Doodaddy

Clearly in homage to MetroDad’s most excellent rundown of the Eight Types of Playground Parents, Cox News recently syndicated a piece citing actual psychological research (pshaw!) into the Four Types of Parents (article, requires registration; original paper). It’s a 2×2 matrix based on how much love you’re showing and how many limits you set. As a public service, á la Indexed, here’s my drawing of their conclusions:

Guess who the “good” parents are! Give up?

Apart from cutting MetroDad’s total in half — clearly, psychologists are a lot less rigorous than bloggers – they reach essentially the same conclusion: that parents somehow lend themselves to categorization like this. (To be fair, MetroDad had his tongue firmly implanted in his cheek by this point, not to mention acknowledging a whole lot of mixing in all of us.)

By MetroDad’s list, I’m totally the Peter Pan dad — I even called myself that once, although I used the term Pied Piper, since toddlers follow me around a lot. But I chafe at the idea that I am any one of these things all the time — I don’t even want to be painted with one of the “good” labels, if that means I’m not allowed to change it. Heck, I think being passive or permissive at times is important for both parent and kid — does that really mean that I am showing “low love” right then? What the heck?

There are many conscientious, aware parents who feel the need to divide themselves — and other parents — into tiny clique groups with fixed labels. But “parenting style” isn’t a filing system. It’s more like driving a car: it takes a constant stream of tiny adjustments, a few major course corrections, and a never-ending state of vigilance to get yourself safely to a destination.