Authoritarian, permissive or democratic parents

Undoubtedly, most fathers and mothers want good for our children, and we bet on the way we raise them convinced that it is the best. We usually resort to what we have learned from our parents, grandparents, great grandparents ... along a chain of transmission of beliefs and mythologies that place children as basically instinctive, savage and without any kind of control. From there it follows that the role of parents must be assumed as a kind of police that impose control on "little monsters" who must fit within the demands of a society that dictates unquestionable parameters.

Antonio Pignatiello, a psychoanalyst, affirms that these beliefs are totally false, seen from the perspective of the children themselves, who throughout their development and in front of the large and unknown world they encounter at birth , and that often is uncertain and distressing, they are always looking for themselves that which guides them. So we should impose fewer external rhythms, norms and parameters and rely more on the intrinsic abilities and innate abilities of the little ones to self-regulate, co-produce, create and build progressively, the way they face, assimilate, adapt or modify the world to which they belong.

Clarifies Pignatiello, that if we educate under the understanding that another must control, we will end up throwing to the world individuals dependent on the authority of others and unable to be autonomous to decide. And he is very right. If we want children who blindly obey our will and authority, we can not expect them to become adults with criteria to make their own decisions. One thing is the respectful, conscious and empathetic child, and the obedient and submissive child is quite another.

Certainly parents have to perform a complex task that nobody taught us to carry out. Well Pignatiello explains when he points out that not everything in the upbringing of humans is regulated by instinct as it happens with monkeys or birds. Parents have the difficult task of transmitting to our children a culture increasingly distanced from our instincts. The professor and psychoanalyst explains that in this complex task, the anguish of the parents arises who feel they have to do well. And it is precisely this anguish that is one of the traps that keeps us in the authoritarian and tax system of upbringing. Parents end up believing that the easiest way out to take care of the dangers that makes us see the same anguish is to control, repress, intervene drastically or violently, because it is believed to be the best for the child and it is thought that to do it, we would create spoiled monsters, incapable of respecting anyone and that by not imposing ourselves on the little ones, the only possible result is chaos and debauchery.

But it turns out that this is not the case, that there is a third option, neither authoritarian nor "permissive". We refer to the democratic and flexible parenting style where the emphasis is not on asserting authority but on understanding how the child values a certain reality and creates the possibility of dialogue. Pignatiello indicates that one of the keys to achieving this is a more relaxed, less rigid attitude, leaving aside the anguish of assuming parenting as the imposition of objectives to be fulfilled and understanding it as a pleasant experience of human encounter. Something more or less similar to what many grandparents do with their grandchildren and who at the time did not experiment with their own children, because the anguish of doing well, took away the possibility of enjoying them.