I grew up in France in a private school with traditional and kind education. As a kid and teen, I always noticed that my friends had different permissions as me. Some had to go to bed at 9pm, even when they were 14, while I had TV in my bedroom when I turned 14 and I usually went to be around 10am. But they could go to parties at that age and I was not until I turned 16, with very strict rules.

So as a young adult, I always wondered what parent I would become.

The Basics

First, I am still wondering what parent I am, and my kids are already teenagers. Because parenting is a learning journey that never ends. At each stage of my child developments, I learned to act differently, to think differently, to find the most appropriate solution to help my child, …. In a nutshell, parenting is a perpetual reflection and I believe it makes me a better person in the end.

And then, this is something to discuss as a couple with your spouse. Indeed, your spouse may have had a different education than you. The ideal situation would be to agree with him/her on a common parenting style. But the reality may be a bit different. And in the end, it could also be instructional for your kids to see a variation of parenting styles.

The Four Parenting Styles

I read many website and blogs on parenting style. I learned there are 4 parenting styles:

• Authoritative
• Authoritarian (or Disciplinarian)
• Permissive (or Indulgent)
• Neglectful (or Uninvolved)

I am not going to explain them here because others already did that better than what I can do. I like this website because it gives clear explanation of each parenting style with a nice graphic summary. So check it out!

My Takeaways

In the end, what I learned is that the most important is NOT to raise your child to satisfy you, or to live the life you wish you had, like I would like my child to go to Yale or be a doctor because I missed this opportunity. The most important to me is to raise your child to be happy in life, to have empathy and emotional intelligence, to have self-esteem, to be trustworthy, to exhibit resilience and a willingness to persist when facing difficulty, to be independent, to know right from wrong, because one day, I won’t be there to help them, and they should know.

I don’t have the recipe because I am still trying, but I know I will do my best to be the warmest and the more demanding mom I can be.