Indulgent parenting

The parent is responsive but not demanding.

Indulgent parenting, also called permissive, nondirective or lenient, is characterized as having few behavioral expectations for the child. "Indulgent parenting is a style of parenting in which parents are very involved with their children but place few demands or controls on them." Parents are nurturing and accepting, and are very responsive to the child's needs and wishes. Indulgent parents do not require children to regulate themselves or behave appropriately. This may result in creating spoiled brats or "spoiled sweet" children depending on the behavior of the children.

Children of permissive parents may tend to be more impulsive, and as adolescents, may engage more in misconduct, and in drug use. "Children never learn to control their own behavior and always expect to get their way." But in the better cases they are emotionally secure, independent and are willing to learn and accept defeat. They mature quickly and are able to live life without the help of someone else.

From a recent study,

• The teens least prone to heavy drinking had parents who scored high on both accountability and warmth.

• So-called 'indulgent' parents, those low on accountability and high on warmth, nearly tripled the risk of their teen participating in heavy drinking.

• 'Strict parents' or authoritarian parents – high on accountability and low on warmth – more than doubled their teen’s risk of heavy drinking.

Neglectful parenting

The parent is neither demanding nor responsive.

Neglectful parenting is also called uninvolved, detached, dismissive or hands-off. The parents are low in warmth and control, are generally not involved in their child's life, are disengaged, undemanding, low in responsiveness, and do not set limits. Neglectful parenting can also mean dismissing the children's emotions and opinions. Parents are emotionally unsupportive of their children, but will still provide their basic needs. Provide basic needs meaning: food, housing, and toiletries or money for the prementioned. Neglectful parenting can stem from a variety of reasons, this includes the parent's prioritizing themselves, lack of encouragement on the parent's parts, financial stresses, lack of support and addiction to harmful substances.

Children whose parents are neglectful develop the sense that other aspects of the parents’ lives are more important than they are. Many children of this parenting style often attempt to provide for themselves or halt depending on the parent to get a feeling of being independent and mature beyond their years.^[1] Parents, and thus their children, often display contradictory behavior. Children become emotionally withdrawn from social situations. This disturbed attachment also impacts relationships later on in life. In adolescence, they may show patterns of truancy and delinquency.^[1]

A study done by Maccoby and Martin (1983) analyzed adolescents, aged 14– 18 in four areas: psychosocial development, school achievement, internalized distress, and problem behaviour. The study found that those with neglectful parents scored the lowest on these tests, while those with authoritative parents scored the highest.^[26]

Other parenting styles

What may be right for one family or one child may not be suitable for another. With authoritarian and permissive (indulgent) parenting on opposite sides of the spectrum, most conventional and modern models of parenting fall somewhere in between. The model or style that parents employ depends partly on how they themselves were reared, what they consider good parenting, the child's temperament, their current environmental situation, and whether they place more importance on their own needs or whether they are striving to further their child's future success. Parents who place greater importance on the child's physical security may be more authoritarian, while parents who are more concerned with intellectual development may push their children into a number of organized extra-curricular activities such as music and language lessons.

• Attachment parenting – Seeks to create strong emotional bonds, avoiding physical punishment and accomplishing discipline through interactions recognizing a child's emotional needs all while focusing on holistic understanding of the child.

• Aware parenting – Very similar to attachment parenting but in addition, recognizes the impact of stress and the need to release stress by crying and raging in the accepting, loving presence of the parent.

• Concerted cultivation – A style of parenting that is marked by the parents' attempts to foster their child's talents through organized leisure activities.

• Emotion coaching – This style of parenting lays out a loving, nurturing path for raising happy, well-adjusted, well-behaved children. It’s called emotion coaching and it feels good to parents and kids alike. Emotion coaching helps teach your child how to recognize and express the way he is feeling in an appropriate way.

• Nurturant parenting – A family model where children are expected to explore their surroundings with protection from their parents.

• Overparenting – Parents who try to involve themselves in every aspect of their child's life, often attempting to solve all their problems. A helicopter parent is a colloquial, early 21st-century term for a parent who pays extremely close attention to his or her children's experiences and problems, and attempts to sweep all obstacles out of their paths, particularly at educational institutions. Helicopter parents are so named because, like helicopters, they hover closely overhead. It is a form of overparenting.

• Parenting For Everyone – A parenting book by Simon Soloveychik that describes a philosophy of unconditional love. It explains why some families having same conditions have good children, and some - bad ones. It emphasizes the root of humanity in upbringing children. It states that good children come from parenting where love and conscience go together.

• Punishment based - Punishment based parenting uses pain, punishment, intimidation, yelling, degradation, humiliation, shame, guilt, or other things that can hurt a child's self-esteem or hurt them physically. Their emotional growth and well being are affected greatly.

• Shared Parenting/Shared Earning where two married parents share the responsibility of parenting relatively equally and the responsibility of earning money relatively equally.

• Slow parenting – Encourages parents to plan and organize less for their children, instead allowing them to enjoy their childhood and explore the world at their own pace.

• Strict parenting – An authoritarian approach, places a strong value on discipline and following inflexible rules as a means to survive and thrive in a harsh world.

• Taking Children Seriously – The central idea of this movement is that it is possible and desirable to raise and educate children without doing anything to them against their will, or making them do anything against their will.

Differing parenting styles for male and female children

Mothers and fathers tend to pick up different behaviors of parenting based on the sex of their child. Studies have shown that fathers can affect their daughters' emotional adjustment more through the style of parenting they demonstrate rather than through using disciplinary approaches, such as punishment. Also, both a father and mother sometimes tend to use an authoritative style towards their daughters, while feeling more comfortable switching over to an authoritarian style for sons.^[27]