The fatal flaws of "Gentle Parenting"
and why traditional parenting gets better results
Originally published in the Moultrie News.
I see a lot on social media about “Gentle Parenting.” What is it, and does it make kids better students?
A more radical branch of the Permissive Parenting tree, Gentle Parenting (GP) is, according to Parents.com, “a means of parenting without shame, blame, or punishment. It is centered on partnership as both parents and children have a say.”
Parenting coach Danielle Sullivan says Gentle Parents “do not compel children to behave by means of punishment or control, but rather use connection, communication, and other democratic methods to make decisions together as a family.”
An example: your dawdling child is slow to leave the house for school. Traditional parents might shout, “Hurry up! You’ll be late.”
Gentle Parents, says Today.com, try to understand why the child is dawdling: “Are they deep in pretend play? Are they reluctant to leave the comfort of home?” After identifying the dawdling’s root cause, “The parent can better enlist the child’s cooperation by saying something like: ‘I know you’re having so much fun playing with your stuffies. Let’s leave them right by the door so you can play with them the second you get home.’”
You now know enough about GP to see its flagrant flaws. Take the scenario above. I remember dawdling a lot as a child. I had no hidden motive. I did it because I was a child, and children dawdle. Even if I had some secret reason, like wanting to play with stuffies, an extended dialogue about it would only have exasperated me. Children don’t generally thrive on conversations with adults about their latent motivations.
Traditional parenting gets improved results because, ideally, it draws a quick, clean line between inappropriate behaviors and undesirable outcomes. Child dawdles; child gets admonished. Child continues to dawdle; child loses stuffies. Result: child dawdles less.
Children need simple directives and simple consequences because they are simple, unsophisticated human beings. Transactional moral negotiations mystify and bore them. Clarity and accountability work better.
Because of its reliance on diplomacy, GP gives children a lot of power they don’t need and aren’t ready for (power, incidentally, they’ll expect to wield in places they don’t possess it, like school and playground). But bargaining isn’t necessary for children to learn that No means No. The cleaner the connection between rule and behavior, the more likely kids are to internalize right from wrong.
Unfortunately, I’m unconvinced that children are even GP’s target. Based on social media testimonials, proponents seem most worried that their kids will view them as brutes if they practice traditional parenting. They appear to harbor unprocessed anger toward their own parents’ tough love and fear becoming the same sort of villain to their children.
Whatever you think of that, you can’t say it’s mostly about the child’s growth when it’s clearly more about the parents’ feelings. As a result, Gentle Parents unwittingly substitute the obligation to love with the need to please.
To see why that’s dangerous, consider an adult situation: Your alcoholic friend begs you for a bottle. Your need to please says you’ll be adored if you give it to him. Your obligation to love, however, knows it will ruin his life.
GP takes option A, mitigating its blatant error by negotiating (“This is the last time, right? You’re going to get help, aren’t you?”). Tough Love simply says no and drives him to rehab.
Something similar happens with kids. When a child repeatedly disobeys, it feels awful to scold, spank, or punish, but parents are obliged to discipline kids so life doesn’t have to. The child must learn that willfulness is no way to build a life. If you’re gentle on his third transgression of the day, rest assured his spouse, boss, or teacher won’t be.
So does GP make kids better students? No. Parenting expert Anna Lussenburg observes that GP fails to distinguish between children’s needs and feelings. There’s a big difference between children breaking down when they crush their fingers in the door and throwing a fit because they didn’t get a cookie. Yet GP treats both with the same grave attention. This can instill kids with a self-centeredness that makes everything about schools’ egalitarian structure more anxiety-inducing, greatly diminishing its yield.
The real world, of course, is even tougher, so Gentle Parent at your child’s peril.
Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books, or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.com.