Parenting Types (continued)

Last time I spoke of the dismissive parent and the disapproving parent. Both are traps we sometimes get into when dealing with our children's feelings and emotional issues.

The laissez faire parent is not really responsive to the feelings but more from a sympathetic rather than empathetic way. The feelings take over and the parent is almost gushing about the feelings. One bit of caution is that the laissez faire parent allows his/her own boundaries to be violated. As this type of parent, you allow the emotions to take over completely and then you may end up snapping. (Allison and I got into a talk on the show about passive-aggressive behaviour and I feel that the laissez faire type of parent may have these tendencies.)

What we are striving towards is the parent as the emotion coach. This type of parenting models effectively the ways to deal with the feelings expressed by our children. We talk about the feelings and what may have ccaused them. We don't sweep them under the rug or chastise our child for expressing them.

First of all we listen to our child to understand what the feeling is and what may be the underlying cause. Our daughter used to get very sleepy, saying she was tired for no apparent reason. Soon we realised that she was feeling sad or upset about things and this was how she coped with that feeling. It took awhile but with our children, the patterns may be telling us something that their words are not.

Again, the stress as a parent is on keeping the communication open and really listening to your child by re3flecting on their words or feelings by restating his/her words to get a sense of what has caused the feeling.

For more on this listen in on Island Parent Radio on Sunday April 15th at 9 am (PST) on Village 900 (AM) or www.village900.com.

Next time I will be talking about the relation between parent types and bullying that I referred to the other day.