What Your Favorite Harry Potter Character Says About Your Parenting

Many of us who are now raising kids grew up along with Harry Potter. It would have been impossible for the wizarding world imagined by J.K. Rowling not to have had an impact on us, and that impact surely extends to our lives as parents, not just to our occasional temptation to whisper ‘expecto patronum’ to ourselves on bad days. If you too found yourself severely cheesed by the failure of your Hogwarts admission letter to arrive on time (I’m sure mine’s coming any day now), you may be curious as to what your favorite Harry Potter means for your personal parenting style.

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Harry Potter: You know all the latest trends in parenting by name (attachment? free-range? sounds great!) and have formed an opinion about them based on that alone. You haven’t actually gotten into any of the books to know enough about their ideas to make an informed decision–who has time to read with a kid screaming for your attention all the time?

You may also have named your child after some teachers who were brave enough to be a dick to you when you were a schoolchild.

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Hermione Granger: You bought your infant a copy of Calculus for Babies as a joke, but you weren’t really joking, at least not entirely. Your house contains nearly every board book stocked by Amazon, and you periodically peruse the latest literature to make sure you’re appropriately providing mental stimulation to your child.

Someone tried to turn on a Disney movie in front of your baby once, and that person is dead to you now, or possibly actually dead depending on if you lean a little more Slytherin than Ravenclaw.

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Ron Weasley: You are the ‘cool parent’. You wouldn’t buy beer for your underage kids or anything, but you let them drive the car without mentioning that little fact to your spouse, whom you knew would say no. Despite your lack of intervention, or maybe because of it, you managed to have a kid who’s pretty nice, does decently in school, participates in sports, and is dating someone 10,000 miles outside his or her league. Well done, probably! Now you just need a good explanation for your spouse about how the door of the minivan got dinged up like that.

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Albus Dumbledore: You take ‘free-range parenting’ a step farther into what should probably be called ‘survival of the fittest parenting’. Your house is one giant booby trap of carelessly-stacked bookshelves and unlatched cabinets. You serve candy for dinner about three nights a week. You also happen to be the world’s greatest toddler manipulator (or at least wish you were, and admire those with better toddler-wrangling skills than you).

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Neville Longbottom: You put on a ‘disappointed’ face when your kid didn’t make the sports team or land a role in the school play, but really, you were kind of relieved. Working in the family garden is much more your speed, and even if your kid leans toward ‘average’ now, you’re sure he’s going to bloom any day now, whether that’s in a saving-the-world kind of way or just a, “Oh hey, when did this cute little pudgy buck-toothed child become supermegafoxyawesomehot?” way.

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Severus Snape: You … don’t really like kids. If your child didn’t have your spouse’s beautiful eyes, you probably would have long since tried to trade him in for something you find much more cute and snuggly and obedient. Like a pit viper.

(Feature image: AnjelikaGr / Shutterstock)