Authoritarian parenting, one of the four main parenting styles, and in this video I’m going to give you an angle on authoritarian parenting that you’ve never heard of in any other parenting style video before. So let’s do this. The strongest influence in your child’s life wins. Is that you? I’m Brad Zude and this is Influencer Parenting. I’m Brad Zude with Influencer Parenting, and on this channel, we focus on helping you become the strongest influence in the life of your child because the strongest influence in the life of your child wins. That’s how we’re going to focus on authoritarian parenting today. Again, it’s one of the four main parenting styles. So you have authoritarian, authoritative, permissive parenting, passive parenting. This is the most strict parenting style that they’re in. Super high expectations, super strict, follow the rules, et cetera, et cetera. Authoritarian parents literally invented the phrase, “Because I said so.” They are, “My way or the highway. I’m in control. You’re not. I’m big, you’re small, I’m important. You follow me.”

So my wife and I, Greta, we have seven children of our own and everyone asks, “Oh my gosh, how do you do it? How do you keep the chaos down? But you have such incredible relationships with your children. How do you do this?” Now, running a home with seven children, it takes rules and it takes standards and it takes values and morals and goals and structure, all those good things you have to have in order to run an effective home. But we don’t Lord those things over our children, right? We don’t make them do them because I said so and I’m dad. And when you do that, when you become an authoritarian and you make people do things because you said so, it kills your relationship and it kills, most importantly, your influence. See, when it’s all said and done, when your kids are all grown up or whatever, you’re going to be left with one thing and that is your influence.

At that point, you can’t ground them, you can’t make them do things. You can’t even make them like you. And every parent, if you could begin with the end in mind, you want to have a great relationship with your children, right? You want to take your son on a fishing trip. Moms, you want to go out shopping and have coffee and all that kind of stuff with your daughters. And if you have influence where they actually want to be around you and they actually like to be around you and they want the wisdom and knowledge that you have in your life, that’s what influence is all about and that’s when you know you’ve done your job as an effective parent. Most parents have the goal of, “I want to raise a responsible child. I want to raise a moral child.” The problem is that they’re willing, subconsciously, they’re willing to sacrifice their relationship with their children in order to achieve it.

They actually love their children so much and they want them to be such a way so bad that they implode the relationship in the meantime, getting them to act moral and do good in school and hang out with the right crowd and get married and get a good job and all these sorts of things. And then when they’re older, you find out, “Wow, I don’t have a relationship with you and you don’t influence my life and this is kind of awful. What did we do all that for?” Another big downfall of authoritarian parenting style is that your children will do whatever it takes to conform to the behavior. Because mom or dad, they’re not giving the reason why or how you get to the behavior, they just want you to achieve the behavior. So maybe an authoritarian parent says, “Hey, I want you to get straight A’s in school,” and you have a child that maybe is just not capable of straight A’s. Maybe they get some Bs here and there.

So what does the child do? They feel so much the pressure to conform to the standard of their parents, that their parents demand, that maybe they cheat on a test or do something that sacrifices their morals or values in order to achieve the results so that they can actually please their authoritarian parents. See, then what happens is, because parents don’t care how something happens or the reason why it gets done, they translate that to their children and then their children grow up the same way and they go, “Hey, listen, I don’t care how it’s done. I don’t care what your morals and values are. Just get the job done.” This is what happens in sports. It doesn’t matter who you are or how good of a person you are, if you can’t catch the ball, you’re no good to me. That’s an authoritarian style of a job, right? And that is not what we want for our children.

And speaking of parenting styles, one of the things that authoritarian parents have to separate out is that they may be someone very, very important and successful in the workplace, maybe they have a lot of employees working underneath them and they’re used to people coming up to them and serving them and asking how they can help them and getting things done on a very short and timely manner, and it develops that authoritarian mindset. But if that’s you, you can’t take that home and then overlay that on your home and your children. Your children don’t work for you. They’re children. They’re not here to serve you, right? They fit into the home. You actually exist to teach them your knowledge and your wisdom that you’ve gained over the years and submit yourself humbly to them and teach them so that they can become wise and successful adults.

