Flexible parenting allows parents to adapt their behavior and emotional responses to their child’s specific needs and circumstances while staying true to their parenting values and priorities.
Parents often face the challenge of managing multiple competing demands simultaneously to achieve work-life balance.1
Many factors can affect the costs and benefits of any parenting decision.
Flexible parents have the psychological flexibility to make these decisions based on different factors to yield positive outcomes for children rather than rigid rules. This parenting style reduces emotional strain in interactions between parent and child and fosters a strong relationship.
Among the four parenting styles in the work of Diana Baumrind, authoritative parents are flexible parents, while authoritarian parents are inflexible parents.
What Is Psychological Flexibility
Psychological flexibility is a set of skills you can use to manage difficult thoughts, feelings, and experiences to adapt to life’s challenges while maintaining mental well-being. They include tolerating and accepting negative emotions, being open to new ideas or different ways to do things, and taking different perspectives.
The absence of flexibility can be characterized by a set of rigid and maladaptive responses to challenging experiences, which can ultimately exacerbate distress and hinder personal growth.
