Permissive Parenting: Definition, Examples & Characteristics​

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph.D. Candidate
Permissive parents exercise relatively little control over their children’s lives. Is this a good parenting choice? What does the research say?
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When I learned about the different parenting styles as psychologists understand them, I was naturally curious about how to classify my own parents. I realized quickly that, yes, they have a parenting style, and that how effective it has been has varied across me and my siblings. As their oldest child, I was naturally responsible and self-regulating, and I learned to take care of my own needs. As a result, my parents got used to being quite hands-off with me: 
They trusted my judgment, saw how independent I was, and were pretty confident that I would not get myself in much trouble.

Things were different for some of my younger siblings, who could probably have benefited from parents who intervened more often and with greater authority. At times, they needed our parents to be less permissive and more assertive. What had worked in parenting me left my siblings at greater risk of making choices and being around people that would end up hurting them. Except in very extreme circumstances, my parents were permissive parents—warm but not very involved—and that brought with it both benefits and costs. Let’s look at the psychology behind those benefits and costs.
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What Is Permissive Parenting? (A Definition)​

Psychologist Diana Baumrind, in a series of classic articles, described her painstaking research that identified three primary parenting styles: permissive, authoritarian, and authoritative (Baumrind, 1966). Authoritarian parents use lots of control and not too much warmth in parenting; they give orders and expect them to be fulfilled. Authoritative parents provide lots of structure but are also more warm and loving with their children. Finally, permissive parents have few explicit expectations for their children and don’t do much to control their children’s lives.
 
Permissive parents tend to be less consistent with discipline, indulge their children more, and give fewer orders and chores to their children. This leaves children without a clear sense of what their parents expect of them (Shumow et al., 1998). Instead of following their parents’ guidance, the children of permissive parents are left to follow their own impulses and desires. As you might imagine, this approach has both pros and cons.​

The Psychology of Permissive Parenting​

Why would some parents end up parenting permissively? One potential reason is that some parents experience more attachment insecurity than others—they do not trust that they can make expectations of other people without alienating them or hurting the relationship (Branjerdporn et al., 2019). These parents seem to be more sensitive to the impacts of their parenting on their children, which can lead them to avoid making parenting decisions that will result in conflict between parent and child. In other words, these parents are listening to their anxiety about how their children will respond to being parented and letting those fears keep them from being directive (giving orders and setting expectations).

Permissive parents may also have a dislike of authority in general (Manuel, 2006). They do not want to limit their children’s autonomy, so they choose to give their children a great deal of freedom. This may align with their personal attitudes and morals, but it does not provide their children with some of the important structure and guidance they need as they develop.​

Examples of Permissive Parenting

Here’s one compelling example of how permissive parenting impacts families: A very interesting line of research links permissive parenting to poorer outcomes for children with diabetes. In general, permissive parents seem to be less stringent and effective in getting their children to eat a healthy diet (Podlesak et al., 2017); they tend to let children eat what they want, experience more frustration at  mealtimes, and have trouble getting their children to stay at the table. Knowing all this, perhaps it will not be surprising to hear that permissive parents may have a harder time following treatment protocols for their children with diabetes (Shorer et al., 2011). What might be good in one context, such as when parenting a child whose diet naturally tends to be healthy, becomes quite risky when enforcement of a strict diet is needed for the child’s safety.
 
You can also probably come up with plenty of examples of permissive parenting yourself by thinking about times when you or someone you know has given a child tons of freedom to make choices (McCoby & Martin, 1983). My own parents heard me talk for years about how interested I was in going to summer camp (while also feeling a little apprehensive about the idea), but it wasn’t until I directly asked to go that they moved forward with the idea. Looking back, I perhaps missed out on some great summers by the lake because my parents weren’t decisive enough to push me out of my comfort zone in this way.​

Permissive Parenting Effects & Outcomes

Most of the effects of permissive parenting identified in the psychological literature are not very encouraging; they suggest that permissive parenting is not the most effective parenting style. For example, a review of studies on academic achievement and parenting styles found that children of permissive parents tend to do slightly worse in terms of grades and scores on standardized tests (Pinquart, 2016). It is important to note that this kind of finding seems to be consistent, at least for children in the United States, across different demographics. In other words, permissive parenting is not the ideal style for supporting academic achievement regardless of race, gender, or socioeconomic status (Dornbusch et al., 1987; Pinquart, 2016).
 
Why might permissive parenting lead to poorer school outcomes? One study found that the children of permissive parents had higher levels of academic entitlement—they expected schools to be more accommodating and flexible than they actually were (Barton & Hirsch, 2016). This led to the students feeling stressed out and having poorer mental health outcomes as well.

Permissive Parenting Characteristics

Subsequent to her initial studies, Baumrind came to classify parenting styles along two different characteristics: how demanding parents are and how responsive they are to their children (Baumrind, 1991). The more demanding a parent is, the more expectations and orders they give. The more responsive a parent is, the more likely they are to respond positively when their children ask for attention or support.
 
