Is “Gentle Parenting” All It’s Chocked Up to Be?

Someone sent me this article and asked to hear my thoughts:

The Harsh Realm of “Gentle Parenting”

It’s hard to sum up the article and the points the author makes, but I’ll do my best.

The author explains how she believes gentle parenting works, stating that it “centers on acknowledging a child’s feelings and the motivations behind challenging behavior, as opposed to correcting the behavior itself. The gentle parent holds firm boundaries, gives a child choices instead of orders, and eschews rewards, punishments, and threats.”

She mentions how gentle parenting has changed a lot about her parenting and how she views and speaks to her kids. However, she criticizes gentle parenting to do it just “right” and how a “child’s every act must be seen through a lens of anxiety and threat-detection—which heightens the parent’s dual role of child psychologist and emotional-security guard.”

While she acknowledges that practical advice and scripts can be helpful, they make it feel like you have to do things a certain way and that it denies the reality of what parenting in the real world looks like.

She accuses the gentle parenting industry of planting doubt and fear in parents. “The business of parenting advice, though, is to raise the stakes—to say it’s all your fault.”

First and foremost, she is not wrong in talking about all the noise, the shame, the fear-mongering that exists. Because that is so real. And any parenting advice, my account included, that is making your life as a parent HARDER, making you more unsure, or adding to the noise is not advice I think you should follow.

I recognize that I am speaking from inside the parent education space, and because of that I understand the intentions behind the things I (and probably many other parent educators) speak to. I also consume my fair share of parenting content and totally understand how saturated this space can feel with parenting advice.

It seems that the author of the article thinks that gentle parenting is requiring parents to get it “right.” That is, to be fully attuned, always calm, never mess up, always seeing beyond the behaviors, and never just setting firm boundaries and moving on.

“the gentle parent—and, perhaps, the gently parented child’s invisible siblings—must push aside in order to complete a transformation into a self-renouncing, perpetually present humanoid how has nothing but time and who is programmed for nothing but calm.”

Because the author uses gentle parenting as a catch all phrase for different parenting approaches like respectful/mindful/intentional/etc, I will mostly use the term “gentle” parenting here, but I want to talk a bit about my thoughts on parenting approach names.

I’m not a huge fan of the label “gentle,” because it gives vibes that parents are supposed to give "saccharine sweet, Miss Honey” vibes. However, I do think that the term gentle parenting can be really helpful in the important inner child work of parenting. I like to think of “gentle parenting” as meaning that we must be gentle with ourselves on this journey.

I believe that parenting advice should always steer back to our instincts and intuition. Nature gave us the ability to be the parent our kids need; we sometimes just need help getting back to it. Parenting advice is a tricky industry. I think it is so easy for guilt and shame to seep in on the receiving end, even if it isn’t the intention.

My take? If parenting advice is making you second guess yourself, if it is taking away your confidence instead of bolstering it, if it is taking the enjoyment out of parenting…then it probably isn’t the advice for you.

I know a lot of parenting accounts try to normalize the hard and messy shit of parenthood, but the reality is that they are trying to convey information on a curated platform in short snippets of content that can reach wide and generalized audiences.

Parenting accounts/educators are often sharing “best practice” advice. Examples are shared in hyperbolic ways to exemplify the overarching points. That doesn’t mean you are expected to perform them perfectly or that you have to be perfectly attuned with your kiddos all the time.

I think that where a lot of parenting advice goes wrong is pulling away from the fact that parenting is a relationship more than a set of skills. And relationships are messy and human and beautiful because there is room for mistakes. There is room for misattunement and rupture. We have the ability to repair.

Gentle parenthood does not require you to be a martyr (it actually can help you to avoid that). Sometimes you just do what you can to get through a moment with the least amount of harm. You shouldn’t have to lose yourself in parenthood. Gentle parenthood can help you find yourself.