Understanding modern parenting styles: from tiger to lighthouse and beyond – Greg Bruce
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I’m paraphrasing, but
basically it said: “Have kids if you want, but don’t say I didn’t warn you”.
Parenting is 90% feeling overwhelmed and 10% feeling useless and as with any situation involving human suffering, many, many self-proclaimed experts have rushed to the scene to offer their help, typically while asking for money.
The problem with experts is not that they’re all wrong, necessarily, but that listening to them takes time and focus, which, because you’re a parent, are things you don’t have.
And where you might once have needed only to read these experts’ long-winded books, now you must also follow their Insta, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, X, Substack, blog and podcast.
What you need is a guide to help you cut through the noise and find your way to the advice that really helps. This is that guide. Here are the top seven parenting styles, in reverse order:
7. Tiger
Essentially: depriving your kids of the opportunity to do things they love while simultaneously forcing them to do things they hate, in the hopes it will make them successful. The definition of success is, of course, subjective, but as defined by leading tiger parent advocates, it consists of straight As, followed by a high-quality tertiary degree, followed by wealth, followed by grandchildren you can berate for their failure to master piano.
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Tiger parenting is the most suffering-forward of the parenting styles, focused almost entirely on the hypothetical adult version of the real-life child you’re putting through hell. No mention should be made of modern concerns like “feelings” or “mental health” or anything else that might affect their application for Harvard Law School.
SCORE: 15/100
6. Lighthouse
It’s neither new, nor proven effective, but it’s the hottest parenting style of the moment, because parents are desperate and nothing else seems to work.
Its reappearance in the zeitgeist is due in large part to a recent article in US publication The Atlantic, under the headline “Lighthouse Parents Have More Confident Kids”.
The article got a huge amount of attention, probably because of its sensational parent-bait subtitle: “Sometimes, the best thing a parent can do is nothing at all”.
The article was written by an American school principal called Russell Shaw, who opened his piece with the incredible claim that he could control his child’s response to injuries using only the power of his face.
He defines a lighthouse parent as “a steady, reliable guide, providing safety and clarity without controlling every aspect of their child’s journey”, which are the exact words I would have used were somebody to ask me to define the word “parent”.
He offers a handful of other suggestions, including that parents should prioritise long-term outcomes over short-term fixes, which is something any parent who cares enough to read articles like this has tried often enough to know it’s impossible.
Towards the end of his article, Shaw writes: “Authoritative parents are Lighthouse Parents”, then notes that authoritative parenting was first recommended nearly 60 years ago in a widely cited study by developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind.
He never addresses the issue of why a 60-year-old theory needed a new name or an article in The Atlantic.
Nearly 20 years ago, developmental psychologist professor Stephen Greenspan wrote about authoritative parenting in the academic journal Child Care in Practice: “Good parenting involves the ability to make effective decisions under the pressure of sometimes difficult and confusing situations. The technique of authoritative parenting is too static and rigid to allow effective and flexible management of such complexity.”
Preach.
SCORE: 25/100
5. Gentle
The basis of gentle parenting is empathy. When your kids go feral – yelling, screaming, hitting, refusing to listen etc – gentle parenting advocates advise you against following your instinct to yell back and tell them they’re being ridiculous and that if they don’t stop that right now they’ll go straight to time out and won’t get their week’s pocket money.
Instead, you must seek first to understand; acknowledging their feelings and empathising with them, presumably while pushing your own feelings deep, deep down inside, from where you will hopefully be able to extract them much later, in therapy.
Jessie Stern, PhD, research fellow in psychology at the University of Virginia, recently told the self-proclaimed “world’s number one digital parenting resource”, BabyCenter, that gentle parenting is an “empathetic discipline”.
No one would argue against the importance of having empathy for your kids, but do you know who else needs empathy? You. And who is producing content advocating for that? I can’t say no one, but I can say not your kids.
Positives: Affirming kids’ feelings is probably good.
Problems: Their feelings make no sense.
Do say: “I can see you’re having a hard time.”
Don’t say: “The US surgeon general was right about you.”
