Parenting Styles

1. Ambivalent Parents are parents who take care of the physical needs of their children but are emotionally distant because of their ambivalence. Usually, they did not get the role-modeling they needed to be a good parent and are there but not there.

2. Distracted Parents are parents who are distracted from parenting because of some kind of addiction, including love addiction or other external factors (finances, insufficient support system).

3. Codependent Parents do too much for their children. They are often overcompensating for not getting the love they wanted as children.

4. Detached Parents are disconnected from their children for some reason. They are afraid of the intimacy or don’t know how to be at ease within themselves as they relate to their children, so they distance themselves emotionally from their children.

5. Narcissistic Parents are not capable of truly loving their children. They need to be the center of attention and their children are only a threat to this need of theirs. Children are seen as a supply to meet the parent’s needs and if they are not able to do that they are discarded.

6. Idolizing Parents worship their children and place them on pedestals. To these parents, their children can do no wrong and they often lose themselves in their children, do not have lives outside of their children, and live vicariously through their children.

7. Resentful Parents may not have even wanted to be parents. They resent the strain on their lives that parenting presents and view parenting as a burden and inconvenience. As a result they neglect or abuse their children.

8. Jealous Parents are in competition with their children. They feel threatened by their children’s intellect and talents. As a result, they look for ways to undercut their children and their accomplishments to make themselves feel better. They may also be jealous of the attention the other parent gives to their child

8. Emotionally Immature Parents take the role of the child in the parent/child relationship. Because they have not examined or worked through their own childhood trauma, parenting triggers the pain of when they were children, and they end up acting like a powerless, terrified child instead of a parent.

9. Angry Parents are parents who have trouble controlling their temper and anger and often have sudden outbursts of anger over often minuscule events and actions of their children. This creates a very volatile living situation.

10. Authoritarian Parents are parents who use their authority as a parent to intimidate and dominate their children in order to control them into submission. They often use guilt to shame their children into behaving the way they want them to.

11. Sexually Abusive Parents are parents who behave sexually inappropriately with their children either overtly or covertly. Overtly involves physical violation, and covertly means there are sexual undertones in their relationship.

12. Emotionally Incestuous Parents are parents who make surrogate spouses of their children. There are no healthy boundaries.

13. Perfectionist Parents are parents who are impossible to please. These parents always point out how much better their children can be doing, and fail to acknowledge the good that they do. Perfectionist parents may also have some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder and require strict adherence to neatness. They often follow this strictness with ridicule, insults, and shame if not lived up to.

14. Insecure Parents are parents who don’t have confidence in their parenting skills and ability, nor do they trust themselves as a parent and tend to view their child’s behavior as an attack on or personal criticism of his/her parenting.

15. Physically Abusive Parents use physical abuse to punish, intimidate, control and inflict harm on their children because it was done to them or they don’t have any other tools or skills. They believe their children deserve it and feel a sense of vindication and relief and release when they can punish and harm in this way.

16. Emotionally Abusive Parents use degrading words, phrases, slurs to insult their children and criticize and attack their character, intelligence, appearance etc.

17. Rejecting Parents are parents who reject their child, knowingly or unknowingly, for reasons known or unknown. It could be because the child was born a different gender than they wanted, or because the child has a disability. It could be because the child does not exhibit qualities or personality traits that fit into the ideals held by parent.

18. Loving Parents have worked through their own personal unmet needs, childhood trauma and past and are ready to be an attentive parent. They have a healthy and realistic understanding of their parental role in each stage of their child’s development. They are consistent, present, balanced and have gotten rid of any emotional barriers between them and their children. Energy, love and humor flow freely between them. They admit when they are wrong, apologize and take the necessary immediate actions to repair any ruptures that may occur. They are no longer actively transmitting family dysfunction to their children but are creating a new legacy of healthy parenting (which includes boundaries) unconditional love, wholeness and acceptance.

Parents may move between differing parental styles at various points of their lives and their children’s lives. To be clear, all these styles are forms of abandonment and have a serious impact on our children.

In LAA and ACA for parents, we strive to better understand our parenting approaches and the parenting approaches used by our parents, we seek to gain insight, understanding, clarity and tools to make healthier choices and to break the cycles of generational trauma and dysfunction that have existed in our families for generations.

This is a bold, courageous step we are taking, and we find comfort, honesty, support, love and understanding. We find the strength, we did not have alone, knowing that there are others out there that are honest enough to look our parenting struggles in the face and look within to achieve wholeness, health, peace, humor and appreciation in our journeys and relationships with our kids.