Parenting is the biggest, most impactful job you’ll ever have in your whole life. So, How Can You Understand Your Parenting Style?
Let’s start by outlining different parenting styles to allow you to reflect in which one you align with the most.
Respectful Parenting
Respectful parenting is an approach to parenting that prioritizes the needs and emotions of children and aims to foster a deep sense of respect and trust between parents and children. Respectful parenting acknowledges that children are individuals with their own thoughts, feelings, and experiences, and seeks to support their growth and development by offering opportunities for exploration, learning, and expression. It also emphasizes the importance of positive and secure attachment between parents and children, and the use of positive discipline techniques such as redirection and natural consequences to teach children appropriate behaviors.
Peaceful Parenting
An approach to parenting that focuses on the relationship between parents and children without resorting to punishment or coercion. It prioritizes communication, empathy, and understanding, and aims to create a safe and respectful environment for children to grow and develop. The philosophy behind peaceful parenting is grounded in the belief that children are more likely to learn and thrive when they are treated with kindness, compassion, and respect and are given the freedom to express themselves and make choices based on their own interests and abilities. It also recognizes that all children are unique individuals with their own emotions, needs, and circumstances. Therefore, parenting strategies need to be flexible and adaptable to meet each child’s specific needs.
Positive Parenting
An approach to raising children that focuses on reinforcing positive behaviors, encouraging independence, and nurturing a strong parent-child bond. It emphasizes the importance of good communication, listening, problem-solving, and setting realistic expectations. Positive parenting seeks to build mutual respect, trust, and empathy between parents and children and to avoid negative discipline techniques such as punishment and blame. Positive parenting aims to help children develop self-esteem, self-discipline, and a sense of responsibility while promoting their physical, social, and emotional well-being.
Conscious Parenting
An approach to raising children that emphasizes self-awareness, empathy, and mindfulness. It involves being present and intentional in your interactions with your children and making decisions based on their unique needs and personalities. Conscious parenting emphasizes communication, respect, and connection and seeks to empower parents and children to create healthy and fulfilling relationships. This approach recognizes the importance of emotional intelligence and encourages parents to prioritize their own healing and growth in order to model positive behaviors and attitudes for their children. Many parents who practice conscious parenting also embrace the journey of reparenting themselves to release childhood trauma and choose to be the architect of their parent/child relationship.
Progressive Parenting
An approach to parenting that promotes gender equality, respect for diversity, and social justice. It emphasizes teaching children values such as open-mindedness, empathy, critical thinking, and self-expression. Progressive parenting also prioritizes the emotional well-being of children, which involves creating a nurturing environment that fosters positive relationships, encourages communication, and builds resilience. This approach often involves non-traditional parenting methods that challenge traditional gender roles and seek to create a more inclusive and tolerant society.
So what does your chosen parenting style really mean?
This first line of inquiry is vital, but ultimately these are just adjectives, labels for the experience you have as you relate to your kids. It’s how you choose to be connected to your child, and how you design your relationship with them. The language you use and the actions you choose to take or abstain from. The strategies you use to help them navigate the world and their behaviors.
Modern-day parents are choosing to break generational cycles and design their family and relationship with their kids intentionally. And for me, that’s always been the core of motherhood.
My girls are now women, eighteen and twenty, making their way into the world and adding value to it. I could see this future even as I guided their first five years of life. I knew that a strong, unbreakable bond would allow us to navigate challenges, emotions, and behaviors as they presented themselves through every age and stage of their lives. I empowered them to be part of the team, co-designers of their own lives, using the Core4connectors as our promise that we’d always tackle things together.
I chose my style by living it. I am a collaborative parent and nanny.
What is Collaborative Parenting Methodology(c)?
- It’s connecting deeply with your child on every level.
- It’s choosing compassion over comparison.
- It’s compromising when the need to connect is more important than the need to be right.
- It’s creating opportunities so they can practice independence.
- It’s choosing to set and hold boundaries with love.
- It’s not ‘do as I say, not as I do.’
- It’s, ‘do as I do, and I’ll learn to do better.’
Collaborative parenting is a commitment between the parent, child, and nanny. And, like anything worth doing, it makes us better people so we can raise better human beings. It’s built on the Core4Conenctors, an understanding that people are bound by these four interpersonal promises:
- I deserve respect, and so do you.
- I’ll always speak my truth, and be willing to listen to yours.
- I trust and believe you unless you give me a reason not to.
- The lines of communication are always open to problem solve hard things together without judgment.
The Key To A Successful Team
These are the key to a successful team, and when you hire a nanny you expand your parenting team. You bring on a third member, a partner, to support your long-term goals for raising your children.
Recently a client of mine, a Pandemic mom with a two-and-a-half-year-old, said it best:
“We have a nanny, and we have babysitters. And I think the difference is that babysitters keep my child safe and fed, and they have fun together while we’re not here. But our nanny is part of our parenting team. She helps us raise our little human being and will forever be part of our family.”
Knowing your parenting style and your deep desires and goals for who you’re raising is how you team up with your nanny and become ‘the dream team.’
Over my 46 years, I’ve had the privilege to become part of many families lives as their nanny, joining their parenting team and helping them raise their little people.
We struggled through challenging days together, laughing because it was the only alternative to crying. And we’ve shared meaningful looks followed by bittersweet celebration tears at the first preschool drop-off.
Collaborative parent/nanny partnerships give kids the very best start to life, supporting them to grow into adults who become your legacy by being their true selves and making this world a better place.
Partnering with an agency like Hello, Nanny! is often the best course to create a partnership with a career nanny set to thrive collaboratively.
Cara Tyrrell, M.Ed., is a mom to three girls, founder of Core4Parenting, an early childhood educator, conscious parenting coach, and host of the Transforming the Toddler Years podcast for Pandemic moms raising the COVID generation. Cara uses her degrees in ASL, Linguistics, and Education to create community, courses, and coaching programs anchored in her Collaborative Parenting Methodology(c) that blends soul & science based strategies for raising world & Kindergarten ready kids who find success in school and life.
Read more about Cara, then schedule a 30 min complimentary connection call to see if she’s the right parenting coach for you. Use code HelloNanny23 for 10% off any Collaborative Parenting Coaching Package.
