Your parenting approach can have an impact on your child’s self-esteem, physical well-being, and interpersonal relationships. Because the interactions you have with your child and the way you discipline them will have an impact on them for the rest of their lives, it is crucial to make sure your parenting style supports healthy growth and development. These 9 new age parenting styles are popular for younger parents, especially when millennials and Gen-Z are raising a new generation.
9. Instinctive Parenting
The foundation of instinctive parenting is the idea that having children and understanding how to raise them comes naturally to us. Instead of acting on the advice they may have read in a parenting book or received from well-meaning relatives, instinctive parents usually go with their gut when it comes to raising their children. Parents with strong instincts frequently learn a lot from their own upbringing and rely on their gut feelings to guide them.
All parents are capable of spontaneous parenting in urgent circumstances, such as when their child trips and falls. A different scenario may be a mother who has been instructed to feed their child every three to four hours but is aware that their infant needs food every 90 minutes. Even if it contradicted what they had read or been told, they would still listen to their child in this case and act accordingly.
Generally speaking, instinctive parenting is seen as a very beneficial parenting approach with positive consequences for both children and adults. While some parents may use instinctual parenting the majority of the time, all parents exhibit it occasionally throughout their parenting journey as one of the most prominent new age parenting styles.
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8. Attachment Parenting
In line with the theory of attachment parenting, constant physical contact and intimacy between parent and child are also recommended as strategies to strengthen the bond between them. The American pediatrician William Sears is credited with coining the phrase “attachment parenting.”
William Sears argues that a strong mother-child attachment comes from contingency, that is when mother and child are attuned to one other, which in turn is founded on the mother’s sensitivity, in accordance with the founders of attachment theory, particularly Mary Ainsworth. Since the mother “reads” her baby’s signals, Sears uses the term “baby reading” in this context. He also employs the term “to be in the groove”.
William Sears firmly thinks that parenting techniques exist that promote “baby reading” and improve maternal sensitivity. The seven practices/principles that make up Sears’ “synergetic” ensemble and are based on the child’s “biological needs” comprise the attachment parenting techniques and secure this among one of the new age parenting styles.
- Baby Wearing
- Birth Bonding
- Breastfeeding
- Balance
- Beware of Baby Trainers
- Bedding Close to Baby
- Belief in the Value of a Cry
7. Gentle Parenting
Evidence-based gentle parenting practices help to raise children who are confident and happy. This parenting approach, which focuses on nurturing the qualities you desire in your child by being kind and setting consistent boundaries, is made up of four basic components: empathy, respect, understanding, and boundaries. In contrast to other less strict parenting strategies, gentle parenting promotes age-appropriate punishment that imparts important life skills.
Gentle parenting advocates encouraging families to work together to educate kids on how to express their emotions in age- and socially-appropriate ways. Gentle parenting is seen as an effective strategy for developing children who are content, self-reliant, and self-assured.
To establish rules and boundaries that are developmentally appropriate and age-appropriate, gentle parenting focuses on a child’s cognitive state. Gentle parents set an example for their children depending on what they want to see from them because this one interesting new age parenting styles aims to develop positive attributes in kids.
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6. Free-Range Parenting
Free-range parenting refers to the idea of growing kids in a way that promotes their ability to function freely, with little to no parental supervision, in line with their developmental stage, and with an acceptable acceptance of personal risks. In contrast to helicopter parenting, it is viewed as the opposite.
Being permissive or passive is not what free-range parenting is all about. Instead, it’s about giving children the ability to freely experience the results of their actions when it’s safe to do so. Making sure children have the abilities they need to grow up to be responsible adults is another goal.
Parents who let their kids roam free encourage unstructured play rather than hustling them from violin lessons to soccer practice every day. For instance, free-range children are encouraged to play a pick-up game of baseball with their neighborhood friends rather than having an adult enforce several rules.
Children raised by free-range parents are gradually given more freedom and responsibility as they learn independence. The goal is to demonstrate to children that they are capable of taking risks and completing challenging activities on their own in one of the most interesting new age parenting styles.
5. Slow Parenting
Slow parenting, also known as simple parenting, is a parenting approach in which there aren’t many organized activities for the kids. Instead, they are free to travel at their own speed and discover the world. It is a reaction to purposeful nurturing and the pervasive trend of parents scheduling after-school activities and classes, resolving issues on behalf of the kids, and purchasing services from for-profit vendors rather than letting nature run its course.
Slow parenting seeks to provide kids the freedom to be content with their own accomplishments, even if they don’t make them the richest or most well-known people in the world. These parents claim that other parents’ kids can’t handle the uncertainty of life because they either wait for their helicopter parents to step in or whine about injustice. They might not even recognize themselves till much later in life as an adult.
