Authoritative Parenting in the 21st Century: What to Expect

Are you a new parent and thinking about your child’s future? It’s time you explored some parenting options to see what will work best for your family. Fortunately, we’ve prepared a guide to the authoritative parenting style.

Learn what authoritative parenting is, how children of authoritative parents tend to be, and how to implement it in your household. Learn about the differences between authoritative and authoritarian parenting. With our guide, you’ll learn everything you need about authoritative parenting.

Authoritative parenting is based on high responsiveness and high expectations. That means authoritative parents are highly responsive to their child’s every need, show support, and provide them with all the necessary resources.

In addition to that, they also have high expectations. They hold their child to high standards and expect them to follow the previously set limits. Balancing firm yet reasonable limits with warmth and support is the essence of being an authoritative parent.

This parenting style avoids corporal punishments and threats. Instead, authoritative parents rely on reasoning with their children and positive reinforcement. Coaching your child and controlling their behavior is done by setting the rules, explaining and discussing them, reasoning with your child, and, most importantly, being consistent with enforcing those limits and boundaries.

The bottom line is that children need love and consistency to thrive and prosper in life. The role of authoritative parents is to balance warmth with discipline and to be consistent about it to provide a healthy environment for their children to become their best selves.

It’s not uncommon for people to mistake authoritative parenting for authoritarian parenting. Even though the names seem similar, they differ in the core of their principles. Let’s first explain each of the two parenting styles.

The main characteristics of authoritative parenting are:

• Support
• Responsiveness
• Warm
• Commanding
• Placing limits and consequences
• Fair and consistent discipline

Authoritative parenting focuses on raising healthy, independent, and successful children. This parenting style is characterized by balancing two factors: love and boundaries. Authoritative parents show their children love and warmth and are highly responsive to their child’s needs. However, they set firm boundaries and rules, explain them to their child, and consistently enforce them.

The main characteristics of authoritarian parenting are:

• Strictness
• No support
• Harshly enforced rules
• Corporal punishments and threats
• Little involvement in their child’s life.

The authoritarian parenting style is characterized by less warmth and involvement in a child’s life. These parents are strict and show little support to their children, and the child’s mistakes are met with harsh punishments and threats with no reasoning with the child.

Both parenting styles have high standards and demands from their child but differ in their attitude toward the child. While authoritative parents show love, support, and warmth to their children, authoritarian parents show little involvement in their children’s lives.

Authoritative and authoritarian parents set high standards and expect their children to behave according to the established rules. However, authoritarian parents expect their children to follow the rules blindly. If not, their children are punished physically and through threats.

Authoritative parents tend to explain why some boundaries are set and reason with their children. They practice positive reinforcement.

Most people practice the authoritative style from the moment they become parents. They show love and support to their children and tend to their every need, but they also set firm but fair boundaries and rules and explain them to their children. They consistently enforce these boundaries throughout their children’s lives.

As a result, the children of authoritative parents grow up to be independent, happy, and well-behaved. Moreover, the children of authoritative parents tend to be socially competent, have great self-control, and can express emotions clearly.

With high expectations set by their parents, the children grow up academically and professionally successful and show high self-esteem. They are always achievement-motivated and cooperative. Additionally, they have excellent mental health, with little to no chance of depression and anxiety.

Even though authoritative parenting is considered the best approach to raising healthy and prosperous children, it isn’t for everybody. However, the only way to know that authoritative parenting isn’t for your child is to wait and see how they react to it as they grow older.

If your child shows some narcissistic traits, being overly supportive won’t help them. In fact, if you notice your child is abusing your constant support and mild punishments, it might be time to change your parenting approach.

You and your child should work together on making your child’s life as good as possible, so be aware of your parenting’s effects on your child.

If you want to learn how to implement authoritative parenting in your household and raise a healthy, self-reliant, and successful child, adopt the following principles. By adopting authoritative parenting and practicing it consistently in your child’s life, you ensure your child grows up to be happy and healthy.

• Create a Balance Between Freedom and Responsibility

Your goal as an authoritative parent is to raise your child to be independent and responsible. However, if your child has difficulty performing something independently, it’s your job to help them. Although you want to help them, be careful not to make the child dependent on you – balance responsibility and freedom by providing support to help them do it alone in the future.

