Personal Narrative: My Parenting Patterns

The parenting pattern that would best describe the way I was raised was a mix of authoritarian and authoritative. My mom was relatively strict about certain things while growing up and being somewhat of a helicopter mom. On the other hand, she was lenient with many things and would try to explain things out. My mom would be a helicopter mom when it came to hanging out with friends and her constantly calling and texting ever five minutes to check in on me and yell at me if I missed a single phone call. She would also expect me to keep on top of my grades from a young age and if I ever came home with anything lower than a C she would be upset with me. But this doesn’t go without saying that if she noticed that I was putting all the effort in …show more content…
On the topic of school when I was younger I was always sick so I would miss out of a lot of school, but never fell behind because if the discipline and expectation to always do well and get everything done. When I reached middle and high school my mom didn’t mind if I wanted to just stay home and not go to school, as long as I kept my grades up and not fall behind. Most of my childhood when my mom would say “No” to something and I would always ask why her favorite response was always “because I said so”. There was very little room for arguing, which is very typical for an authoritarian parenting style. As I got older my mom started to become more open to reasoning and even compromising, which is more of an authoritative …show more content…
This is because the culture my mom comes from is very rule orientated and there is very little that the child or anyone that isn’t older can say to an elder. The way our culture is back in Czech and Germany is that you don’t really talk back to someone older than you and that you have to respect them even if you don’t agree with them. On top of all that my mom has been a single parent for most of my life and I am the only one that she has to hold on to. She wanted me to grow up strong but at the same time was always worried about the “what ifs” and the dangers of the world around us. In the end, I think I came out just fine. Now that I am about to be twenty-one my mom has really learned to let go of the restrains and let me do whatever I want to do, knowing that I know what’s right and wrong and that I can handle things on my own. Although she was more on the authoritarian side, I don’t think it really did anything to hinder my self-esteem or make me feel like I wasn’t capable to make judgments on my own. Instead I adapted the point of view at a young age to understand why my mom did the things she did and took her high expectations as a tool to use to give me that push to always do better.
The book says that the best parenting pattern is authoritative and I agree with