There are risks in daily living. Advocates of slow parenting contend that children must be exposed to dangers in order for them to develop a healthy awareness of that in one of the most intriguing new age parenting styles.
Advocates of Slow Parenting would contend that parents frequently lack the ability to determine which dangers are serious because many parents have been trained in a risk-averse manner. For instance, critics have blasted stranger danger, a cornerstone of kid “safety”, for purportedly believing that all strangers are hazardous and, by negative inference, that all familiar individuals are safe.
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4. Paranoid Parenting
Parenting in one of the most popular parenting paradigms of today demands that parents be hawk-eyed about safety, masters of micromanaging, and vigilantly attuned to the “success optimization” of their child’s life from the moment of the child’s birth. Many primary school students’ schedules are clogged with extracurricular activities. Additionally, implicit “time-management” is a parenting idea that is culturally more recent but still highly well-liked. It entails taking somewhat dictatorial control over a child’s interests. Normal, unstructured play is being pushed aside by formal activities more and more.
This excessive worry has practical foundations in many ways. Parents rightly worry about the environment they are hurriedly releasing their children into in the aftermath of an uncertain economic climate and an undoubtedly worsening ladder to respectable, traditional American-dream achievement. This “practical anxiety” is not unjustified, given all the media hype about millennials getting financially stuck inheriting a dimmer, craggier future, and allegedly breaking the norm of the later generation building upon their parent’s living.
Theoretically, it’s a classic example of seeking to exert control and order in what appears to be unpredictable, frantic chaos. Perhaps the drive to maximize and overprotect one’s children is a way for adults to cope with the stresses of modern life as one of the most common new age parenting styles.
This association shows a form of anxiety transfer from parents to their kids that lasts throughout childhood and into adolescence. Children do, after all, pick up a lot through watching others and imitating their habits. They practice what they see more than what they are taught, according to an old proverb, and it is something to consider.
3. Positive Parenting
In order to be a positive parent, you must love, care for, and be kind to your kids. It involves encouraging and educating children to behave in the way you desire. It is about conveying the positive message that you are valued, loved, and important to the world.
Positive parenting is the ongoing interaction between a parent or parents and a kid or children that include continuously and unconditionally attending to the needs of the child.
Parental sensitivity is seen to be a major predictor of good parenting habits in their earliest stages and is thought to influence the strength of the mother-child relationship.
More recent attachment research shows that girls with safe attachments to their fathers also experience long-term increases in social self-efficacy. A strong mother-child attachment is not just associated with early beneficial developmental outcomes in one of the most mainstream new age parenting styles.
Even before the parents are informed of a pregnancy or adoption, there are ways that great parenting can help a kid or family (for example, see sibling rivalry). It is imperative to emphasize that positive parenting starts as early as possible.
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2. Lighthouse Parenting
A parenting approach known as “lighthouse parenting” views the parent as a lighthouse that guides and supports their child. Parents that follow this method are attentive to their children’s environment and available to assist them, but they also trust their kids and give them room to develop, grow, and make errors on their own. The understanding that children change and grow as a result of parenting, and that parenting itself must adapt and expand to meet the needs of children at various times, is a key component of lighthouse parenting. Like they are, it is adaptable.
Being a lighthouse parent might be challenging at times since it calls for equilibrium and a thorough knowledge of your child. It can be challenging to accurately assess their emotions and behavior. Maintaining contact with your child as they get older is also crucial because it might get harder when they enter adolescence and start to want for greater independence in one of the most formative new age parenting styles.
Finding the appropriate degree of expectations to place on your child can be difficult as well. If you set the bar too high, they could feel discouraged and incapable of accomplishing anything. However, if you don’t push them hard enough, they could get bored or believe they aren’t very good at anything.
1. Montessori Parenting
A laid-back parenting style known as Montessori parenting encourages toddlers to play freely, avoid punishment for misbehavior, and sleep on the floor rather than in cribs.
The approach is predicated on the idea that kids naturally want to learn and that they absorb information best through self-directed activity, practical learning, and cooperative play. The Montessori approach places a strong emphasis on personalized learning and lets kids develop at their own rate. The primary focus of Montessori parenting is on children’s need for play-based learning and their desire for responsibility.
Children certainly do know what they want even as toddlers. In order to practice Montessori parenting, parents must merely prepare and offer guidelines for their kids before letting them decide what to do and how to play. This gives children a sense of worth from an early age.
The tenet of Montessori parenting is that children only desire to be with their parents. Because of this, parents should try to spend time with their kids, whether indoors or outside, and pause to watch them play and explore their surroundings in one of the most well-known new age parenting styles. When it is required, parents should play with their kids, go on walks with them, and have meals with them in order to better understand their wants and needs.
