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What Is the Best Parenting Style?

  • Sarah Hamaker Crosswalk.com Contributing Writer
  • Updated Feb 23, 2023

How we parent our children can affect everything from our kid’s physical health to their relationships. How we parent should support and encourage healthy development and growth, interactions and communication, and discipline and correction. You might not have thought much about your parenting style, but this article will discuss the four main parenting styles and which one is best for raising kind, well-adjusted adults.

In the 1960s, Diana Baumrind, a developmental psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley, first defined the main categories of parenting. In the 1980s, Maccoby and Martin refined her model into four separate parenting styles.

Those four categories are:

  • Authoritarian
  • Permissive
  • Authoritative
  • Uninvolved/neglectful

Photo Credit: ©GettyImages/digitalskillet 

sarah hamaker author bio picSarah Hamaker is a national speaker and award-winning author who loves writing romantic suspense books “where the hero and heroine fall in love while running for their lives.” She’s also a wife, mother of two teenagers and two college students, a therapeutic foster mom, and podcaster (The Romantic Side of Suspense podcast). She coaches writers, speakers and parents with an encouraging and commonsense approach. Visit her online at sarahhamakerfiction.com.

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