Being a parent can be the greatest thing ever — and one of the hardest. One of the harder tasks of parenting, at least for me, is figuring out the line between exerting parental control and letting our children make their own choices. Or, as a friend puts it, letting them make their own mistakes, even when we can see the train wreck coming.
There are a bazillion ways to parent (OK, slight exaggeration), from the old Dr. Spock methods to “ gentle parenting ,” free-range parenting , tiger moms , helicopter parenting and oh, so much more. It’s like that old quote: “Before I got married, I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories.”
Here is one thing we know for sure: Being a psychologically controlling parent isn’t good for kids. A multinational group of researchers analyzed 238 studies from 50 years worth of research, across 38 countries and 126,000 people. They found that these studies repeatedly show that being a psychologically controlling parent thwarts children’s abilities to be curious and to feel safe, while increasing the likelihood of anger, defiance, aggression, depression and anxiety…