input from the worlds we inhabited, a quite expansive setting for Yasik’s set of development or journey into his life.
I am going to interject here, because I have heard it so often, that if anything should not work out according to the fantasy, adoptors have a nice little ‘escape hatch/cop out’ from responsibility for their parenting, especially parents of older adoptees, should they accept it: the tsk, tsking of onlookers who intone, “Well it’s in the blood”, or those who shake their heads in commiseration to remind us, “Well those first 3 years are the most important.”
Bruce Perry appears to agree: “Since much of the brain develops early in life, the way we are parented has a dramatic influence on brain development. And so, … a good “brain” history of a child begins with a history of caregiver’s childhood and early experience.”[viii]
As recounted in earlier posts, Yasik’s parenting begins first with his bio-parents and then a hospital staff followed by the orphanage so that for the first and crucial (they say) four years we and our styles can be absolved from responsibility for outcomes, right? Yasik was not quite 3 months short of 5 when we entered his life. By the age of 3 a child’s brain is 80% developed.[ix] Well what can a hapless adoptor do about that? Everything has been sewed up before they even start. Can’t fault their parenting styles. But it looks like Perry has more to say: The adoptors need then to recognize the delay in development or the hard-wiring in place and work not with the chronological age of the child but with the child’s actual stage of development.[x] We are not off the hook. Our parenting styles matter. To turn a quote from Gabor Mate around: “no, [parents] did not create the world in which they must parent [their children]. Yes, parents are responsible for their children;”[xi]
As the very long page, Orphanage Risk Factors, has made me quite aware, the world of adoption has spent time reporting on the conditions and the effects of the orphanage ‘alloparenting’. What world did Yasik, who was in orphanage care in Russia from 1993 to 1997, come from? I asked Google a specifically Russian orphanage parenting style question. An article written by Rachel Stryker in Global Studies of Childhood, Volume 2, Number 2, 2012 called “Emotion Socialization and Attachment in Russian Children’s Homes” (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2304/gsch.2012.2.2.85) notes that Russian children raised by their biological parents are usually raised in the authoritative parenting style. Children raised in orphanages in the 1990s, the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union with its socialism guided parenting and the time of economic struggle, were raised in what was called “toughened attachment”, considered necessary to preparing them for the harsh world they would be turned out to at the age of 18, toughened enough to deal with the economic struggle and the need to get along in such a world.
[The article] argues that … detdoma [orphanage] workers’ … [prioritized]… 1) [socializing] children’s attachment in an attempt to establish economic and emotional security for children in uncertain times after the fall of the Soviet Union; and 2) [shaping] children’s understandings of attachment within transnational contexts….
Orphanage workers thus understood that children raised in detdoma during perestroika and the years immediately following led very liminal lives…. that state of being between caregivers as well as between economic and political systems – justified a particular form of attachment socialization referred to in the orphanages as ‘toughened attachment.’… [The] philosophy of toughened attachment is characterized by the understanding that the best forms of attachment behavior are non-responsive. The rationale is that non-responsive care trains children to be resourceful and thus increases their chances for survival in bleak times…. -namely, a relationship whereby children from an early age could be taught to best maximize opportunities in resource-lean environments. In particular, detdoma workers encouraged children with very limited economic prospects to make multiple, flexible, and peer-based relationships with others….
In 1996 then, ‘toughened attachment,’ or purposely non-responsive infant and child care, was thought to instill in children a more practical approach to relating to others in uncertain circumstances. The concept of toughened attachment had much of its basis in the traditional practice in Soviet-style childcare collectives of ‘toughening’ children’s bodies in institutions – for example, … systematically exposing children to cold air and cold water so they develop resistance to winter weather…. Orphanage workers believed that just as one could toughen children’s bodies to make them more fit to survive the natural elements and disease, so could toughening children’s understanding and expression of attachment aid them in the challenging and uncertain times after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Such attachments were socialized in a variety of ways, including swaddling (thought to encourage self-soothing), delaying responses to child crying, encouraging children to ask peers rather than adults for help when they had problems, or telling children in consciously cheerful or humiliating ways, to discover the answers to questions on their own somewhere in the orphanage. Throughout this process, those children who were compliant and cheerful about such interactions were rewarded verbally or by being given some important status or role in the orphanage, although not with touch. Those children who did not comply and expressed anger, sadness, and despair were discouraged using the socialization techniques… mentioned in this section above.
