What Kind of Parent Are You?

If someone were to ask parents this question, they’d get a range of answers:

“I’m a strict parent.”

“I’m easy-going.”

“I’m more of a friend than a parent to my children.”

“I just leave them alone unless they are wildly out of line.”

“I like to know exactly what’s going on in their lives.”

There is no ‘best’ kind of parent. It is merely your idea of what kind of parent you are. And yet, this very idea can become your burden – and your child’s burden.

Let’s take the idea of “I’m a strict parent.” You say this with some pride. You are a no-nonsense parent who is bringing up ‘good’ children who will grow up to become ‘good’ and ‘worthy’ human-beings. You have your rules which you explain, clarify, and enforce consistently. You believe this is a ‘good’ kind of parent to be, so you have worked towards being this kind of parent: a ‘strict’ parent.

But by labeling yourself a ‘strict’ parent, you create a prison for yourself – you force yourself to always work inside the boundaries of ‘strictness’, which you believe is ‘good’ in a parent.

Never mind that there are many occasions when your heart is melting. Just as you begin to respond with how you truly feel, you remember that you need to be ‘strict’. So instead of giving your natural response, you give your ‘strict’ response, keeping up your image of yourself as a ‘good’ parent (all this image-building and maintenance is happening only inside your head! 🙂 )

Your child has just had a nightmare. You want to hold him close till you calm his fears and his trembling body. But as a ‘strict’ parent, you don’t want be so indulgent of what is, after all, only a bad dream. So you hold yourself back, tell him “it is only a bad dream, there is nothing to worry about. Now go to sleep”, and force yourself to turn around and leave his room. Neither you nor your child is at peace. His fears are not soothed, and your peace of mind is gone – because your response was based upon your idea of the ideal parent, instead of the parent you actually were at that moment – the one who wanted to gather his child close in his arms to make him feel safe and secure.

You’ve kept up your image, but at what cost to yourself? And to your child?

The ‘easy-going’ parent has the opposite kind of issues. There will be many situations which shock or appall you, which make you want to put your foot down and say “NO”. But you are mindful of your image as an ‘easy-going’ parent. And ‘No’ is not a word found too often in an easy-going parent’s vocabulary, so you watch your child go haywire in all kinds of ways, but you say nothing, do nothing. You bite your tongue, steel your nerves, and remain an ‘easy-going’ parent.

No matter what your self-image as a parent, or what kind of parent you’re trying to be, the real you cannot take the strain beyond a point. When you reach that point, you become irritable, worried, and anxious, adding more stress to an already strained situation.

Not content with creating your own prison in the form of labeling yourself as a particular kind of parent, you have been working actively to reduce the size of your prison, till you are stifled.

As your niggling dissatisfaction turns to active discontent, you look for reasons all around you, outside you – the kids are pushing your buttons, you haven’t been getting enough rest exercise sleep food, there are too many demands on you … You are so busy looking for a situation/person you can hold responsible (blame!) that it doesn’t even occur to you that you might be the source of your problem.

You might think your consistent responses are creating a firm set of rules for your child to follow, but in all probability, they confuse the hell out of her. Your child always knows when ‘you mean it’ and when ‘you don’t really mean it’. So when your authentic response matches your self-image, the message she’s getting is ‘Dad means it’. But when the two are not in line with each other, she doesn’t know whether you mean it or not, and she doesn’t know what to make of your reaction. How can she? You yourself don’t know what to make of your response! You are acting from a mind and heart torn by conflicting responses.

The only result this achieves is to confuse your child and yourself, and lay the foundation for ‘not telling the truth’. After all, feeling one way and acting another is one way of  being dishonest. This breaks (or at least weakens) the bond of trust between yourself and your child.

Your child will learn to make inauthentic responses – she will learn from you. And this is absolutely not the result you want! But she won’t be able to tell you how she ‘really’ feels, unless you are telling her how you ‘really’ feel.

Don’t worry about what kind of parent you are. Don’t worry about what kind of parent you want to be. Just make the response that comes naturally to you in each situation. It will be the best response you can make. Simply be the parent that you ARE in that moment, and enjoy the freedom it brings you! 🙂