BOOKS: Love, Warmth, and Discipline: Lessons from Boys Town for Successful Parenting

We’ve all been on the playground and seen one kid hit another.

The reactions of the parents is usually much more telling than the actual incident.  Some parents smile and shrug, indicating “kids will be kids,” in a passive, everything’s okay style that causes other parents to roll their eyes.  Others rush over to lay down the law over the smallest infraction, sometimes with more sternness than the situation demands. 

Both styles continue to exist because their practitioners see how unappealing and unworkable the other style seems.   Yet both styles provide their practitioners some empirical evidence of success: the permissive parents are pleased to see how free their kids seem, and the authoritarian parents see how well the rules are kept—and how little rebellion they notice.

Which parenting style do you use?

Val J. Peter tackles these two styles in the slim book called Love, Warmth, and Discipline: Lessons from Boys Town for Successful Parenting – and claims neither extreme really has the right answer. The overly strict, rule-driven parents? Their “children score quite well on the avoidance of drugs and alcohol. [These] families don’t have constant warfare, but authoritarian parents overwhelm their children into obedience. The price for that… is often depression, loneliness, and alienation, along with anger and anxiety.”  In contrast, many kids Peter has met come from permissive parenting background, what he calls the “permissive negative” – a combination of inconsistency and neglectfulness.

As Executive Director Emeritus of Boys Town  Peter has a great deal of experience working with children. BoysTown improves the lives of  thousands of at-risk children in locations across the United State.   Because they have a track record of success working with at-risk kids, it’s interesting to hear the story of how they evolved their approach over time, and the many stories of the kids whom they’ve helped. But Peter embeds the Boys Town story in what he sees as the larger historical shift in parenting after World War II. According to Peter, Dr. Spock’s challenge to traditional parenting in 1945 is understandable only against the backdrop of the war and the tragic abuses of authority it represented. This broad challenge to authority, coupled with a dramatic rise in American affluence, helped usher in new era of permissive parenting.

Peter’s proposal of a third way, neither permissive nor authoritarian, but “authoritative,” implies more than splitting the difference between the alternatives. Different from permissive parenting, it encourages warmth and psychological independence. In other words, warmth and love require interaction and engagement, neither the distance of the authoritarian, nor the detachment of the permissive. And the research seems to back him up.

You might appreciate this book if you were raised in a permissive household and want to think about balance. Or, if you are a parent who’s gotten through the preteen years pretty smoothly and want take a reality check as your kids enter their teens.

The book also contains material on building resilience in your kids that anyone can profit from.This book also gives good tips on how to make resilient kids. Did you know that Iin 1995, the International Resilience Research Project identified five key markers of resilience in kids, which? They all deal with relationships – with family, of course, but also with bigger “authoritative communities.” Kids are most resilient if surrounded by people who show steadfast care; people who model wise choices; people who inspire and motivate them to do things on their own; and people to lean on in times of sickness or danger, or to learn. 

Please note that although this book avoids most of the problems of the sometimes irritating and preachy “how to parent” genre, but introduces each chapter with a fake text message that tries to be relevant and hip (“U need 2 no wat r the keyz that make ur kidz resilient”). It would have been an easy and prudent editorial decision to axe these distractions with no harm done to the content of the book.

Nevertheless, this book is a helpful reminder that the ever-changing work of parenting always manages to  combine love and warmth with discipline, and that strong families need to be rooted in, and help to root, good “authoritative” communities.

And what do you do when you’re at the park and that kid hits yours, but the parents merely shrug?

Well, you’re on your own with that one.