SCORE 45/100
4. Sturdy
This is the self-described style of the world’s most omnipresent parenting expert, Dr Becky Kennedy, who coined it in response to people describing her as a proponent of gentle parenting. What’s the difference? Something about boundaries, I think, but if you really want to know, you’ll have to read her book or take one of her workshops, presumably in the time you’d normally be using for your nightly three hours of sleep.
Kennedy is a psychologist who for a long time adhered to the traditional reward/punishment model. Then, one day, while advocating for it with some clients at her practice, she admitted she didn’t believe in it any more.
After that, she “got to work, taking everything I know about attachment, mindfulness, emotion regulation, and internal family systems theory” and began a new life railing against sticker charts and timeouts.
I would never criticise Kennedy, because my wife loves her and won’t let me unfollow her on Instagram, and because she is also the source of my favourite parenting quote: “Good parents spend time away from their kids”.
As a person who likes clear instructions, I also like that she provides parents with scripts to use with children when they’re being awful, although I also empathise with the following criticism in a New York Times review of her 2022 book Good Inside.
The Times’ reviewer, Judith Newman, imagines a scenario in which a child is screaming and kicking a seat on an aircraft, and hypothesises the script Kennedy might suggest for dealing: “I know you’re bored right now and kicking feels good, but what would be a better way to deal with being bored?”.
Newman, herself a parent, then writes: “I am sure these sorts of scripts work with some actual human kids. Those kids do not belong to any parent I know”.
I decided to test such a script for myself recently, when my 7-year-old went on a multi-hour rampage, during which he hit both his sisters, called me a moron, and screamed at his mother. Each time, I tried first to connect, speaking calmly, saying something along the lines of “I know you’re feeling X right now…” but I was never able to finish my sentence, because he was either screaming at me or leaving the room while screaming at me.
After the fourth or fifth time, one of his sisters, who I was trying to help, angrily interrupted, saying: “Daddy! Stop! We don’t like it!”.
I was beginning to say, “I hear that you don’t like me using parenting scripts…” but had barely started speaking when my wife gave me a look, and I knew that if I didn’t stop speaking immediately, no script would be powerful enough to deal with the consequences.
SCORE: 46/100
3. Free-range
I knew some free-range parents once. They lived next door to friends of mine, who told me the key to making it work is to make sure you’ve got a couple of suckers living next door.
Still, it’s not without intuitive appeal, especially to the parent who wants to focus on online gaming while smoking weed. However, if you’re going to pursue it, you really have to do your research so you can talk a lot of convincing-sound anthropology-adjacent BS when eventually confronted by the people who have been looking after your kids while you’ve been playing Wii Tennis.
SCORE: 60/100
2. Helicopter
Helicopter parenting is universally ridiculed, but why? In my view, it’s primarily a marketing problem. What if we called it “Lovebomb Parenting”? Or “Careful Parenting”? Or “Here-for-you Parenting”?
Yes, it’s possible that hovering around your kids too much could have bad outcomes for everyone, but so could spending too much time affirming their feelings while they’re trying to hit you in the nuts.
When we’re deep in the parenting advice rabbit hole, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that our primary role is to keep our kids safe. It’s all fine and well to talk smugly about being a lighthouse or a gardener, but how smug will you feel when your kid falls off the lighthouse in your garden and ends up in traction?
SCORE: 65/100
1. Gardener
In her 2016 book The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children, developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik defines gardeners as parents who give their kids a protected space to explore. She contrasts gardeners with carpenters, who try to shape their kids into the type of person they want them to become.
As with free range parenting, the idea of being a gardener parent is intuitively appealing, because it gives you a free pass to spend time alone in your bedroom, but unlike with free range parenting, you can assuage your guilt by telling yourself it’s endorsed by a child development expert and Berkeley professor.
But the thing that really makes Gopnik’s work stand out is her claim that there’s no evidence supporting the view that what you do now will affect how your children turn out as adults. In what appears to be a knockdown argument against everything and everyone in the parentosphere, not excluding herself, she writes: “From an empirical perspective, parenting is a mug’s game”.
Agreed.
SCORE: 90/100
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