Can't help but think dogmatic parents
1. Would mostly not recognise themselves
2. If they did would be loath to own up to being dogmatic.
I mean dogmatism aint something to aspire to!

Maybe most cant even admit it to themselves, yet alone other peers.

Hmmm...mysterious. Independent has almost the same article.

I see the Observer has an interesting article on this issue.

"The study, by the thinktank Demos, tracked the lives of 9,000 families and found that 13% used a "tough love" approach, combining warmth and discipline. It did not matter whether the parents were rich or poor – those that adopted the approach brought up children who were more likely to be empathetic, more able to control their emotions and bounce back from disappointment, and more capable of concentrating and completing tasks.

Sounds good to me and its what me and DW hope we do with DSs. I get annoyed by parents who seem to have no boundaries for their DCs.

Justine gives a quote at the end of the article which I also agree with.

Before I had children I would have expected to be a dogmatic GF control freak type. Instead I read the Baby Whisperer, threw it across the room in disgust, and "accidental parented" (God I loathe that phrase) my way through the last two and a half years. We're all still in one piece and still speaking. Result.

(Wine helps)

i just try and do whatever gets us all through the day happy, fed and sleeping at the end of it.

i've read so many bloody books and dip into them now and again but to be perfectly honest it's whatever gets me through it without shouting at the dss (3.5 and 20m)

that and a big glass of wine at the end of the day

I try to be pragmatic, but there are days/moments/moods (me and DD)/situations where I tend to get more dogmatic and realise that I am sounding like my Mum.

I just try to go with the flow with a certain amount of routine as a framework to hang the rest of the day on.

I've just winged the whole lot. Turns out that's called the benign neglect school of parenting!

sums me up too when I'm being nice to myself. On bad days I'm just a crap mum

Pragmatic with a lot of benign neglect thrown in and like scottishmummy aims are a good enough parent.

I don't understand all these terms but first time around as an idealistic teenage mum my bible was the Continuum Concept with a dash of Paula Yates (Paula ) and it all went swimmingly, 2nd child was a shock to the system - she screamed for the whole of her first year whatever I did. By the third I'd discovered ready-made formula and was mixed feeding by about 4 months, using a cot and other daring modern parenting inventions

Well I thought I was quite pragmatic but now that we are having sleepovers I see that I am more dogmatic than I realised, with a strong clock-watching element.

This is partly because the children whose parents are up for sleepovers at ds's age (5) tend to be the more winging-it types I think, so my shoutier, stricter side is highlighted. I am a strict bedtime kind of girl, mainly because my overriding memory of the early years days was that feeling at 6 am of '13 hours til bedtime, what the hell am I going to DO til then?' I like to know when freedom adult time is going to begin. I also have an enormous amount invested in manners of a rather formal type including napkins, 'please may I' etc. So encountering the freerange child who has no bedtime, and no formal 'manners' to speak of of which there are actually quite a few, is a bit of an eyeopener. So is the lovely relationship they tend to have with their parents, who don't enjoy have to shout the way I do to get the troops dc to obey cooperate.

Yeah, military is probably the word for me in parenting. I feel the best mum when barking orders at ds, oddly.