I’ve long struggled with this new (ish) concept of Gentle Parenting. The idea of it seems solid – it has the word “gentle” in it, which is a great start. Parenting should not be harsh, but it does need to be realistic. It should prepare kids for the real world, but allow them safe emotional access to their parents along the way.
Gentle parenting seems heavy on a verbal back and forth between parent and child when the child is struggling behaviorally or emotionally. Talk it out, don’t yell it out. Allow your child to be heard, don’t run roughshod over their feelings. This harkens back to the late 80s when corporal punishment began to fall out of favor, something that took much longer than it should have. In all our wisdom we decided that talking to our kids about their behavior was the replacement; anyone who has raised kids could tell you how that was going to work. The unobserved truth is: Talking is often the enemy of effective parenting.
And this is where Gentle Parenting falls short: it does not account for secondary gain created by all that “talking.” Secondary gain comes in the form of the control that it gives children since they are often in charge of the agenda of that discussion. This creates many twists and turns in a discussion that ultimately misses the point of Gentle Parenting. This is because the child learns that protracted discussion can delay or avoid uncomfortable accountability. We have to hold our kids lovingly accountable for the choices they make, and that’s going to make them uncomfortable. We can, and should, do that gently, but we have to do it.
Gentle parenting assumes that a child’s strong expression of emotion is the result of an overwhelmed nervous system and / or strong feelings of anger / sadness / invalidation. If you’ve had a child dysregulate in front of you (as parents, we all have) it can look exactly like these things. But if you notice, when a child dysregulates, it often gets them more of what they want – control, attention, acquiescence – than if they regulated. Some may wonder if dysregulation in children might, sometimes, be a choice.
So, a quick review of Gentle Parenting:
What It Gets Right:
- Relationally Focused
- Gentle (duh)
- Emotionally safe
What It Gets Wrong
- Gives children more control than is helpful
- Does not recognize child’s inherent inclination to seek control of the interaction with their parents or caretakers
- Does not account for the issues of secondary gain
- Short on effective consequence
Let’s take the gentle part and apply it to the way that we hold kids accountable.