The 4 Main Parenting Styles: What To Know About Your Style

How you parent your child is a very personal and highly individualized to your situation, personalities, lifestyle, and needs. As such, what it means to be a "good parent" has a lot of different variables: What works for one family won't for another. That's OK.

The concept of four distinct parenting styles was coined in the '60s by psychologist Diana Baumrind, who studied preschool-age children and their behaviors. She then compared said behaviors with the interaction with the kids' parents: the adult's disciplinary strategies, how nurturing and caring they were in times of duress, how they communicated together, and expectations of maturity and control.

What she found was four different styles, those being authoritative, uninvolved, permissive, and disciplinarian (also known as authoritarian). "What it comes down to is where the parent falls on the grid of sensitivity and expectations," says Aliza Pressman, Ph.D., co-founding director and director of clinical programming for the Mount Sinai Parenting Center. "Sensitivity is about warmth and nurturing your child's needs and emotions; expectations are about instilling responsibility in your child and setting boundaries." 

While these four styles are distinct, parents may identify behaviors from multiple camps (people are complex, after all); however, it is more about how the parenting style comes across generally. 

"Authoritarian parents have a rigid, controlling, 'my way or the highway' style of parenting," says licensed psychologist Nicole Beurkens, Ph.D., CNS. Essentially, the authoritarian parent rules the home like a, well, authoritarian. And as Pressman notes, "The authoritarian parent has high demands, but that's not the problem; the problem is there's low sensitivity." 

This parenting style is, essentially, the flipped version of the last one. "These parents are highly sensitive and warm, but they don't feel comfortable with boundaries," says Pressman. "These are like your 'best friend' parents." 

"Uninvolved parents aren't attuned to their child's needs, and generally leave them alone to fend for themselves. They don't take an interest in the child or their activities, and don't spend much time engaging with them," says Beurkens. "This is generally regarded as the most problematic style of parenting."

And at its worst? "This is basically just neglect," says Pressman. 

Here, we have the parenting style that actually goes by many names: mindful parenting, gentle parenting, and so on. Essentially, authoritative parenting is the ideal balance of sensitivity and clear expectations, boundaries, and demands that experts and regular folks have been striving for for years. "This is something of a north star," says Pressman. "It feels like, 'I'm in tune with who my child is, but it's not a free-for-all.' It makes a lot of sense: You need guidance as a kid to grow, but the child also needs to feel safe to receive boundaries."