“The Harsh Reality of Gentle Parenting”

[Anonymous]

I didn't ready the article but have read several difference bits of parenting philosophies over my 12 years of parenting and of course I have the 18+ years of being parented and I see my friends parents and basically have come to the extremely brilliant realisation that just love your kids as they are and play to your unique strengths as a parent and EVERYTHING WILL BE OK!

Your kids will tell you what they need (not want, need), and you do everything you can do provide. It's OK to fail sometimes, but that's why we show them how to get back up, take responsibility and do better.

[Anonymous]

I got turned onto gentle parenting as a philosophy when my kid was 2 and having tantrums/meltdowns. I read something that resonated really hard with me and it's sort of guided my parenting since then. I'll paraphrase because I can't remember the exact quote or source:

Small kids (toddlers/preschoolers) are just learning about how vast the world is, and trying to figure out their place in it. They don't know if they matter and they are trying to figure it out. When they throw tantrums or meltdown, part of what they are saying to their parent or caregiver is, "Do I matter? Do these feelings matter? Do I belong here?" And part of our job as parents is to say "Yes, you matter to me. Yes, your feelings matter to me. Yes, you belong with me." You don't have to teach them that their matters are of paramount importance, or more important than yours, or than other kids, or than everyone in the world. You just need to reassure them that you care, and that they always have a place with you where they matter and their feelings matter.

My kid is much older now and I do sometimes make sure to instill in them the lesson that it's not up to everyone in the world to prioritize their feelings. That they don't have to tell everyone how they feel or expect everyone to defer to them. But I always make sure they know that I am available if they need to talk about their feelings, and I will be empathetic to them. They have a home where they matter and are welcome. Nothing could take that security and safety away. I don't ever want to sever or corrupt their trust in that, because I think it's the basis for their sense of security in the world. It actually makes them more resilient, because if the world is cruel to them (which it is, inevitably, to everyone sometimes) they know they have somewhere to go. They don't need validation from everyone because they get it from us.

That's the philosophy, as far as I'm concerned. I have no trouble telling my kid "Please hurry up, you are making us late" or "no, you may not hit me -- it hurts and I don't like it" or "it's time for. atom out for everyone -- let's go cool down and we'll talk in a bit when everyone is feeling calm." Those are all things I say as a parent. I still subscribe to gentle parenting. I don't see the issue.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Agree with those saying the article is talking more about permissive parenting.

Gentle but authoritative approach has done wonders for me. I am extremely firm with my 3yo because she needs it, but I’m grateful to have learned to do it in a way that is healthy and builds connection. I have a demanding job and the last thing I want to do in my time with my kid is be in constant power struggle, conflict, making threats and punishments, etc. So this has been a great framework.

I also feel like it has shifted the way I manage people at work too - I place a little more emphasis on seeing where people are coming from now.

Agree, and I think that what a lot of people are missing is that no matter your approach, it's going to take time. You have to deal with the behavior no matter what. Telling your kid their feelings are important but they cannot hit and helping them calm down is not more time-consuming than telling them no, sending them to their room, and enforcing the time-out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m a mental health professional and loved this article. There is a lot to like in gentle parenting but the ideas that parents should constantly disguise their emotional state is a big problem. There’s a world of difference between “you make mommy sad!” and a gauzy, cooing “it seems like you’re having such a good time hitting mommy in the face with your train’” type response. Also, the part about hitting the little sister was perfect example of the excesses/absurdity of the gentle parenting ethos.

I’m also a mental health professional, and I have to say that there are probably a certain number of kids who really do need this kind of parenting. I do a lot of DBT for borderline personality disorder, and my patients talk a lot about how they can’t trust their feelings. Most of them had abusive parents, but there is a certain subset that had normal parents, but were born with heightened emotional response to situations.

Marsha Linehan gives a great example in her book (CBT for Borderline Personality Disorder). She talks about a parent taking a child to the ocean, and the child is afraid to get into the water. Normal parent makes the child get in the water. Instead of calming down, the child screams louder and louder until normal parent takes them out of the water. What happens next time they go to the ocean? Child decides to skip the middle part and just starts screaming.
When this same kind of thing happens over and over again in different situations, a child who already had heightened emotions learns to either go off the rails screaming or stamp down her emotions (which later leads to cutting or other self harm).

I can see how a gentle parenting approach might really work for these kids. I wonder if the authors of these books were highly sensitive children or abused as children and struggled to see their own emotions as valid. And if you can match up gentle parent and highly sensitive kid, it probably works out really well. (Of course, these women often marry narcissists, so I wonder how dad feels about all of this gentle parenting…).

