Rosie Colosi lives in New Jersey and is a reporter for TODAY Parents. She has bylines in The Atlantic, The Week, MSNBC, and PureWow, and she has written 33 nonfiction children's books for Scholastic, Klutz, and Nat Geo Kids. Once upon a time, she played Mrs.
Parenting style is a perennial hot topic because we're all trying so hard to do it 'right.' For a long time, gentle parenting felt like the only acceptable way to raise children. It leans heavily on feelings, but not on discipline.
As a reaction to gentle parenting, FAFO parenting gained popularity for allowing kids to experience the tangible consequences of their actions. Now calm authority parenting has entered the chat. Family psychologist Dr. Jen Hartstein and journalist Ericka Sóuter joined TODAY’s Sheinelle Jones and guest co-host Nia Long on March 18 to discuss all three approaches. Though gentle parenting can teach kids emotional resilience, 'it doesn't necessarily teach them what to do with their feelings in the bigger part of the world,' Hartstein said. Plus, we often don't have the amount of time gentle parenting requires in order to be successful. FAFO parenting, on the other hand, can teach kids 'resilience and grit and how to pick themselves up and how to kind of move forward in this world that can be very unforgiving,' Sóuter said. 'But there are parents who say it is too harsh, and a lot of parents ... don't want to see their kids fail.' The experts said that calm authority parenting is a happy medium between the two extremes. Sóuter said that the calm authority parenting style includes both boundaries and warmth. 'It's not authoritarian and it's not permissive,' she added, but it does include consequences. She gave this example: kids who are throwing a ball in the house might get a warning or two, and then parents should follow through with the consequence of taking the ball away. 'I think there's like this fine line between doing what's necessary and actually creating healthy boundaries so that they know better to begin with,' said Long. 'What we need to be teaching young people is: your feelings are always valid. That is a true statement. You how you feel about it is always valid,' said Hartstein. 'What you do with your feelings is where we have problems.' Sóuter added, 'In the house, we can acknowledge their feelings and care about their feelings, but in class, they need to just follow the rules and know that there are limits.'
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