Another good example of authoritarian parents would be like this. Imagine a police officer, imagine a police officer with this dark blue hat on, his police officer sunglasses, right above his police officer mustache. Imagine his deep Navy blue uniform, his gold badge on his chest, his black walkie talkie on his shoulder, his belt with his gun and his baton. Maybe some red and blue flashing lights in the background. Uh-oh, you’re getting pulled over. “You’re kidding, a ticket.” You’re about to have an interaction between an officer of the law and a law breaking citizen. And that officer of the law gets out of his white squad car, walks up to your window with his clipboard, demanding your license and registration. Now, is that a fun interaction? No, not at all, right? That’s not an enjoyable interaction. On the contrary, I want you to imagine an undercover police officer. They look just like you and me. In fact, maybe you were standing right next to one today and you didn’t even know it.

They still carry a gun and they still have a badge, but they hide it. They don’t lead with their power, they don’t lead with their authority. They just know when to take it out and when to use it. And the goal of any parent in order to gain influence in the life of your child needs to become more like an undercover police officer. You still have the same authority, the same power. You just know and understand when to effectively use it on your children and you don’t walk around like, “Look at me. You’re going to do what I said, because here’s my power and here’s my authority.” That’s no fun at all. In order to be the strongest influence in the life of your child, you have to understand that children are not inferior to you. They’re not inferior. Look, it’s hard being four years old. It’s hard being six years old. How many of you were like, “Man, it’s hard being,” however old you are, right? And then someone five years older than you, they’re like, “Oh my gosh, you think it’s hard to be in that age? Imagine being this age.”

So whatever age we’re at, it’s a very, very difficult age. On some level you have to recognize this. You have to say, “Hey listen, child, you’re human, I’m a human, and we’re stuck on this blue and green ball. We’re just two humans trying to make our way through this place until we’re out of here.” And that is the humanistic approach that we have to have. You have more in common with your child than you ever stop and realize or think, and growing your influence is the best way for you to translate your knowledge and communicate with your child effectively. Another downfall of authoritarian parenting is that you become the thing that they want to appease. So, for example, if you said, “Hey, I need you to get all straight A’s because that’s what we do around here, around this house.” And they run out, they get all straight A’s, they immediately take their straight A’s back to you as a mom and say, “Look, see, I did it. I complied with the rules. Isn’t that great?” And you train your children that exterior factors are important to you, exterior factors are the motivation.

Not interior factors like hard work or, “Gee, I really put a lot of effort into that test and even though I got a B, I worked really hard.” As parents, we want to praise effort, not results. There are a lot of times when your child can put no effort into something and do something really great. There are other times where your child can put a lot of effort into something and have a result that maybe is not what you’re looking for. So, if you have a child that’s on the baseball team, for example, and they step up to the plate and knock one out of the park, you want to praise the effort they put into the swing, not the result of the ball going over the fence. So I would sit my son Andrew down and say, “Andrew, wow, I can really tell that you started on your back foot. You brought the bat up slowly, you kept your eye on the ball and you translated all your power through that swing and that’s why the ball flew so far. That was a great effort.”

Otherwise, what you end up doing is raising a praise junkie, right? If you just say, “Man, you knocked it out of the park. That’s my boy. That’s so great,” the reason they want to hit another home run again is to get the praise of mom and dad. Now, the praise of mom and dad is not bad. We love our children. Tell them you love them so much, all that kind of stuff, that’s not what I’m saying. But you want to praise the effort that went into something, not the result of it. So authoritarian parenting has that downfall because, again, all they care about is the result. It’s behavior modification. Behavior modification is expecting and demanding a result and doing almost anything to get that result, that’s it. That’s what authoritarian parenting is and that’s what behavior modification is. We want to teach our children the moral reason why behind what we do and then we actually want to pose that so the children want to do that as well.

And then we have it easy as parents, we have children that wake up and want to do the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing all on their own, not because mom and dad said so. There’s going to be a time where they grow up and they go off to college or they start to live on their own and mom and dad are going to be removed from their life. They’re not going to be that firm solid structure anymore. And then, at that point when the child doesn’t have that strict sounding board of, is what I’m doing good or bad, the child won’t know the barometer to which they live their life by. So they’re not used to dealing with drawing from within themselves what’s good and what’s bad. They rely on others for that type of feedback. So I want you to walk away with authoritarian parenting doesn’t help you become the strongest influence in the life of your child.

And this channel is all about helping you become the strongest influence in the life of your child. So join the #ipfam and subscribe below. Drop a like on the video, throw us a comment. It would mean the world to us. Let me know if you like the new office style set up here. And if you’re wanting to know more about the other three parenting styles, go ahead and click the links above. I’ll see you on the next one. The strongest influence in your child’s life wins. Is that you? I’m Brad Zude. And this is Influencer Parenting.

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