Parenting Tips For Rookie Parents

This week on Rookie Parenting, I wrote about parenting tips on parenting styles and attachment theory. They can help us understand how environment, especially the way we parent, can shape our children's social development, emotion regulation and personality.

It is interesting to note that there is no one "right" way to parent. However, there are many wrong ways to do so. A blog Professor Poppins talks about how the two dimensions used to determine different parenting styles are actually two spectrums. Inside each style, parents adjust their degrees of demandingness and responsiveness to suit each child. However, as researches have shown, there is definitely an ideal parenting style better than the others and those other styles are associated with more academic, social and mental issues.

If a parent is currently practicing a less than ideal style, it will take a lot of hard work to change. But most important, the parent needs to have the courage to admit that they need to change, which is actually much harder to do.

What is your parenting style? Do you agree with the most used classification - authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and neglectful?