• Control Your Child’s Behavior

Even though you want to show love and support and teach them independence, you still need control over your child’s behavior. Some behaviors are easier to control by reasoning and explaining the rules, and others are not. For example, setting time limitations for using their mobile devices or limiting what they search online can be harder to enforce.

That’s why installing a parental control app like Wondershare FamiSafe would be the best solution. Wondershare FamiSafe allows parents to control their child’s screen time and monitor and limit what they search for online.

• Set Clear Rules

As an authoritative parent, you want to enforce rules and set boundaries for your child to behave appropriately. However, your child won’t understand why they can’t act in specific ways if you don’t explain it to them. You should reason with your child and explain why you enforce particular rules so your child can have a frame of reference for future behavior.

• Think About Your Kid’s Feelings

If you only focus on setting high expectations and numerous rules, your child will be overwhelmed and may start developing depression and anxiety. It’s essential to consider your child’s feelings as you do so. Show love and compassion and be warm to them. Additionally, consider their feelings when setting rules and limits. Work together on building their life.

• Validate Their Emotions

Even though you have significantly more life experience than your child, you must consider their emotions. Teach your child to talk about their feelings and explain how and why they feel that way.

Even if their feelings on some matter seem absurd to you, you need to make them feel heard and validated. Their feelings matter. Show empathy and understanding to your child, as they don’t have the life experience you do.

• Listen to Your Kids

As an authoritative parent, you must be involved in your child’s life. You’ll show them you’re present and available by listening to them. You need to listen if your child has a problem, wants to boast and share something nice with you, or tells you the same story repeatedly. It shows your child you’re there for them in good and bad, and they can always rely on you throughout their life.

• Warn Them When They Make Smaller Mistakes

If your child breaks some rules, they should receive “punishment” as a time-out or something similar. However, if they make a minor mistake, avoid punishments as much as possible. Instead, warn them and explain the consequences if they don’t follow through.

Being consistent and staying true to your words is essential, so if your child repeats the same mistake, ensure the consequences you’ve warned them about are carried out.

• Teach Them Valuable Lessons With Consequences

As an authoritative parent, you shouldn’t make your child suffer or use corporal punishment. When your child makes a mistake, it’s your job to show them the consequences of their actions and teach them valuable lessons about their behavior.

Thus, when your child does something wrong, ensure the consequences fit the mistake, then explain how they can fix the problem. Avoid identifying them with those mistakes – criticize the action, not the person.

If you want to raise your child the best way possible, try authoritative parenting. This parenting approach balances parental involvement in a child’s life with setting high expectations and enforcing boundaries. If you want to be an authoritative parent, exercise high responsiveness to your child’s needs, and show love and support while also setting high standards and clear rules.

Your child will grow into a self-reliant, healthy, and successful adult with high self-esteem and a warm and positive attitude. By practicing the behaviors we’ve covered, you’ll adopt authoritative parenting and raise a well-mannered yet independent child.

Parents can and should have control over their children. However, you should be careful as to what degree of control you have over your child. The parental control approaches vary depending on your child’s age. When the child is younger, you must have more control, but as they grow older, the parents’ control needs to loosen up.

However, parental control regarding Internet usage should be practiced with younger and older children. Wondershare FamiSafe is a parental control app allowing you to monitor your child’s Internet usage and limit it according to age.

To better understand how authoritative parenting works, let’s take the following scenario as an example: Your child ate snacks before dinner.

You’ve already set rules for your child not to eat snacks before meals, yet they did it anyway. Since it’s a minor mistake, explain their error: “We said we wouldn’t have snacks before dinner. If you eat chips, you’ll spoil your meal, and you need to eat your meal for nutrients. Only eating chips is unhealthy, so we must make room for healthy food to be strong.”

Then, give them a warning. The warning should sound like this: “If you eat snacks before dinner again, I’ll have to take the snacks away. You’ll get them back when you learn that eating home-cooked meals is more important.” Now, it’s essential to be consistent. If your child makes the same mistake again, enforce the consequences you said you would.