Permissive Parenting: Is It Bad Or Good For Our Children?

Basically, there are four types of parenting styles and permissive parenting is one of them. Every parent has a different style of handling or disciplining their child.

Being a parent, we tend to provide happiness to our children. Sometimes, our intentions are not wrong but our parenting style goes off the track. And, whenever you feel like your parenting style is not on the right track, you should change your parenting style.

Talking about permissive parenting, it is characterized by low demands over nurturing or over-loving our kids. Is that the right thing to do? Loving our kids should be our priority but permissive parenting is all about loving our kids without any guidelines, rules, or discipline.

In return, permissive parenting does not expect anything in return, not even mature behavior. It seems like permissive parenting is all about maintaining a friendship with our kids instead of becoming a parental figure in front of them. The opposite of permissive parenting is named “helicopter parenting.”

When a parent does not hover over their child’s move or rarely makes any move towards disciplining their children, you can directly refer to it as a permissive parenting style. This blog cover whether permissive parenting is good for the mental health of our children or not.

Features of Permissive Parenting

Characteristics of Permissive Parenting Style are:

• Over-loving or over-nurturing towards their children
• Takes opinions of their children before making any move
• Rely on the decisions of their children
• Makes their children more open and free instead of making them responsible
• Do not rely on any structure or standards for behavior and discipline.
• They make inconsistent rules and structure
• Bribe kids for disciplining their child
• Maintain friendship with their child instead of becoming a parental figure
• Do not know how to manage their children
• Rarely focus on punishing or showing the consequences of misbehavior to their children.

Effects on Children’s Mental Health

As per psychologists, the permissive parenting style is an overly-relaxed type of approach that can have negative consequences as well especially on the mental health of children. Generally, it can be sensed that children who are raised by a permissive parenting style are less disciplined, less mannered, lack social interaction skills, are more demanding, and are less involved.

Moreover, they are insecure, lack boundaries, guidance, and have fewer chances of maintaining any type of friendship or relationship in the future. Moreover, below can be some impacts on children’s mental health due to permissive parenting:

1. Low Achievement

Children who are raised through a permissive parenting style tend to have low achievement in various areas of life, be it personally or professionally. Due to a lack of self-confidence and self-involvement, they can have low academic achievement, and additionally, they are not able to maintain friendships or relationships.

2. Poor Decision Making

Since permissive parenting is all about no rules or guidelines, children are unable to make proper decisions on their own. Additionally, they also lack poor problem-solving skills which means it will trouble them in all areas of life.

3. Chances of Substance Abuse

Research shows that children who are raised with no guidelines or discipline tend to have more engagement towards substance abuse or alcohol use.

4. Lack of Emotional Understanding

Children who are raised through permissive parenting are unable to deal or manage emotions. They might get stuck under the trap of emotions instead of working on them.

5. More Aggressive

Children who are raised by a permissive parenting style are more aggressive and egoistic as they believe their demands should be completed on time and everyone should follow what they say.

6. More Messy Life

These children have a more messy life than other children because they lack structure, rules, and discipline. “Limits” do not exist in their dictionary.

Strategies to Change Permissive Parenting

Below are some strategies which can help in changing permissive parenting style:

• Develop a list of rules and structures.
• Be consistent and follow through with all the rules and structure.
• Make sure your kids understand the consequences of breaking rules and structure.
• Give a reward for good behavior and show consequences for bad behavior.

If you are still unable to get through the bad phase of parenting, you can also opt for parenting counseling. To connect with a counselor from BetterHelp, click here.

I hope this blog helps you to understand if a permissive parenting style is good or not. According to my opinion, every parent has a different style of handling their kids. However, fulfilling every demand of our children and hoping they get disciplined on their own is the most wrong approach towards parenting.

In order to keep your children well-mannered and disciplined, you can take the help of the below-mentioned parenting styles:

• How to become a confident parent
• Parenting tips for children with anxiety
• Authoritative Parenting Style: An approach towards positive reinforcement
• Co-parenting Guide
• Team Parenting: Raise your kids the calm way
• Positive Parenting

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