How does your parenting style affect your kid? Here’s what experts say.
From gentle to lighthouse parenting, the right parenting style could improve your child’s well-being.
We are living in an age of metaphorical parenting. First it was tiger parenting. Then helicopter parenting, snowplow parenting, and free-range parenting became trends. Now, gentle parenting is having an extended moment.
But many parents may wonder: Do these parenting styles actually make a difference to a child’s development and future well-being?
“Parents are eager for answers and these messages become seductive on social media,” says Annie Pezalla, a developmental psychologist and visiting assistant professor of psychology at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. As a culture, “we’re becoming increasingly prescriptive about what to say or do or not do with the mentality that we could screw up our kids if we say or do the wrong thing,” she says.
(How can you help your kid flourish? Experts say to help them find “flow.”)
Scientists have long wrangled with the question of how your parenting style affects your children. In the 1960s, psychologist Diana Baumrind identified three research-based approaches to parenting: authoritarian parenting, which involves strict rules, high expectations, and often harsh discipline; authoritative parenting, which is characterized by a close, nurturing relationship and guiding kids to meet high standards; and permissive parenting, which is characterized by warmth and few rules or expectations as kids navigate situations on their own. Later, a fourth style—neglectful (or uninvolved) parenting—was added to the mix.
Which is how these new metaphorical parenting styles came to be.
In contrast to the traditional parenting styles, these newer ones don’t have as much research behind them—and they can mean different things to different people. Here’s what experts say about six of the newer parenting styles and their potential consequences for kids.
Gentle parenting
Known for prioritizing compassion, warmth, and respect, gentle parenting is an approach that has gained popularity in recent years. A major hallmark of this style is the focus on fostering a strong bond between children and their parents.
“It involves approaching parenting with attunement—being able to look at things through a child’s perspective,” says Sarah Bren, a licensed clinical psychologist and cofounder of the Upshur-Bren Psychology Group in Pelham, New York. Depending on how boundaries are set and discipline is handled, it can look a bit like authoritative or permissive parenting, experts say.
“Kids do well when they have warmth and discipline,” Pezalla says, but the gentle parenting style can be hard for parents to sustain. A study led by Pezalla published in a 2024 issue of PLoS One found that one-third of those who identified as “gentle parents” expressed doubts about their parenting abilities and experienced feelings of burnout. Whether this parenting approach has a better effect on kids than others hasn’t been well studied yet.
Snowplow parenting
Parents who adhere to snowplow parenting—which is also called lawnmower parenting or bulldozer parenting—often try to clear obstacles out of a child’s path. The parents’ intentions may be good—they don’t want their kids to struggle or feel distressed—but this isn’t realistic because challenges are an inherent part of life.
As a parent, “you want kids to handle adversity or conflict with your support and guidance to help them build resilience,” says Bren. If you regularly remove obstacles from their path because you’re afraid your child can’t handle them, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, Bren adds.
This is largely a fear-based approach to parenting—and it can backfire: Research has found that when parents are anxious about potential threats their children may face in the world, that anxiety can be transmitted to the kids, contributing to their own anxiety and an intolerance of uncertainty.
Helicopter parenting
While the term “helicopter parenting” refers to parents who hover over their children, it also means being controlling and overprotective, ready to jump in to help at any moment.
But much like with snowplow parenting, “this micromanaging doesn’t help kids learn to pivot, navigate bumps in the road or develop resilience,” says Michele Borba, an educational psychologist based in southern California and author of Thrivers: The Surprising Reasons Why Some Kids Struggle and Others Shine. As a result, “the child becomes dependent and you rob them of agency.”In addition, research has found that helicopter parenting by mothers has been linked with greater alcohol use among their teenage daughters. (To be clear: This study showed a correlation between helicopter parenting and teens’ alcohol use; it didn’t prove causation). And a study in a 2024 issue of Frontiers in Psychiatry found that helicopter parenting was associated with more depression and lower physical self-esteem among college students.
Free-range (or panda) parenting
A giant panda mother cradles her cub at the Wolong China Conservation and Research Center. Although it might have a cuddly name, panda parenting—also known as free-range parenting—is an approach that emphasizes a child’s independence and freedom from their parents.
The opposite of helicopter and snowplow parenting, free-range parenting (a.k.a., panda parenting) emphasizes kids’ independence and freedom.
But the concern is that kids may end up with too much freedom in areas of life that they’re not ready to handle. That’s why it needs to be based on what a particular child is capable of, Borba says, and there needs to be guidance or “scaffolding,” as she describes it, to help them stay safe. “You need to keep in mind that our children are having different childhoods than we had,” Borba adds. “They’re faster-paced and more fear-based, and kids are digital natives.”