It became clear over time that permissive parents, while not being very demanding of their children, could differ in how responsive they were to their children. Thus, Baumrind (1991) broke permissive parenting into two types: the permissive-indulgent parent and the permissive-neglective parent. Permissive-indulgent parents are warm and loving toward their children while providing less structure, kind of like my parents. Permissive-neglective parents provide little warmth and little structure; they are not very present in their children’s lives at all.​

Permissive Parenting Style Pros & Cons

A clear benefit of permissive-indulgent parenting is that parents are warm and supportive toward their children (Baumrind, 1991). When the children of permissive-indulgent parents seek care and love, they usually get it. However, beyond this benefit, there are mostly costs to parenting in either of the permissive styles. This may be especially true for children with mental health diagnoses such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder. Because of the additional challenges these children face, they need additional support from their parents in order to function, and when they do not get it because of permissive parenting decisions, their overall functioning can really suffer (Hutchison et al., 2016).
 
Another con of permissive parenting is that children parented in this way face fewer emotionally difficult experiences—at least with a parent alongside them. Think about it: If your parents rarely force you to make hard decisions (ideally while still helping you through them), you may not learn how to navigate those tough moments. In fact, the children of permissive parents may even develop less emotional intelligence as a result of not being exposed to these challenging situations (Wischerth et al., 2016).
 
If you would like to know more about some of the pros of this parenting style, I encourage you to watch this video:​

Video: Permissive Parenting

Permissive Neglectful Parenting

Permissive parenting that is also neglectful—as we saw above, this means it lacks both structure and support—may be especially harmful for children. Neglectful parenting is considered a form of abuse (Rodriguez, 2010), as it leaves children without many of the resources they desperately need to learn how to navigate their lives and develop into functioning adults. Parents who are neglectful may fail to provide food, shelter, and help with personal hygiene, for example.
 
The parenting choices associated with permissive parenting may also put children at greater risk of engaging in delinquent behaviors. In one study, parents who set few family rules, did not establish a curfew for their children, and engaged in minimal monitoring of their children’s activities—all behaviors we can definitely classify as permissive—had children who engaged in more delinquent behaviors (Church et al., 2015).

Permissive vs. Gentle Parenting

You might be wondering if permissive parenting is all that bad. Surely it is not healthy to try to control our children and run their lives for them? We might establish a difference here between permissiveness and gentleness. Parents can be gentle, regardless of whether they are firm or permissive. The problem with permissiveness is that there are times when gentle firmness is called for.

Effects of Permissive Parenting on Child Development

There is a ton of research that demonstrates a clear association between being permissively parented and having poorer developmental outcomes as a child. For example, the teenagers of permissive parents are more likely to use substances and get into trouble at school and with the police (Hinnant et al., 2016). This may happen because an important aspect of development is looking for and testing boundaries: Children want to learn what is good and not good, safe and not safe. Without parents putting guardrails on behaviors and establishing limits, children may overstep them. Children not given this structure may develop less empathy for their peers, which can make it easier to act harmfully toward others (Schaffer et al., 2009).

Children of permissive parents are also at increased risk for internalizing symptoms—the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors associated with anxiety and depression (Rankin Williams et al., 2009). This effect can be seen as early as preschool age, when lots of structure is absolutely essential for children (Rankin Williams et al., 2009). How might this effect take place? One study suggests that when parents are permissive, they do not intervene to address unhelpful attitudes about school and peers, which can lead the child to worry more (Chan et al., 2022).

Children raised by permissive parents also may have few experiences of having to put others’ needs before their own. This means they may be less considerate and more selfish than children who are raised differently, as they have had fewer chances to learn how to tolerate disappointment or interpersonal conflict (Santrook, 1998). Indeed, other research indicates that the children of permissive parents have stronger reactions to challenging situations than children parented in other ways (Miller et al., 2002). In addition to finding these situations more upsetting, they also may have more difficulty regulating their emotional responses to these situations (Jabeen et al., 2013).

Articles Related to Permissive Parenting

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Permissive Parenting

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Permissive Parenting

If you are a parent and you find creating structure and setting rules to be difficult, you are far from alone. (Likewise if you struggle with letting your children make their own decisions.) I encourage people who are worried that they are parenting permissively to consult one of the many evidence-based books on parenting styles or speak with a child psychologist if they want their questions answered more directly. Parenting is a skill that can be learned and refined, and parents can change their parenting styles with enough commitment to the task; I have seen it happen in therapy. In therapies such as parent management training, parents can learn to lovingly provide structure, giving expectations and limits in ways that children experience as caring and kind. Even if you did not experience this kind of parenting as a child, you are more than capable of providing it as an adult.

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