More on parenting

We've decamped for a couple of days to stay at Mike and Lynn's while they're away on a mini-vacation. It's good for us at a lot of levels, giving us a chance to spend more time with the grandchildren, live out of baskets and bags for a while, and adapt when we're not always so adaptable.
It's that last point that's been kicking around my head since a conversation at the dinner table on Monday night. Let's see. Michael and his girl friend, Lindsey, Krista, Tess, and Cassie were here. Joe was out with friends and Matt has a place of his own now.
After dinner, Lindsey and I talked for a while. She said that her mother really enjoyed having the kids living at home, even though or perhaps particularly because they are all in their 20s. Lindsey observed that some households are all about the kids while others are all about the parents. Her household is all about the kids.
Hmm.
I thought back to the household we had when Mike and Adam were at home, of the households where  Sandra and I grew up, of other families we've known through the years. While not every household fits neatly into one category or another, there are some broad similarities.
Households that are kid-centric seem to be more open, with more people coming and going, more energetic, more spontaneous. It doesn't mean that those households are necessarily more permissive or without guidance - Mike and Lynn's children are invariably polite to new and familiar guests. It's just that, well, there's more of an inclination to say yes rather than no.
Parent-centric households are, painted broadly, are likely to be more ordered, perhaps just to keep order, perhaps to ensure that teaching moments are never missed. It also doesn't mean that parent-centric households can't be fun or inventive, but rather that you know who is  in charge (or, at least, pretending to be.
Neither model is necessarily more virtuous than others. Some parent-centric households are that way because the parents are so desperately trying to figure it out themselves that they're less tolerant of additional things being out of control. Some kid-centric households are such because the parents are clueless or powerless to assert leadership. There are good parents and lousy parents using each model.

If you know and trust your kids and if you know and trust yourself, you'll do fine with either choice. If you don't (and most of us don't), then the choice of model doesn't matter much either because the primary issues are still going to make the decisions for you.