Over the past half century parenting has evolved into a highly developed behavioural science. A mountain of research studies, books, and manuals has been written explaining and dissecting parenting styles to best develop children into happy, confident and successful adults. In the 1960s, American clinical and developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind was the first to formally identify and classify three parenting styles — authoritarian, permissive, and authoritative. A fourth style, neglectful, was later added in the 1980s by Stanford researchers. Since then, more classifications have evolved including helicopter, attachment, and snowplough/bulldozer parenting.
In 2011, Amy Chua, an ethnic Chinese professor at Yale Law School, set the world aflutter with her best-seller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – an ode to Asian-style tough love parenting which drills-n-skills children to attain high levels of academic achievement and/or success in co-curricular activities such as music or sports.
More recently, a free-range style of parenting has been attracting media and public attention. Coined by Lenore Skenazy, a US-based former columnist who detailed her experience of letting her nine-year-old son ride the New York subway unaccompanied, free-range parenting is defined as “raising children in the spirit of encouraging them to function independently and with limited parental supervision”. A backlash against over-involved ‘helicopter parenting’, free-range parenting is winning many supporters and followers in the US and around the world.
In our cover story this month, we beam a spotlight on the rising popularity of free-range parenting and its beneficial impact on children. In India, where there is a predominant patriarchal tradition of control-and-command parenting, free-range parenting has come like a breath of fresh air for children rebelling against anxiety-driven, risk-averse parenting. Increasingly, parents are becoming aware of the importance of providing children independence and autonomy to prepare them for life and work challenges of the new disruptive AI age. Free-range parenting proponents, interviewed for the cover story, emphasise that conferring increased independence upon children develops their problem-solving, decision-making, self-sufficiency, confidence and social skills.
There’s much else in this monsoon issue of ParentsWorld. Check out our Middle Years essay which advises parents to teach children how to interact with autistic children, and Special Essay about the critical role male parents play in nurturing emotionally intelligent children. Also recommended is our Health & Nutrition feature on taking to trampolining, a bouncy new age (in India) fitness option.
