Parenting // How to do it Wrong & How to do it Wrong

Parenting With Slovie Jungreis Wolff

In the park, the conversations I overhear are sometimes about clothing sales, often about lack of sleep or what to make for dinner, but usually about parenting.
“I was a year and a half into the parenting course,” a woman, rocking her double stroller with one hand and pushing her daughter on the swing with the other, says, “and then I had the baby. I had to stop the classes, and now they’re making me start again from the beginning! But that’s okay. It’s totally worth it. I am learning so, so much.”
“Those parenting classes…” The woman to whom she is talking, who spoons yogurt into her toddler’s mouth each time the swing comes toward her, makes a face. “I’m sure she’s a wonderful person, but let me ask you something. Do you know anyone who goes according to her shitah and whose style of parenting you like?”
The first woman tilts her head, considering it. “Well, the thing is that I’ve been learning a lot from her. When I first started going, I realized that I didn’t really know what I was doing, so—”
“But you do know!” The second woman tosses the empty yogurt container into the nearby garbage can with more force than is strictly necessary, and a splatter of white blooms on the grass. “You know, in your gut, how to parent your own child! The only thing these parenting classes do is block your natural parenting instincts. They make you doubt yourself and question your own relationship with your kids, and they replace all that with something mechanical, something one-size-fits-all! Nobody fits into one-size-fits all!”
“But she has so much experience,” the first woman insists. “She knows a thousand times more about parenting than I do. How can I not take advantage of that?”
I listen to the conversation without interjecting, because first of all, I am sometimes socially appropriate. Second, I have nothing to say, because I agree and disagree with both of them, as parenting can mean knowing everything and nothing, often at the exact same time. This is what parenting has in common with folding a fitted sheet—people pretend, but no one really knows how to do it. However, while there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to parenting, there are general models that can help you to parent with intent.
I know that I need to learn how to parent intentionally. Just yesterday, two of my kids were interacting with each other. With their hands. And feet. They were a blur of motion and both were laughing, but mothers can see into the future, and I just knew that tears were on the horizon. But they were having fun. Do I spoil the good times because of the bad times looming over them? Do I let them continue, or do I stop them? Do I do something in between, such as call out an ineffective word of caution like “careful!” which no one will listen to, but it’s sort of written in the social contract between mothers and children that we must shout out that word in a situation where caution is called for regardless of the inevitable disregard?
My own mother, I know, would have been able to get a handle on the situation immediately. I, on the other hand, tend to flounder, perhaps letting my desire to maintain order be overridden by my desire for my kids to have fun. Until—bam! Someone is bleeding.
It’s amazing, but before I became a parent, I didn’t realize that I could ruin someone’s day by having the wrong kind of Band-Aid.
Kids don’t come with a manual (except for the ironclad rule that after bedtime, every child turns into a dehydrated philosopher), so it can sometimes feel like being a parent means standing in front of 400 choices 1,000 times a day and pretending to know exactly which one to choose. But in actuality, there are really only four key categories of parenting from which to select.
The four main parenting styles as articulated in modern child psychology—neglectful, authoritarian, permissive and authoritative—are based on the work of Dr. Diana Baumrind, a developmental psychologist, and Stanford researchers Dr. Eleanor Maccoby and John Martin. They plumb the depths of the following question:
Does parenting style matter? Yes, very much so, and we don’t need a multimillion-dollar piece of scientific research to tell us that, but we have one anyway. Actually, we have access to multiple extremely expensive studies that have reported significant links between parenting styles and child outcomes, so we might as well learn from them as best as we can.

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