But a normal kid doesn’t need a parent to sit on the beach and talk about his feelings. He just needs to stand in the waves for a minute and get used to it. And a kid who isn’t highly emotional might actually feel smothered by all of this, and later on might see her mother as weak and unable to stand up for herself.

All this to say that I don’t think that there is fundamentally a problem with this approach, but it is useful only in certain situations and with a certain type of kid. For example, this might be a really excellent approach for foster parents of abused children. But it isn’t a catch-all for every situation.

Also, if this really speaks to you, and you feel that you weren’t validated as a child, I think that there is a good chance that you married someone who doesn’t validate you (people do), and if you do this, you might just be training your whole family to see you as weak and like your feelings and opinions don’t matter.

How you get there from all that is nutz.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think empathy, modeling the behavior you want to see, and getting away from shame all make sense, but also think there are some parts of gentle parenting philosophy that are actively bad for parents and kids.

I think advice that tells parents (moms) that they can't express a full range of emotions is really problematic (the go in the garage and scream in a pillow rather than show frustration or anger in front of your child-to me that is messed up.

More harmful to me as the parent of a kid with anxiety is the constant smoothing of the path for kids. The experts in my life keep stressing that my role as a parent is to help my kid build distress tolerance. Kids need to know that they can hear "no" and they will be okay, that someone can be angry at them and they will be okay. If you don't have those small experiences of suffering and recovering through childhood-how do you get to a place where failing a test in college, or getting negative feedback from a boss is something you accept, recover, and work through. I see young people in my life who do not seem to be able to navigate even small adversities without falling apart and I wonder if there is a connection to this style of parenting.

This is interesting.

+1

Coping skills are imperative. Look around at some of these adults - they are a complete mess.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think empathy, modeling the behavior you want to see, and getting away from shame all make sense, but also think there are some parts of gentle parenting philosophy that are actively bad for parents and kids.

I think advice that tells parents (moms) that they can't express a full range of emotions is really problematic (the go in the garage and scream in a pillow rather than show frustration or anger in front of your child-to me that is messed up.

More harmful to me as the parent of a kid with anxiety is the constant smoothing of the path for kids. The experts in my life keep stressing that my role as a parent is to help my kid build distress tolerance. Kids need to know that they can hear "no" and they will be okay, that someone can be angry at them and they will be okay. If you don't have those small experiences of suffering and recovering through childhood-how do you get to a place where failing a test in college, or getting negative feedback from a boss is something you accept, recover, and work through. I see young people in my life who do not seem to be able to navigate even small adversities without falling apart and I wonder if there is a connection to this style of parenting.

This is interesting.

+1

Coping skills are imperative. Look around at some of these adults - they are a complete mess.

Well the idea of gentle parenting is to teach kids coping skills...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think so many aspects of gentle parenting are stupid. There, I said it. No, I do not yell at or harshly discipline my children. Yes, I am empathetic and kind with them, but this bullshit narrating their feelings to them and holding mine in is stupid.

Why do you think it’s bullshit? There is a lot of research on the benefits of helping kids understand what their emotions are and guiding them through coping with those emotions. As for holding your feelings in…I think it’s good for kids to see you get frustrated, but it’s bad for kids to see you lose your shit and it’s terrible for parents to vent at your kids.

DP. I agree. I think kids need to feel and understand emotions but I think self-control is also important, needs to come first. No hitting needs to be the first lesson, next is what anger is and what it feels like.

When children are older, they need to have self-control first, then emotions. IMO.

You cant control something you dont/cant identify. What is it that you are controlling when you are angry- if you dont know what angry is and how to manage it there is no control. Hitting is because of anger in your example. How can you talk about hitting without talking about anger- how it feels? what are you feeling? recognizing the physical and mental manifestations of anger allows you to categorize the emotion. Ex. I start to feel puffy (on the inside) when I get angry/frustrated. It sounds dumb but knowing that means I can address it before I act. So being taught to walk away, take deep breaths, say you need a break are ALL forms of self-control. Self-control is not stopping the emotion its recognizing it and doing something productive with it or at the very least not destructive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think so many aspects of gentle parenting are stupid. There, I said it. No, I do not yell at or harshly discipline my children. Yes, I am empathetic and kind with them, but this bullshit narrating their feelings to them and holding mine in is stupid.

Why do you think it’s bullshit? There is a lot of research on the benefits of helping kids understand what their emotions are and guiding them through coping with those emotions. As for holding your feelings in…I think it’s good for kids to see you get frustrated, but it’s bad for kids to see you lose your shit and it’s terrible for parents to vent at your kids.