Nevertheless, some research suggests that encouraging a child’s independent mobility—defined as the freedom “to travel around their neighborhood or city without adult supervision”—is linked with better physical health and psychological well-being.
Tiger parenting
While we don’t hear about it much these days, tiger parenting still goes on—and has by now been more widely researched than many of these other parenting styles.
Popularized in 2011 with the publication of Amy Chua’s memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, tiger parenting takes a strict, demanding approach to raising kids, with high expectations and standards and lower levels of emotional support. “It’s resumé- driven and it pushes the child too much in terms of the parents’ goals for the child instead of what drives the child based on who they are,” says Borba.
Lighthouse parenting
One of the newest parenting styles on the block, lighthouse parenting, a term coined by Ginsburg, lies in the middle ground—it’s not as strict or controlling as tiger parenting but it’s not as hands-off as free-range parenting either.
With lighthouse parenting, the idea is for parents to offer guidance and a consistent source of support from the shoreline, while allowing kids to venture offshore to navigate the waves. “It’s staying where you are [as a parent]—it’s not moving the lighthouse closer and closer to the child,” says Borba. When parents do dive in, it’s because they want to protect their kids from true danger; not because they want or need to control them, Ginsburg notes.
“While the name is new, it really is about how to apply what we’ve learned from balanced parenting, which is authoritative parenting,” says Ginsburg, author of the forthcoming book Lighthouse Parenting: Raising Your Child With Loving Guidance for a Lifelong Bond. “If parents serve as loving guides and set appropriate boundaries, kids turn out best and their relationships are the strongest.”
Indeed, research has found that authoritative parenting, by any name, is linked with greater academic achievement and higher self-efficacy, as well as higher confidence and better emotional self-regulation, among kids and teens. “If you want a child who will succeed and be well-adjusted, you want an authoritative style,” Borba says.
The characteristics of effective parenting
Metaphors and monikers aside, certain characteristics are essential to effective parenting. The first is to create a secure style of attachment with your child, says Bren. “The ultimate question is: Do they feel safe, seen, and soothed by me enough to feel secure with me?” she explains.
To that end, having emotional attunement, along with warmth, structure, and patience are important, Borba says. Research suggests that parents’ emotional availability may benefit a child’s neurobiological functioning and development.
It’s also important for a parent to be able to see the world through their child’s eyes, while helping them feel a sense of individuality and comfort with all their feelings. These are hallmarks of being loved unconditionally.
While consistency in parenting is important, Ginsburg says that flexibility is, too: “What changes is the level to which you give guidance. The goal is to foster interdependence and the ability to thrive.”
Another perk: These balanced parenting qualities can help foster strong bonds between parents and children. “When you parent with loving guidance,” Ginsburg says, “your child is going to want you in their life forever.”
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How can you help your kid flourish? Experts say to help them find ‘flow’
Experts say this state of being immersed in a task or activity has real mental health benefits for kids. Here are their tips for getting your kids in flow.
For seven-year-old Emme, it’s all about the dragons.
In the midst of the pandemic, Emme was bored—a sentiment she expressed freely and frequently. “Once she discovered dragons, it’s like she came to life again,” says Lizzie Goodman, a mother of two in Illinois. Emme would disappear in her room for hours, creating an encyclopedia of the creatures, full of detailed backstories and anatomical diagrams. “I’ll ask her to go upstairs and get changed, and then she’ll get sucked into this play,” Goodman laughs. “And I’ll have to pull her out and be like, ‘Come back.’”
Before her dragon discovery, Emme was likely experiencing what experts have dubbed “languishing.”
“You’re not depressed,” clarifies Jeffrey Froh, a professor of psychology at Hofstra University, “but you’re definitely not functioning optimally.”
But as Emme discovered, there’s an antidote for languishing: flow. It’s a state of being immersed in a task or activity and has many of the hallmarks that make flourishing possible. Kids in flow are completely absorbed by what they’re doing, to the point in which they lose track of time or even physical needs like food and sleep.
“We all have an innate desire to thrive,” Froh notes. “And encouraging flow states in our children helps them pursue and reach their potential.”
The science of flow
So what’s going on in the brain of someone experiencing flow? As it turns out, quite a lot—but the picture is far from straightforward.
Charles Limb, a surgeon and neuroscientist at the University of California in San Francisco, studied the neural activity of jazz musicians while they played piano and found that “broad areas of the prefrontal cortex [associated with self-monitoring] shut down when they’re improvising.” At the same time, the parts of the brain responsible for “sensory processing and motor processing seem to increase [in activity] during creative tasks,” Limb says. Similar patterns have been observed in freestyle rap artists, comedians, and caricature artists.