Not aware of how Yasik had been parented in his first world, did not as Gabor Mate says let us off the hook. We were still responsible to parent him in way that gave him a good start to life in our world. Accepting that responsibility as we understood it, how would our parenting be judged by those who have studied parenting and what can be learned from our parenting journey? The judging is based on the work of Diana Baumrind, a developmental psychologist who began her research in the 1960s, providing three of the basic parenting styles. In the 1980s, Stanford researchers, Eleanor Maccoby and John Martin added the fourth style.[xii] These four styles are authoritarian, neglectful/unengaged, permissive and authoritative. As is evident by the list of styles mentioned earlier, these four shots are only the ‘opening volleys across the bow’ of the discussion on parenting styles. Depending on how we come packaged into parenthood, in these times, we can choose to parent from a buffet of styles. An article in ThecIrish Times, which I accessed through my library’s online data offerings, provided a list of styles parents might choose: Helicopter, Drone, Lawn Mower/Bulldozer/Snow Plough, Free Range, Tiger, Dolphin, Koala, Jellyfish, Lighthouse, Gentle, Crunchy/Silky/Scrunchy, Concierge or as noted above, Conscious.[xiii] Seriously.
Howevvver, I am not going to fill my plate from that buffet. The 4 original styles will satisfy.
I know it seems facetious exploration to go over well known and likely self-help level material but Jean Mercer brings forward these considerations. After reminding readers that the adoption process is stressful for many, but not all, children, she goes on to say “The effects of adoption depend on three highly significant factors that may be quite different for different adopted children: the child’s age at separation, the circumstances surrounding the adoption, and the care-giving abilities of the adoptive parents.”[xiv] On with the judging of our parenting styles.
As an appetizer/mood setter/ tension builder, I have included a little quiz I found and indulged in, based on the four parenting styles. If you are a tad curious for yourself you will find the quiz (one of several on Google) at the end of this post.
But be aware: because both parents must be considered for their styles and input,[xv] I appealed to the better angels of Dave’s nature, getting him to take the quiz just after I completed it. Maybe it was nearing suppertime and I was fogging over; whatever, I managed to add up the numbers each of us chose for each question instead of the number values given to each. And then I spent the next 24 hours angsting over the designations these numbers offered. One of us was borderline Neglectful and the other, Permissive. Maybe Permissive could be met with a bit of a shrug and giggle, but Neglectful? That one elicits, at the very least, a grimace and groan. I wanted to delete the quiz, shoving the results under the rug, but I also want to honestly explore our parenting. In the morning, I went back over the quiz looking for a way to ease it into my determination to be open and honest in my search and, whew. I saw my mistake and I recounted.
For some of the questions I was on the fence, thinking it depends on the situation, choosing the middle option, #3. And while Dave did not stay on the same fence for as many question responses as I, we came out with exactly the same scores, barely inside Warm in the first set and barely inside Demanding for the second set. Whew again! We managed to raise Yasik according to the nice sounding parenting style – Authoritative.
But I cannot ignore the impact of my emotional response to the three negative styles and what my image of myself and Dave would have had to acknowledge had we landed in any of these styles that are less than admirable and certainly not trending currently.
The following infographic provides definitions of each of the parenting styles.[xvi]
The following infographic provides a chronology of the trend in parenting.[xvii]
| TIME PERIOD | PARENTING STYLE |
| Post-WW2 Era | Authoritarian: emphasizing discipline, low warmth, and high expectations |
| 1960s – 1970s | Permissive: emphasizing warmth, lenience, self-expression and individuality |
| 1980s – 1990s | Authoritative: emphasizing warmth, connection, boundaries and explanation |
| Present Day | Conscious Parenting: [emphasizing warmth, boundaries] “while also expressing age-appropriate expectations and demonstrating an increased element of attunement, self-reflection, and parental awareness” |
And remember, If you are in danger of taking all this too seriously check out this address: https://www.verywellfamily.com/parenting-styles-from-around-the-world-4162019
Add it all up and our parenting styles come from all that is swirling about in our brains, bodies and emotions, the parents who parented us, the times and the environment in which that parenting played out, and our values for, as is the habit of values, they take shape influenced by this mix of nature and nurture. And we are off, skipping along the yellow brick road, off to ask the wizard what kind of setting we provided for Yasik.