DP. I agree. I think kids need to feel and understand emotions but I think self-control is also important, needs to come first. No hitting needs to be the first lesson, next is what anger is and what it feels like.

When children are older, they need to have self-control first, then emotions. IMO.

You cant control something you dont/cant identify. What is it that you are controlling when you are angry- if you dont know what angry is and how to manage it there is no control. Hitting is because of anger in your example. How can you talk about hitting without talking about anger- how it feels? what are you feeling? recognizing the physical and mental manifestations of anger allows you to categorize the emotion. Ex. I start to feel puffy (on the inside) when I get angry/frustrated. It sounds dumb but knowing that means I can address it before I act. So being taught to walk away, take deep breaths, say you need a break are ALL forms of self-control. Self-control is not stopping the emotion its recognizing it and doing something productive with it or at the very least not destructive.

I have boys, not girls. The first thing they need to learn is not hit, not lash out. After that, there's lots to learn. Girls should learn to not lash inwards, but that's less obvious and not as easy to teach.

First, no hitting.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think empathy, modeling the behavior you want to see, and getting away from shame all make sense, but also think there are some parts of gentle parenting philosophy that are actively bad for parents and kids.

I think advice that tells parents (moms) that they can't express a full range of emotions is really problematic (the go in the garage and scream in a pillow rather than show frustration or anger in front of your child-to me that is messed up.

More harmful to me as the parent of a kid with anxiety is the constant smoothing of the path for kids. The experts in my life keep stressing that my role as a parent is to help my kid build distress tolerance. Kids need to know that they can hear "no" and they will be okay, that someone can be angry at them and they will be okay. If you don't have those small experiences of suffering and recovering through childhood-how do you get to a place where failing a test in college, or getting negative feedback from a boss is something you accept, recover, and work through. I see young people in my life who do not seem to be able to navigate even small adversities without falling apart and I wonder if there is a connection to this style of parenting.

This is interesting.

+1

Coping skills are imperative. Look around at some of these adults - they are a complete mess.

Agreed but you have to be careful about what you conclude from this.

When I was a younger adult (20s, early 30s) I was super sensitive to criticism and had very emotional responses to what I think other people consider normal stuff -- a very critical boss, or a flaky friend who always bails last minute. I took this stuff personally and was very hurt and my life was hard because I had very little resiliency.

I'm not like this anymore (more on that in a sec) but a few years ago I was talking about parenting with another parent and mentioned that I used to be like this. She immediately jumped in and said, "Exactly, see -- your parents smoothed everything out for you as a kid and then you go to adulthood and couldn't cope. That's why I am strict with my kid. He needs to learn how to deal with disappointment and frustration."

Here's the part she didn't wait to hear: my parents did NOT smooth everything out for me. I had incredibly strict parents. They yelled, they told me to hurry up, they punished me if I messed up (i.e. getting grounded for getting a C on a test, or grounded for missing curfew... I got grounded a lot). They were not gentle, they never empathized, they told me often they "didn't care" what my explanation was for some problem I'd had or something I'd done wrong. They never reassured me that they loved me or that I was okay or that I could mess up and they'd still listen and support me.

And this meant that as I entered adulthood, the stakes for every freaking relationship were sky high. My boss is mad at me? I am a failure who doesn't deserve this job. My friend flaked on me? They must secretly hate me, maybe all my friend secretly hate me, I have no friends. I was super needed and wanted constant validation because (this is important) I had never received adequate care and validation as a child and questioned my worthiness as a person constantly. I wasn't a mess because my parents failed to teach my coping skills. I was a mess because all I had were coping skills (to deal with the crushing depression and lack of self-worth) but I had nothing underneath. No sense of value, no trust that my family would love me no matter what, no belief in my fundamental worthiness as a person that would make it okay if I messed up or someone got mad at me or someone didn't want to be my friend.

That's why I do gentle parenting and make sure to validate my kid's feelings and have empathy and don't say stuff to them like "you make me so mad" or I can't deal with you anymore." The world will teach them all about how little other people care about them and how unimportant they are. They need to know that I love them anyway, and I think they are worthy of love. I'm the port in the storm. I don't need to be the storm.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Interesting read--thanks for sharing, OP.

I wish the author had included consideration of Attachment Parenting, which was the big thing when my oldest was born, and which I think places outrageous pressure on mothers specifically. And I say that as a psychologist who wrote a dissertation (literally) on attachment theory!

That she ignores Whole Brain Child is interesting, too, since that book is arguably the most prominent within the genre. But maybe the examples she chose are more extreme versions of gentle parenting.

