Try ‘Democratic’ Parenting

Published February 11, 1988. This semester at BYU I am teaching “Practicum in Family Facilitation Programs.” Enrolled are seven upper-division students majoring in family science. The purpose of the class is to prepare young professionals to go into their communities and teach helpful insights and information relating to marriage and family life.

We are studying a parenting program designed by Dr. Michael Popkin from Atlanta, Georgia. It is a video-based program called “Active Parenting” and draws heavily on the work of Alfred Adler and Rudolph Dreikus. We think it has many helpful suggestions on how to rear children in today’s society.

In “Active Parenting” Popkin makes the following assumptions:

1. Parenting well is extremely important.
2. Parenting well is extremely difficult.
3. Most parents have sufficient love and commitment to rear their children.
4. Most parents have not been given sufficient information, skills, and support on how to rear children, and that can be disastrous in our modern society.

Most people have little problem with assumptions 1-3. But it is No. 4 that creates attention. Do parents today have “sufficient information, skills, and support” to rear their children? Some think not.

There are three major parenting styles noted in “Active Parenting:” (1) The Autocratic Style of Limits without Freedom; (2) The Permissive Style of Freedom Without Limits; and (3) The one advocated in “Active Parenting,” which is the Democratic Style of Freedom Within Limits.

Popkin notes that major problems arise when one parent adopts one style and another parent advocates another. What happens in many families is “counterbalancing.” Perhaps the father is very autocratic and the mother is very permissive. Both parents then act in the extreme to balance or compensate for the supposed inadequacy they perceive in the other.

Rather than try to convert a spouse to one’s own varying style of parenting, Popkin suggests both might adopt the democratic method, which requires that parents jointly set limits for their children and then allow freedom within those predetermined limits.

And finally, I like what Popkin and his associates have defined as the purpose of parenting: “To protect and prepare our children to survive and thrive in the kind of society in which they live.”

Overall, I think most parents do remarkably well in the “protect” and “survive” categories. But it is the “prepare” and “thrive” areas that concern me.

While we are protecting our children from the ills and potential harms of society, how well do we prepare them to survive in it once they leave home? And even though our children may survive in society once they do leave, can or do they actually thrive . . . particularly if they leave the Intermountain area?

Such are the present challenges of modern parenting. Popkin’s “Active Parenting” has some suggestions and solutions.