**4. Parenting strategies as parents' communication styles**

Having defined parenting strategies in this chapter as all the behaviors, attitudes and values utilized by parents in raising their children, we propose also that these strategies are parents' communication styles because they serve as channels for all parenting activities and also provide platforms on which parents connect with their children. Without these connections, parenting becomes a struggle. Parenting research literature has tried to group these strategies according to the philosophical perspectives of their proponents. We review some of these strategies to identify elements of family communication in them and to highlight how they function as parents' communication styles.

#### **4.1 Positive parenting**

Eanes [26] describes positive parenting as an entirely different way of relating to children that allow parents to maintain a strong bond with them through the ages and stages of childhood while still raising kind and responsible people. Its philosophy is rooted in connection and not just a method of discipline. This strategy, according to her is directly opposed to conventional parenting methods which often pits parents against children. The goal of this strategy is to achieve more strong connection, cooperation, and joy and peace in the family. The five principles that inform positive parenting include attachment, respect, proactive parenting, empathetic leadership and positive discipline [26]. These are principles that are relationship-oriented and powered by communication. Summarizing the role of communication in positive parenting, Eanes [26] opines that:

*Effective communication is more than just an exchange of information. It helps us to understand our partners and our children better. It helps us to connect, solve problems, and convey emotions. Understanding the emotion behind the exchange of information is really what effective communication is all about; it's tuning in* 

*Communication in Healthy Parenting: The Interplay of Positive Parenting Strategies and Parents'… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101026*

*to our partners (and others) to hear the meaning behind the words. That brings us a deeper understanding of the ones we share our lives with and leads to more fulfilling relationships overall (Chapter 4, pp. 2–3).*

The above submission is quite different from what most of us experienced with our parents while growing up. I see efforts on the part of parents in the above context to, not just control with instructions, but to establish connections that will produce lasting bonds between them and their children. The communication pattern adopted by parents in this context is conversational. Parents in the above context talk to their children differently [22]. Communication for them is a tool for fostering connection, and not control. They seem to have transformed notions of parenting that have shifted the way they perceive and respond to their children. Children from such parenting backgrounds are happier more emotionally balanced and readier to seek out and establish healthier relationships than their peers for the conventional parenting background.

#### **4.2 Scream-free parenting**

Scream-free parenting is built on the principle that parents can 'keep their cool' even when events in the parenting experience get hot [27]. Its philosophy is hinged on the notion that parents can relate with children in a calm, cool, and connected way, taking hold of their emotional responses no matter how children choose to behave. The dominating principle in this school of thought is that for parents to be able to parent in a calm, cooperative and peaceful environment, they need to focus on themselves instead of the children. By focusing on themselves, they can get a handle on their 'emotional reactivity', which is usually the 'greatest enemy of great relationships' [27].

To combat emotional reactivity, parents are tasked with the duty of regulating their own emotions so they do not get in the way of calm and peaceful parenting. By getting a handle on their own emotions, parents are better disposed to respond to issues in their relationship with their children, thereby modeling for them the calmness and good behavior which they expect in return. Markham [22] describes this as "self-regulation." Since parenting, for her, is not about what a child does, but more about how a parent responds, staying calm enough to respond constructively to all childish behavior and the stormy emotions behind it requires growth on the side of the parents. Achieving this 'growth' is the hardest part of parenting but the only key to positioning parents/the more peaceful parent that our children deserve.

Engaging 'response' as a phenomenon in scream-free parenting, scholars [22, 27] opine that an adult's peaceful presence has a more powerful influence on a child than yelling ever could. This promotes emotional regulation as a communication strategy for achieving positive child-rearing outcomes. This also directs attention to parents' use of language in parent–child relationships. The language of communication in such contexts is usually conformity-oriented rather than conversational. While yelling at children may force them to cower into obedience to parents' instructions, it disregards respect for their tiny personalities and produces emotionally imbalanced children, with lots of externalizing and internalizing symptoms [28, 29].

#### **4.3 Poisonous parenting**

Dermer et al. [25] define a poisonous parent as one whose ways of teaching children about life and styles of interaction damage children's abilities to form healthy connections with family members, friends, and eventually romantic partners and offspring. In a nutshell, poisonous parenting addresses how destructive

relationships with parents will lead to unhealthy relationships throughout the lifespan if they are not effectively addressed [25]. It hinges its philosophy on the notion that people who have destructive parenting styles often were the victims of malevolent parenting themselves.

Coming from such backgrounds, parents cannot help but play out their insecurities, deficiencies, and fears from childhood in their relationships with their children. Thus, when attachment anxieties are triggered in the relationship, parents resort to abusive behaviors to control children and to force emotional and physical proximity [25]. Such abusive behaviors are manifested in harsh criticisms, shaming, labelling and the use of words too big for a child's developing emotions to handlewords that are not age-appropriate [30–32]. This suggests that the communication environment in which poisonous parenting occurs is overly conformity-oriented. Parents here strive through their communication to achieve strict obedience to parental authority and the maintenance of family hierarchy without paying attention to the sensibilities of the children in the relationship. Children from such parent–child relationships very often carry their unresolved trauma into future relationships and are incapable of emotional regulation, emotional awareness, emotional responsiveness, making an accurate assessment of people's behaviors, and interpersonal connectedness [22, 25, 26].

#### **4.4 Unconditional parenting**

Unconditional parenting is founded on the notion of lovingly parenting children without attaching the conditional strings of 'good behavior' and 'achievement' [30]. It pushes forward the idea of parents loving their kids not for *what they do* but for *who they are*. Contrasting the two ideas, Kohn [30] opines that while the first sort of love is conditional, demanding that children must earn their parents' love by acting in ways they deem appropriate, or by performing up to their standards, the second sort of love is unconditional and does not depend on how children act, whether they are successful or well behaved. Parents in this tradition parent with the consciousness that children do not have to struggle to earn their parents' approval. Rather they are to be loved by their parents for 'no good reason' [30]. This consciousness is further informed by the idea that loving children unconditionally will help them to accept themselves as fundamentally good people, even when they make mistakes or misbehave.

Research has shown that children raised in this kind of atmosphere come off with a healthy assessment of their personalities, can regulate their emotions and become responsible citizens of the society [17, 22, 33, 34] and are also capable of forming healthy and balanced relationships later in life. Meeting this need of acceptance for children positions them to also accept and help other people in their present and future relationships. It is noteworthy to say that the communication environment in this parenting style is conversational and makes way for frequent, spontaneous, unrestrained interactions which allow children to co-discover the meaning of symbols and objects in the parent–child relationship systems and thus encourage them to participate in the definition of their social reality [20].

#### **5. Implications**

From the parenting styles outlined in the chapter, two patterns of communication are identified: the conformity-oriented and the conversation-oriented communication patterns. While the conformity-oriented communication pattern is unsupportive of children's psychosocial development because it is concerned with hierarchy and strict submission to parents' authority, the conversation-oriented

*Communication in Healthy Parenting: The Interplay of Positive Parenting Strategies and Parents'… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101026*

communication pattern, on the other hand, is supportive because of its preoccupation with relationship cultivation and children's overall psychosocial development. Thus, engaging parenting from the two communication perspectives has implications on the parenting atmosphere and ultimately on child outcomes. The overarching role of communication in helping parents articulate the different values, norms and attitudes they hope to transmit through their chosen parenting styles cannot be over-emphasized. While a chosen parenting style can be supportive or unsupportive of children's psychosocial development, an ability to identify the communication patterns inherent in them and to demonstrate their dual roles as parenting styles and parents' communication patterns has been the preoccupation of this chapter. We make this statement in the diagram below:
