By Chip Ingram

4 Parenting Styles and Effective Child Discipline

How do you get your children to obey, and what should you do when they won’t?

There’s no responsible parent on the planet who hasn’t struggled with getting a child to obey, and it can be an excruciating experience. How do you get your children to mind without losing yours? That’s a challenge, and God’s Word has much to say about how we, as parents, can meet that challenge. It shows us how our parenting style can provide the kind of discipline that helps our children fulfill their responsibility. If the most important thing for our children to learn is to obey, what do we do when they won’t?

4 Parenting Styles

First, it’s important to understand how your parenting style may be contributing to the problem, especially in a culture that has made discipline a dirty word. To speak of a parent disciplining a child today evokes images of unreasonable anger and brutal beatings. That’s not biblical discipline. Two case studies — one sociological and the other biblical — show us what appropriate, godly discipline is all about.

Sociologist Reuben Hill conducted a study of thousands of teens and parents in Minnesota. Hill put all of his research on a grid with an x-axis, a y-axis, and four quadrants. The horizontal axis measured how much discipline or control parents exercised in their relationship with their child. The vertical axis measured love. Hill found that different parenting styles produced different responses among children. Below is a summary of Reuben Hill’s research, as presented by Dr. Richard Meier in a seminar on parenting, Minirth-Meier Clinic, Dallas, Texas, 1988.

The Permissive Parent

The upper left quadrant represents parents who are high in love but low in discipline: the permissive parent. The study revealed that permissive parents tend to produce children with very low self-esteem and feelings of inferiority. Though the parents express a lot of love, the lack of boundaries leaves their children with a high level of insecurity.

The lower left quadrant belongs to the worst of all four combinations: the neglectful parent. This kind of parent doesn’t express much love and also doesn’t really care enough to discipline. Their children tend to grow up with little or no lasting relationship with Mom or Dad. They’re estranged because they feel forsaken.

The parents’ neglect may not necessarily be intentional — they may simply be in the midst of their own traumas and chaos, like an addiction or an abusive situation. They don’t purposely desire to neglect their kids, but they don’t know how to deal with their own issues adequately and don’t have the tools to be healthy parents. These children grow up

The Authoritative Parent

Those who land in the upper right quadrant provide the best combination of love and discipline. This kind of parent is authoritative — not an overbearing authoritarian, but a compassionate yet firm authority.

They have clear boundaries but are also very loving. Everyone knows who the boss is, but there’s also a connection between parents and child, a consideration that respects and honors who the child is while not compromising their disciplinary needs. The result is a child high in self-esteem and equipped with good coping skills.

This secular sociological study found that the parent who balances love and discipline without compromising either produces well-adjusted kids who maintain a positive relationship with Mom and Dad. This research, the best available today, affirms parents who express love well and maintain a high degree of control in their home.

Out of these four parenting styles, all of us want to be in quadrant four, and most of us probably think we are.

But before we move on to our biblical case study, consider these questions:

Where do you tend to err?
If you had to pick a quadrant other than number four to represent your worst moments as a parent, which would it be?
Make a mental note