What might this mean for kids? Limb suspects that there are levels to flow states depending on the activity involved as well as the expertise of the person (for instance, a child who likes to draw versus a professional artist). In an ongoing study, Limb’s team examined the brain activity of musically untrained kids between the ages of 9 and 11 during improvisational play. Similar to his experiment with musicians, Limb compared the kids’ brain patterns while playing a memorized sequence versus a tune they were making up. The experimental setup was designed so that whatever note was struck, it never sounded wrong.
“The kids’ brain activity was much more muted compared to the professional musicians,” Limb says. “It raises the interesting question of how the patterns in kids related to those of trained adults.”
What is clear, however, is that “there’s a big difference in the brain when the kids go from memorizing to improvising,” or from rote exercises to activities they can become completely absorbed in. But the science continues to be refined.
From a neurochemical perspective, dopamine—which mediates learning, memory, and emotional regulation—plays an important role in flow states.
“Flow really taps into the brain’s dopaminergic circuits,” or the routes through which this neurotransmitter travels in the brain, says Joydeep Bhattacharya, a professor of psychology at the University of London. He speculates that the dopaminergic circuits of people who frequently achieve flow are “slowly reshaped and molded over time.”Regular bouts of flow, therefore, could boost both motivation to learn and the skills to manage emotions. In his research, Bhattacharya demonstrated a link between ability to slip into flow states and emotional intelligence in piano students (though he cautions the study shows correlation, not causation).
How to encourage flow in kids
As anyone who’s witnessed a child immersed in doodling or building the perfect tower can attest, “children have a natural and inherent tendency to experience flow,” according to Bhattacharya. But sometimes they need a nudge. Experts have a few tips for helping kids benefit from flow.
1. Find what interests them.
Because intrinsic motivation is so crucial to achieving flow, it’s important to find out what your child’s passions are.
“Talk to kids about what they’re interested in,” says Michelle Harris, a licensed clinical social worker based in New York and founder of Parenting Pathfinders. She adds that parents should encourage kids to come up with their own ideas rather than just telling them what they need to do. Once they assume some ownership, they’re more likely to stick with the activity. For parents of younger children, “feel free to suggest ideas if kids are struggling to come up with some of their own.”
What’s considered a flow activity is highly dependent on the individual. “For kids, you have to find out what lights their fire,” says David Shernoff, an educational psychologist at Rutgers University. “The more they can reclaim these sorts of flow activities, the more they start building back motivation as well as meaning.”
2. Provide uninterrupted time with no distractions.
We live in an era of distractions and overstuffed schedules, both of which can kill flow. “Turn off the TV, find a space with limited distractions, and let kids know that this is a time for them to just do nothing but enjoy what they’re working on,” Harris says.
Froh agrees: “Unstructured play, and lots of it, is imperative.” For instance, Froh’s 11-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son are limited to two extracurricular activities to ensure they have plenty of unstructured time to pursue their interests.
3. Support and scaffold kids.
Flow requires a tricky balance: The task needs to be difficult enough to sustain interest, but not so hard that the experience is discouraging. Parents should scaffold this balance by providing support in the beginning when kids need more help, then backing off as they gain confidence.
With Legos, for example, you might start with a kit where “you’re following a recipe and know exactly what you’re going to be building,” Shernoff says. But as your child becomes more comfortable with the basics, you can build something new together. Don’t forget to ask questions: What color will the chimney be? Does this door open in or out? But let the child lead the way.
Engaging in flow activities together is also a great way to connect with your kids, and when they feel connected to others—whether it’s family, friends, or mentors—that can also encourage flow and combat languishing. In Shernoff’s research on flow in schools, for example, he discovered that teacher and peer support led to stronger student engagement.
“Sharing the flow experience with friends,” Shernoff says, “makes it meaningful and becomes a source of bonding.” And when friends and mentors provide immediate feedback, it helps kids reach (and exceed) their goals.
4. De-emphasize performance.
When parents focus on performance or outcomes, they could inadvertently dampen kids’ joy in the activity. “You don’t have to be Mozart to play the piano, and you don’t have to be Michael Jordan to shoot hoops,” Limb says. Instead, encourage kids to engage in activities that are a little more open-ended, without a lot of steps or rules that need to be followed. Create a comic book with no thoughts about publishing, or sing along to the soundtrack of a favorite movie.
Ultimately, Limb believes that creativity is universal, though it requires training to refine. “When kids engage in these activities, they’re developing creativity in their brain,” he says. And the more kids tap into their creative nature through flow, the more likely it is that they’ll carry those skills into a productive adulthood.
