How Lighthouse Parenting Benefits Your Child and Strengthens Your Family

Lighthouse parenting is about applying what we know about balanced parenting.

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Lighthouse Parenting guides us how to balance our expressed love with clear
expectations and firm guidelines that protect our children.

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Balanced parenting leads to proven positive outcomes for children. Briefly, parents who
follow balanced parenting strategies raise children who achieve greater academic
success, engage in fewer behavioral risks, possess a higher level of emotional well-
being, and have reduced emotional distress. Please don’t read those points casually;
stop and reflect on how important they are in shaping a human destined to thrive.

Now, look at each of the details below and consider their impact.

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Children and adolescents raised with a balanced parenting style (AKA Lighthouse Parenting) have been shown to have:
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• Better self-esteem
• Higher levels of resilience
• Better emotional and mental health, including reduced depression and anxiety
• Improved grades and better engagement with teachers
• Increased participation in after-school and extracurricular activities
• Less experience being bullied or bullying others
• Less exposure to violence
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These benefits continue into the teen years when it has been shown to also reduce behavioral risks, including:

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• Safer driving behaviors and fewer car crashes
• Less substance use
• Later start of sexual activity and safer sexual behaviors

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These meaningful outcomes are likely tied to the fact that families that use a balanced
approach to parenting also have the closest, warmest, and most communicative
relationships. Therefore, balanced (Lighthouse) parents also know more about what is
going on in their children’s lives and therefore can monitor them more closely. Their
children don’t resent rules or boundaries because they know that they are meant to
keep them safe and are rooted in how much their parents care about them. These
children see their parents as guides rather than as people trying to control or limit them.
In fact, they understand their parents are guiding them to safely become independent.
Therefore, they may choose to develop strong, interdependent, mutually reliant
relationships with their parents over their lifetime.

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It is these type of interdependent relationships that ensure that we humans will stay
connected across the generations. Knowing we belong to each other; we will thrive.

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This piece is adapted from Lighthouse Parenting: Raising Your Child with Loving guidance for a Lifelong Bond by Dr. Ken Ginsburg.

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