I try to be aware of my kids' developmental limitations and to be empathic, but we also have clear boundaries and limits for our kids. Making everything "child-led" isn't particularly beneficial for kids, IMO.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think so many aspects of gentle parenting are stupid. There, I said it. No, I do not yell at or harshly discipline my children. Yes, I am empathetic and kind with them, but this bullshit narrating their feelings to them and holding mine in is stupid.

Why do you think it’s bullshit? There is a lot of research on the benefits of helping kids understand what their emotions are and guiding them through coping with those emotions. As for holding your feelings in…I think it’s good for kids to see you get frustrated, but it’s bad for kids to see you lose your shit and it’s terrible for parents to vent at your kids.

DP. I agree. I think kids need to feel and understand emotions but I think self-control is also important, needs to come first. No hitting needs to be the first lesson, next is what anger is and what it feels like.

When children are older, they need to have self-control first, then emotions. IMO.

You cant control something you dont/cant identify. What is it that you are controlling when you are angry- if you dont know what angry is and how to manage it there is no control. Hitting is because of anger in your example. How can you talk about hitting without talking about anger- how it feels? what are you feeling? recognizing the physical and mental manifestations of anger allows you to categorize the emotion. Ex. I start to feel puffy (on the inside) when I get angry/frustrated. It sounds dumb but knowing that means I can address it before I act. So being taught to walk away, take deep breaths, say you need a break are ALL forms of self-control. Self-control is not stopping the emotion its recognizing it and doing something productive with it or at the very least not destructive.

I have boys, not girls. The first thing they need to learn is not hit, not lash out. After that, there's lots to learn. Girls should learn to not lash inwards, but that's less obvious and not as easy to teach.

First, no hitting.

Are you really being this obtuse? You are also sexist FYI. I was a kid that lashed out and I am female. The reason I teach my son not to hit in conjunction withemotional IQ lessons is because I was told no hitting and thats great and all but there is still no impulse control at younger ages and honestly its ebbs and flows with hormone surges. So I may not have hit but I could still be mean or I could call them bad words or I could knock over their juice. Your kid will just find another way to deal with anger but at least he follows no hitting.
If all you tell your kids is no hitting without directing them to something they CAN do when they get frustrated or angry then you arent addressing shi&.

[Anonymous]

Just about everything being "child-led": I don't think that's a problem at all.

I think that when you make things all about what the child needs, it can relieve this huge burden. You can just focus on getting your kid what your kid actually *needs*, rather than trying to make your kid behave a certain way. Like, my child does not *need* to get good grades. What she needs is to learn to work and to figure this out for herself. So I offer help but her grades are her responsibility. I rarely spend any time helping her with school, and I think I have much more time to do fun things instead of checking parentvue every day.

Also it doesn't mean you have to be a doormat. In fact, kids need to be taught to not treat others like doormats. They need an example of somebody standing up for themselves, setting boundaries, and getting their own needs met. And I think the principles in gentle parenting that I have learned help parents do this in a really effective way. Parents need to deal with their own issues instead of just trying to make kids act a certain way.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just about everything being "child-led": I don't think that's a problem at all.

I think that when you make things all about what the child needs, it can relieve this huge burden. You can just focus on getting your kid what your kid actually *needs*, rather than trying to make your kid behave a certain way. Like, my child does not *need* to get good grades. What she needs is to learn to work and to figure this out for herself. So I offer help but her grades are her responsibility. I rarely spend any time helping her with school, and I think I have much more time to do fun things instead of checking parentvue every day.

Also it doesn't mean you have to be a doormat. In fact, kids need to be taught to not treat others like doormats. They need an example of somebody standing up for themselves, setting boundaries, and getting their own needs met. And I think the principles in gentle parenting that I have learned help parents do this in a really effective way. Parents need to deal with their own issues instead of just trying to make kids act a certain way.

And by the way, she doesn't just naturally get good grades. She struggles a lot and got some terrible grades in 6th. But she learned things. She learned to ask her teachers and me for help when she needed it, she learned that she can do things like a big paper that she didn't think she would be able to do, she learned that she does best getting up early to work on something rather than trying to stay up late, and she learned how to keep track of assignments. So I feel like by centering her needs, I experienced less stress *and* she grew.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just about everything being "child-led": I don't think that's a problem at all.

I think that when you make things all about what the child needs, it can relieve this huge burden. You can just focus on getting your kid what your kid actually *needs*, rather than trying to make your kid behave a certain way. Like, my child does not *need* to get good grades. What she needs is to learn to work and to figure this out for herself. So I offer help but her grades are her responsibility. I rarely spend any time helping her with school, and I think I have much more time to do fun things instead of checking parentvue every day.

