To think gentle parenting is actually permissive

Personally I think it’s brilliant that we even have the insight to choose different parenting styles and adapt them to suit our children. I’m so grateful that I could learn from others and do better than the terrifying ordeal that was my own childhood. So live and let live.

also as someone with a very high spirited, emotional kid, I get very upset when k feel kiddies by other parents. He does meltdown here and there and it’s quite embarrassing enough without the judgement of others, who assume he does that because you have no boundaries or whatever, when in fact you are trying very hard to find the right approach to help your kid navigate the modern world. We women would do better to stop bitching about one another’s approach and instead share, celebrate and support OP. Life’s tough enough and we all do the best we can.

I find the way she is meticulously copying the OP but changing the words to say the opposite thing very coy and deliberately done in a mocking way to make the OP look stupid.

It comes across as a child mocking another child in their best adult voice like when ten years olds say "look at me look how clever I am" and it's not a nice way to reply to someone.

If she doesn't agree she didn't need to post she could have just moved on. Or she could have just posted something less mocking and disagreed respectfully couldn't she?

I don't really get what the people who claim not to be gentle parents are claiming to be? The opposite of gentle? Agressive? Violent?

I consider myself a (moderately) gentle parent too. What I am not, is a Gentle Parent. Gentle Parenting, as it is generally proselytised, is absolutist and restrictive and has loads of seemingly arbitrary rules with exaggerated pop psychology.

A couple of minutes of time out for an overexcited toddler? This is Not Gentle because it traumatically utilises Shame and Isolation.

A short stern few words for a boy who hits a girl in the playground? This is Not Gentle because it traumatically utilises Shame and besides this level of violence is Developmentally Expected. Remove him from his friends in the playground? Shame, Isolation, Trauma...etc.

When parents try, in good faith, to implement these absolutist rules, it often looks pretty permissive to outsiders. NB this is because they are doing it wrong and Not Truly Gentle Parenting (see above).

Gentle Parenting advocates also generally insist that any/all other parenting styles result in significant psychological harm, which I find implausible.

I'd say the same about so called Traditional Parenting too btw. Any model of parenting with absolutist rules is going to be hard to implement well.

I think good parenting (like good teaching) is flexible, adaptive, moderate, and uses a wide variety of strategies flexibly; this is because, I think, there's no one single good method.

Nailed it.

We gentle parent and are regularly told by people we know and people we don’t how well behaved and kind our boy is. It works for him and works for us. We have very clear, firm boundaries. We do (shock horror) very occasionally shout a bit (we’re human). Showing your children your range of emotions is extremely important for their emotional development and occasionally getting cross is actually not incongruent with the general concept of gentle parenting. A better way to think of gentle is to consider it like traditional parenting but trying to replace fear with other motivators.

Cheers @LostTheMarble

Just don't parent that way if it baffles you to that extent.

I find @MrsTerryPratchett to often be a very articulate poster even if I don’t always agree with the response. I’m not sure why there’s a need for such a snide remark.

That’s because it’s not unhealthy for a 4 year old to have emotional disregulation. That doesn’t mean tantrums don’t need to be dealt with accordingly, but it’s really not a terrible thing for a preschooler to still to be learning how to manage their feelings. You may have children who naturally are inclined not to be overly emotionally expressive, or they’ve learned young that they’re simply not allowed to feel overwhelmed.

Aren't you clever.

Gentle parenting is where instead of yelling at your kids in a shop you set expectations out clearly beforehand, engage with them during the shop and get them helping you/chat to them about what you're doing. Recognise that they're not going to be happy shopping for four hours just because that suits you and don't throw empty threats at them to try and get them to stay in line.

Gentle parenting is just good parenting basically. you are clear about expectations, consistent in your approach and mean what you say. You are clear about boundaries from an early age so they are the norm and accepted. You spend a lot of time with them so they want to please you and so are much more likely to behave. Gentle parenting if you do it correctly takes a lot of time and effort.

It sounds like you mean people who are lazy parents that dress it up as gentle parenting tbh.

I don't pretend to know what "gentle parenting" as an official term means. But I did try and parent in a very gentle way and it was fine for one of my dds but it just didn't match the energy of the other one. Apart from anything else, she didn't have the patience to listen to a drawn out explanation about why we said no to something as it would cause her massive frustration in an already frustrating situation, and she responded better to more clearly stated boundaries. So parenting for the individual child you have is key I think.

I consider myself a gentle parent. I don’t shout, or make up arbitrary consequences. But there are consequences. Discipline means to teach and gentle parenting is a method of teaching, whereas permissive parenting is where parents turn a blind eye and fail to teach. I think the two are often confused.

I work with families where the children have 'gone off the rails' I don't think any of the families that I work with were 'gentle parents'. From my observations the children who are parented gently are not so obedient as toddlers/young children but tend to grow up into very self motivated kind teenagers.

To think traditional parenting is just abusive.

Even though those who favour it are very insistent it isn’t - well, it is, isn’t it?

Its all ‘if you punish them properly they won't develop issues later’ (they do) ‘you’re expecting too little’ (you’re not) ‘the teachers sanction, make sure to punish them at home and school without understanding first’ (nonsense.)

I know post after post will insist that traditional parenting does have love and isn't abusive and to be fair I see traditional parents talk a lot about love and care but they don’t seem to have a clue how to implement them and their kids are miserable and leave the second they can.

See how bloody stupid that is?

Not a child with additional needs but it certainly snaps toddlers out of tantrums very quickly. Mine had very very few tantrums because they learnt, as soon as they turned about 2, they got no positive attention from it. All their gently parented friends were still throwing tantrums at 4. But as above, I'll be told these parents were not gentle parenting properly, despite being teachers, midwives etc who had read all the research papers themselves.

This again 🙄. Just because you see permissive parenting, doesn’t equate it to gentle parenting, which in itself has been a ‘thing’ for generations. I always say, if you don’t understand what gentle parenting is, watch Bluey. Explains it perfectly. It doesn’t mean giving in to every whim. And what seems like permissive may have its own explanations - some children with additional needs need parenting which doesn’t align with the mainstream. That doesn’t mean letting them get away with anything, but ‘firm consequences in the moment’ won’t help a child in full meltdown.

The problem with these debates is the No True Scotsman fallacy.

"True" Gentle Parenting is everything that is good. If you try to do it but it doesn't work or even causes harm, you weren't doing True Gentle Parenting.

My conclusion is: Gentle Parenting is only True Gentle Parenting when it works, but whenever it doesn't work, it's because you're doing it wrong. Therefore Gentle Parenting always works, see? Science.

We'll have lots of examples soon. These threads always run to dozens of pages. Wait till the issue of toddler children hitting or pushing other children comes up.

Reading multiple Facebook posts does not make you an expert. A few neuroscience research papers would have been a better use of time. Impulse control is not fully developed until well past teenage years.

Just wondering what the OP said that makes them a fantasist?