What’s your parenting style? Are you a dolphin?

There have been several animal parenting styles that I’ve talked about in the last few articles. Drawing on Solomon’s wisdom and the common grace that comes from the world, these styles can give us clues to self-reflecting on our own parenting styles. 

One of the most popular from about a decade ago was Shimi Kang’s Dolphin Parenting approach. In it she contrasted competitive and authoritarian tiger parenting, which I mentioned before, with jellyfish parenting which is permissive and floats along on the currents. The first is led by parental desires, the second by the child’s demands. Her criticism of the first is striking: ‘The activities of tiger parenting…do not represent “overparenting”, as tiger parenting has been called. They represent serious underparenting. If parenting means preparing your children for a rich, rewarding life, then tiger parents are doing far too little rather than too much.’

the dolphin – a collaborative parenting position where the parent has desires and goals which are worked out with the child

But she is similarly critical of jellyfish – they lack purpose and give over too much agency to the child too early. They ‘fail to define expectations around matters such as respecting authority, social etiquette, or personal values.’ 

As a mediating position Kang suggests the dolphin – a collaborative parenting position where the parent has desires and goals which are ……