Also it doesn't mean you have to be a doormat. In fact, kids need to be taught to not treat others like doormats. They need an example of somebody standing up for themselves, setting boundaries, and getting their own needs met. And I think the principles in gentle parenting that I have learned help parents do this in a really effective way. Parents need to deal with their own issues instead of just trying to make kids act a certain way.

+1 and I think one reason I like "child-led" parenting is that it's a reminder that my job as a parent is to guide and facilitate my kid becoming a functioning adult. I think parents who are very authoritarian also view it as the child's job to adapt to their (the parent's) adult life, including their moods, schedule, etc. I think this is wrong. My kid's job is not to make sure I'm in the right headspace for work, or that I meet my social obligations or whatever. It's not her job to be quiet and unobtrusive and compliant so that I can take care of all my grown up obligations. None of that is her job.

If my kid doesn't understand how to calm down after getting frustrated, my job as a parent is to stop and figure out how to help her learn. I might have to do it a bunch of times. The end goal is that she learns to handle frustration. If my response to her getting frustrated and yelling is "I don't have time for this, just be quiet" then maybe I get to go back to my work or TV show or adult conversation or whatever, but all she's learned is that as long as she is quiet I don't really care if she understands how to manage frustration. That's not "authoritative" it's neglectful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m a mental health professional and loved this article. There is a lot to like in gentle parenting but the ideas that parents should constantly disguise their emotional state is a big problem. There’s a world of difference between “you make mommy sad!” and a gauzy, cooing “it seems like you’re having such a good time hitting mommy in the face with your train’” type response. Also, the part about hitting the little sister was perfect example of the excesses/absurdity of the gentle parenting ethos.

I’m also a mental health professional, and I have to say that there are probably a certain number of kids who really do need this kind of parenting. I do a lot of DBT for borderline personality disorder, and my patients talk a lot about how they can’t trust their feelings. Most of them had abusive parents, but there is a certain subset that had normal parents, but were born with heightened emotional response to situations.

Marsha Linehan gives a great example in her book (CBT for Borderline Personality Disorder). She talks about a parent taking a child to the ocean, and the child is afraid to get into the water. Normal parent makes the child get in the water. Instead of calming down, the child screams louder and louder until normal parent takes them out of the water. What happens next time they go to the ocean? Child decides to skip the middle part and just starts screaming.
When this same kind of thing happens over and over again in different situations, a child who already had heightened emotions learns to either go off the rails screaming or stamp down her emotions (which later leads to cutting or other self harm).

I can see how a gentle parenting approach might really work for these kids. I wonder if the authors of these books were highly sensitive children or abused as children and struggled to see their own emotions as valid. And if you can match up gentle parent and highly sensitive kid, it probably works out really well. (Of course, these women often marry narcissists, so I wonder how dad feels about all of this gentle parenting…).

But a normal kid doesn’t need a parent to sit on the beach and talk about his feelings. He just needs to stand in the waves for a minute and get used to it. And a kid who isn’t highly emotional might actually feel smothered by all of this, and later on might see her mother as weak and unable to stand up for herself.

All this to say that I don’t think that there is fundamentally a problem with this approach, but it is useful only in certain situations and with a certain type of kid. For example, this might be a really excellent approach for foster parents of abused children. But it isn’t a catch-all for every situation.

Also, if this really speaks to you, and you feel that you weren’t validated as a child, I think that there is a good chance that you married someone who doesn’t validate you (people do), and if you do this, you might just be training your whole family to see you as weak and like your feelings and opinions don’t matter.

How you get there from all that is nutz.

It really isn’t.
- you are used to having your feelings invalidated, so you don’t really trust them or ask for what you want.
- you don’t want to have that happen to your child, so you make sure their feelings are always validated
- this builds a relationship that is pretty one-sided where only the child’s feelings matter, and mom’s feelings don’t.
- as they get older they see that dad’s feelings matter, their feelings matter, their friends feelings matter. There is only one person whose feelings don’t matter.
- they see you as either too weak to express your feelings or so stoic that your feelings don’t matter.

Now, if you have an especially sensitive or perceptive child, they might pick up on your emotions anyway, and they will still make this a two way relationship. I will tell you that this is the only way therapy with my borderline patients works. If I try to be some traditional Freudian therapist and be a blank slate, they get pretty distressed. But normal people are happy to walk all over you if you don’t stand up for yourself.

So, if you have a normal kid and not an especially sensitive kid, this might not be the greatest way to ease them.

I’m going to say something else that you will find insane here too. Your kid might see you as weak, but feel that they need to stand up for you, and all of this coddling might actually parentify them from a early age.