French Parenting? 4 Reasons Parenting Labels Need to Go Away

Tiger moms, helicopter parents, free-range, attachment-and now French, you know what type of parent I am? A good one. I prefer to just call myself a mom. The war over what country parents the best and the labeling of parenting styles is getting a bit out of hand these days. I don’t think it’s helping modern parents at all either. Here are four reasons this trend needs to go away.

They teach a bad lesson.

Many parents seem to feel to parent they have to fit into one of these ridiculous labels, as if raising your kids just like the French, for example, is somehow going to make them turn out awesome. The fact is there is no pre-made plan to parenting that’s going to fit into every life style or work for every child. Parents need to be adaptable and feel comfortable pulling ideals from where ever they like, or even making up their own.

None of them are positive.

While parents calling themselves by one of these labels may feel they are positive, when other people say something like, “Yeah, she’s a tiger mom,” or “They are such helicopter parents.” They aren’t saying that in a positive fashion. From what I’ve seen none of the parenting labels ever are. In effect, they’re just glorified, grade-school insults for the parenting world people who don’t like your parenting use.

They’re inaccurate.

Like most stereotype based labels these parenting types lack accuracy. What one may call an attachment parent may be another’s helicopter parent. The effectiveness of a label requires it be universally applicable. In addition, to say all French parents or Asian parents raise their kids “this” way, and you should too, is ridiculous. All cultures have parental variation. Not all American parents are all squish and no discipline either. It’s hypocritical that we look down so strongly on the use of other stereotypes, but embrace this parenting type trend plastering it all over the news.

They divide us.

You know that old adage that it takes a village to raise a child? Well, it’s hard for a village to work together if they’re busy arguing over what type of parent rocks the most socks. This parenting label trend has only widened the gap between parents and given them something entirely new to fight over. Rather than just debating individual parenting topics, parents can now attack and entire persona of parents creating a major us and them situation, which isn’t helping anything at all.

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