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A new type of overparenting does a lot of harm to children.
With the best of intentions, super nice parenting can sometimes lead to supernasty parenting.
Your choice of parenting approach can have huge impacts on your child and back in the 1980s, four styles of parenting were recognised. Authoritative parenting has been proven to be the best of them. This is a parenting approach that shows a child love and care, via praise and quality time together. But it also assists a child to develop age-appropriate responsibility, via techniques such as calm instructions and non-emotional consequences.
The worst of parenting approaches are the ones where the parent is inordinately focussed on rules and not showing the child that they care about them (authoritarian parenting), or not being appropriately responsive or demanding (negligent parenting).
Recently, overparenting has been established as a new parenting style. This is where parents are doing too much for their children in a manner that doesn’t allow a child to develop sufficient independence and capability.
But I’m seeing a new subset of parenting that combines the worst of overparenting with the worst of authoritarian parenting. It is particularly harmful for children.
