What is "permissive" parenting?
Well a good many people, especially in the 60s there was all this uproar of "Hell no, I won't go" and "I deserve a voice" and authority was seriously challenged. Also there was a great deal of research that was done at that point that showed the downfall of the authoritarian method with the field of psychology coming in and saying, "feelings do matter. Self-esteem matters and it's abusive not to pay attention to that." So a lot of parents swung over to a very permissive style and we see this all over. We see a lot of permissive parenting and this is a serious mistake to allow children to grow up without appropriate boundaries and guidance, without appropriate mentoring, where the child is the boss. So if you look at power in a family, authoritarian parenting is where the parent has the power over the child and the child has to do what the parent says or else punishment or fear or something. Now in permissive parenting the power shifts to where the child is now in charge of the parent and if the parent doesn't do what the child says the child will embarrass them and have a fit and fall in it and carry on and so the parent caves in. Now children automatically think they ought to have whatever they want whenever they want it but part of the socialization is that we need, as parents, to get them out of that and learn the give and take of appropriate social relationship instead of, "it's just me, me, me."