This address will take you to the parenting style quiz Dave and I worked through.
Practical Psychology “Parenting Style Quiz (Free Test + Instant Results)” Feb 1, 2024 https://practicalpie.com/parenting-style-quiz/.[xviii]
To make some sense of the designations Warm, Cold, Demanding and Undemanding the site the quiz is taken from lists Authoritarian as Cold and Demanding, Permissive as Warm and Undemanding, Neglectful as Cold and Undemanding and Authoritative as Warm and Demanding.
Please also note though before you do so that there is a caveat: although provided for another context, Bruce K. Alexander reminds his readers in The Globalization of Addiction: a study in poverty of the spirit “clinical assessments are not hard data, even when dressed up in numbers. Furthermore, it is difficult for clinical researchers to prove…. Human motives are always mixed and at least partly concealed, hence, endlessly arguable”.[xix]
Footnotes
[i] “Time-out (parenting)” 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-out_(parenting)
[ii] Holden, George, Tricia Gower, Sharyl E. Wee, Rachel Gaspar, and Rose Ashraf “Is It Time for “Time-In”?: A Pilot Test of the Child-Rearing Technique” Pediatr Rep. 2022 Jun; 14(2): 244–253. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9149873/
[iii] Belsky, Jay, Avshalom Caspi, Terri E. Moffit, Richie Poulton. The Origins of You: how childhood shapes later life. Harvard University Press, 2020, 110.
[iv] Lang, Diana and Marissa L. Diener “Influences on Parenting” 2020 https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/parentingfamilydiversity/chapter/influences-on-parenting/
[v] Mate, Gabor MD and Daniel Mate The Myth of Normal: trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture. Knopf Canada, 2022, 160, 165
[vi] Mercer, Jean. Understanding Attachment: parenting, child care and emotional development. Praeger Publishers, 2006, 74
[vii] Neufeld, Gordon, PH.D. and Gabor Mate, M.D. Hold On To Your Kids: why parents need to matter more than peers Vintage Canada, 2004, 5
[viii] Perry, Bruce and Maia Szalavitz The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook. Basic Books, 2017, 89
[ix]Brain Development 2024 https://www.firstthingsfirst.org/early-childhood-matters/brain-development/
[x]Perry, Bruce and Maia Szalavitz The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook Basic Books, 2017, 250
[xi] Mate, Gabor with Daniel Mate. The Myth of Normal: trauma, illness & healing in a toxic culture. Knopf Canada, 2022, 179
[xii] “The Psychology Behind Different Types of Parenting Styles” https://jessup.edu/blog/academic-success/the-psychology-behind-different-types-of-parenting-styles/
[xiii] The Irish Times The Irish Times “Helicopter? Free-range? Concierge? What kind of parent are you? How do you parent? There’s a meme for that amid the modern obsession with dissecting and defining parenting styles” July 18, 2023 July 18, 2023 https://www.proquest.com/central/docview/2838432152/3D22720E0AA34700PQ/10?accountid=48753&sourcetype=Newspapers
[xiv] Mercer, Jean. Thinking Critically about Child Development: examining myths & misunderstanding. Praeger Publishers, 2016, 246
[xv] Francis, Richard C. Epigenetics: the ultimate mystery of inheritance. WW Norton, 2011, 72-73
[xvi] Zeltser, Francyne “A psychologist shares the 4 styles of parenting – and the type that researchers say is the most successful” Jun 29, 2021 https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/29/child-psychologist-explains-4-types-of-parenting-and-how-to-tell-which-is-right-for-you.html
[xvii] “Parenting Styles and their Evolution: Old, New, Recent Studies and Recommendations” Oct 17, 2023 https://www.consciousmommy.com/post/parenting-styles-and-their-evolution
[xviii] Practical Psychology “Parenting Style Quiz (Free Test + Instant Results)” Feb 1, 2024 https://practicalpie.com/parenting-style-quiz/
[xix] Alexander, Bruce K. The Globalization of Addiction: a study in poverty of the spirit. 2008, p. 154
