Leonard Sax, a practicing family physician, writing for the Institute for Family Studies says researchers have consistently found that the best parents—the parents whose kids are most likely to thrive as adults—are parents who are authoritative, meaning parents who are both strict and loving.
But Dr. Sax says he’s noticed something new in his parenting patients, a political dimension to parenting. He writes, “It is now much less common to find left-of-center parents who are both strict and loving. Loving, yes, but not strict.”
Dr. Sax say he’s seeing a growing number of parents who truly believe that it’s virtuous to let the kid be in charge, even when the kid is a 6-year-old.
New research regarding political views and depression in teenagers finds that left-of-center adolescents are increasingly more likely to be depressed than right-of-center adolescents. This finding is so pronounced that left-of-center boys are now more likely to be depressed than right-of-center girls.
Dr. Sax says he’s not suggesting that left-of-center parents should adopt right-of-center politics. He’s simply asking them to keep politics out of their parenting.
He writes, “Your child, your teenager, needs you, as the parent, to provide structure, to set boundaries, and to lay down guardrails that are enforced. This has nothing to do with Blue states vs. Red states or Democrat vs. Republican. This is about what every kid needs to thrive.”