Can setting firm boundaries with kindness raise well-behaved kids, or does it lead to entitlement and defiance? Let’s learn more about gentle parenting style!
A look at the data on gentle parenting.
Key points
- The concept of Gentle Parenting is not based on scientific data.
- Gentle Parenting does incorporate some very good parenting techniques.
- Gentle Parenting may ask too much of parents.
What Is Gentle Parenting Style?
The term “Gentle Parenting” was coined by Sarah Ockwell-Smith, a British writer who has authored a variety of books on the subject. She emphasizes the importance of empathy, respect, understanding and boundaries in parenting. And in doing so, she shares some of the best practices of good parenting.
Read More Here: Let Kids Be Kids? 6 Identifying Signs of Hurried Child Syndrome
But you may be surprised to know that Ockwell-Smith actually has no qualifications for calling herself a parenting expert.
She has an undergraduate degree in psychology, she is a mother, but otherwise, nada. Her ideas are her own. Like other parenting experts before her such as William Sears, she speaks based on her own opinions and observations rather than from scientific research findings.
In other words, Gentle Parenting has no data behind it. And it is just beginning to be studied. So how can parents know if it is an effective technique for raising happier children?
Well, they can’t.
But this has not stopped many parents from adopting Gentle Parenting wholeheartedly and feeling deeply that this is the “right” way to parent.
It is important for such parents to keep in mind that since parents started to parent, there have been various styles of parenting that have been considered “right” at the time and then, just as quickly, gone out of fashion.
And in the last 75 years there has been a particular trajectory to parenting styles: since Dr. Benjamin Spock wrote his first parenting book in 1946, parenting has become progressively more “child centered” with Gentle Parenting being the most child centered of them all.
But is it actually good for children to be the center of so many of their parents’ thoughts and actions?
Let’s look at what little data there is on Gentle Parenting.
In one of the first studies, professors Annie Pezalla and Alice Davidson gathered data from 100 self-identified “Gentle Parents”. And what they found may not surprise you. It turns out that this parenting style is extremely hard for parents to implement.
This is what they said, “Parenting young children has always been hard, but evidence suggests that it might be getting harder. The pressures to fulfill exacting parenting standards, coupled with the information overload on social media about the right or wrong ways to care for children, has left many parents questioning their moment-to-moment interactions with their family and leaving them with feelings of burnout.1
And they found that gentle parents were not always so gentle on themselves: They found that over one-third of the parents were extremely self-critical and felt ineffective as parents. They said, “Gentle parenting seems to represent an approach that is extraordinarily gentle for the children, but perhaps not-so-gentle for the parents themselves.”
Moreover, it is also not clear that remaining calm at all moments is actually helpful for children.
While extreme emotional outbursts from parents in reaction to children’s misbehaviors are obviously not advantageous, I would suggest that there is a natural feedback system which is in place in most parent-infant/child interactions both in humans and in most other mammals: when a child or young animal misbehaves by doing something dangerous or annoying, the parent naturally reacts accordingly — with an angry word or growl and sometimes a correction.
From this the child understands that she has done something she should not have. The parent’s negative reaction is the logical and normal consequence for a child’s misbehaviors and the child learns what the parent will and will not tolerate.
And the effectiveness of this sort of feedback has been widely researched. As I discussed in my last post, in the parenting style known as Authoritative Parenting, parents make their expectations clear, they support children’s feelings and needs and they provide gentle punishments or consequences when children misbehave.
This parenting style have been shown to be the most effective parenting method and the one that yields the happiest children.
Gentle Parenting does share some characteristics of Authoritative Parenting — it advocates clear boundaries and provides support for children’s feelings and needs.
And where Gentle Parenting also gets it right is in the area of advising parents to stay calm in the face of children’s extreme feelings. A parent’s ability to stay calm in the face of an infant or young child’s distress — sadness, pain, frustration, is helpful — and we have known this for a long time.
Theorist Wilfred Bion wrote about the mother’s ability to contain her infant’s highly charged affect by reacting with soothing as being one of her most important functions and the one that helps infants learn to tolerate their own distress.
He explained that the mother who can grasp the importance of, and take into herself, some of the baby’s earliest and most primitive anxieties helps her baby to internalize the mother’s capacity to tolerate and manage anxiety.
But staying calm in the face of a baby or a child’s feelings of frustration or sadness is not the same as tolerating every misbehavior with an equal amount of calm.
Where Gentle Parenting goes wrong is that it asks way too much of parents and it asks way too little of children.
At this point in history, most parents work to earn a living and face a host of demands just to survive. Adding to this the expectation to stay calm in the face of every sort of child emotion and behavior, being endlessly empathic and having no consequences for misbehavior may just be asking too much of parents.
Parents need a sense of having some control at home. Sometimes they need a child just to do what they have told them to do. And parents need some way to express themselves to their children.
When a child does not comply with what a parent has expected of them, it is natural for the parent to be annoyed and to say so. Children need to know that not everything they do is acceptable and that some things they do come with unpleasant consequences.
They really need to learn what not to do and what to do — because once they go to school and eventually to internships and to jobs, once they have friends, and eventually romantic relationships, this will be the reality of their lives. Not every person in life will be understanding and empathic. Not every motivation for every kind of behavior is equally acceptable in life.
Moreover, research has shown that children feel safer when they know what is expected of them and they feel less guilty when they have a consequence when they do not comply.
In the end, this is what the researchers who did one of the first studies on Gentle Parenting had to say: “What seems to be unique about the gentle parenting movement is that it has not been presented or advocated by scholars of human development; rather, it has largely been the product of social media.
Considering that parents are increasingly stressed or burned out by their caregiving responsibilities, it is imperative that evidence-based guidance is made available to those parents who are interested in gentle parenting”.
And two of the questions which need to be looked at are: is it a sustainable approach for caregivers and is it truly beneficial for children?
Read More Here: The Hidden Toll of Childhood Emotional Incest: Identifying Signs and Effects
This is the second post in a series on Gentle Parenting.
References 1 Pezalla, A., Davidson, A., (2024) Trying to remain calm…but I do reach my limits sometimes; An exploration of the meaning of gentle parenting. Tenth International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication, July 31.https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0307492#pone.0307492.ref010 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-translator/202311/when-gentle-parenting-doesnt-work https://www.nbcnews.com/news/gentle-parenting-style-hard-on-parents-rcna176917
Written by Corinne Masur, Psy.D.
Originally appeared on: Psychology Today
Leave a Reply