I have already written several articles about the importance of a warm emotional relationship with a child, the harm of punishment, how to properly praise and support a child, now I want to talk about power in relationships parent with child. Many parents get annoyed when they once again hear about the importance of emotionally warm contact, understanding and acceptance of the child with all his strengths and weaknesses, and the need to develop trusting relationships in which there is no place for punishment (degrading to the child’s dignity). An image of an all-permissive and all-permissive parent and his child - selfish, uncontrollable and spoiled - appears in my head. These are the questions parents often ask at trainings, seminars and individual consultations: If I show too much tenderness and warmth, will my child grow up unadapted to the world or spoiled? How to define the boundaries of what is permitted, if not with the help of prohibitions and punishments for failure to comply? If you do not punish a child, then he will understand that he can get away with everything and will stop respecting me? How to influence a child so that he obeys me without punishments? Is it possible to spoil a child with attention and care? I will share the answers to these (far from simple) questions with you in this article. Half a century ago, a wonderful researcher and scientist, Diana Baumrind, identified the well-known classification of parenting styles: authoritarian, authoritative (democratic) and liberal ( conniving). This classification was based on two types of parental behavior - acceptance and demandingness, which formed these combinations called “parenting styles”. Around the same time, attachment theorists, especially Gordon Neufeld, drew attention to the importance of emotional care on the one hand, and the ability to lead, direct, and set boundaries on the other. If you look closely at the discoveries of these two researchers and highlight the main idea in them, you can understand that they were talking about this: in the relationship between a parent and a child, the presence of both emotional warmth and demandingness (power) is important. Moreover, the most important thing in this conclusion is that warmth and power must be present together, at the same time, only “in one bottle.” Both in terms of care and in terms of exactingness, one must avoid excess or lack of each of them. Parents who do not care enough about the child can clearly set the rules, the boundaries of what is permitted, their children are usually obedient (because they experience fear of disapproval or punishment), the parent can be as involved in the child’s life as possible, but not emotionally, but through events - monitoring him, teaching him something. then, saying “how to behave” and the like. Everything would be fine, but it is difficult for such a parent to truly understand the child, his feelings and needs, and accordingly it becomes impossible to develop trusting relationships, the child will never tell his secrets to mom or dad, will not share his experiences, will not talk about his friends or his first crush. There are parents who, on the contrary, are very sensitive, responsive, always ready to help the child, accept him for who he is. Until some time (up to about 2-3 years), the child grows up safely, bathes in love and care, but as soon as the first childish protests and refusals appear, when the child tests the strength of the established rules (“What, you really, really can’t eat just sweets? Now I’ll try to scream harder and stomp my feet, maybe they’ll allow it”), then the parent stops coping and “bends in.” The mother can no longer withstand this challenge, defend her adult position, and thereby show the child: “I am here, I care about your safety, with me you are not afraid of anything. This world is safe because there is consistency and predictability." And here the child no longer feels protected (the lack of boundaries of what is permitted leads to increased anxiety), because next to him there is no one big and"