Gentle Parenting has failed, lets accept this.

I completely agree with every word of this.

I was really only talking about smacking where parents feel it has 'worked'. But, yes, absolutely every single one of your points is correct.

Children who are smacked are fearful of being hurt. They try and avoid being smacked and so are compliant (if they are) for that reason. They are not making better choices because they understand or taking responsibility for their behaviour or because they have developed empathy for other people or because they have learnt a more appropriate response. They just don't want to be smacked.

Not always. Some become violent themselves either because they have a lot of anger/resentment/fear/hurt bubbling inside them, or because they learn that's how you deal with things you don't like .

Some become expert liars and /or break the rules just about enough to not actually get them into trouble.

Some become violent to themselves and engage in self harm or self damaging behaviours.

Some start weighing up whether what they want is worth the smack and sometimes it is. Even worse, sometimes the behaviour escalates because if you're going to get a smack anyway , might as well get it for something "good".

Some are completely baffled every time because they actually have no idea what they're doing wrong or the rules/goalposts are forever changing.

None of it is good for their wellbeing or for proper development and learning how to behave.

It seems to have affected your mental development quite significantly.

Disagree.
However I will say that in many cases efforts at gentle parenting have failed, which is very different and has led to a lot of permissive parenting with a lack of boundaries. Added on to that we have many parents who are simply not parenting at all. I see this every day as a teacher. Kind, boundaried, gentle parenting, I see much less in my inner city, disadvantaged school..

@GreyCarpet nailed it. Authoritative parenting is hard work. It's the gold standard, but it is also the hardest to do. Smacking - yep, easy, lazy, give in to your temper, job done. Not parenting and not saying no - yep, easy, lazy, give in to every tantrum, job done. The hard yards are in the middle ground and every young person I knew who has been parented that way - without violence but with strong boundaries, patience and good communication - is doing well and coping with real life.

@HallieM93 the scenarios you describe are nothing to do with gentle parenting and everything to do with parents not paying attention. You say you smacked and yet those things happened to your kids. Lots of us didn't smack but taught our children caution from a young age and set boundaries, and those things didn't happen to our kids.

Why are children the most violent they’ve ever been despite being the least likely to be smacked by parents? Can you explain it?

Because there is an anxiety in some parents now. They don't want to be abusive or toxic and they want their children to always be happy. They want their children to see them as friends. They don't set boundaries, they're scared of reinforcing them. They take the path of least resistance. They won't say no. So the xhuldren learn that they, their wants, their needs, their feelings are the only ones that count and have no experience of managing themselves in an uncomfortable situation because no one has ever taught them.

And it's also parental laziness. They can't be bothered with the hassle.

Or time constraints. They just dont have time to deal with their children properly because they've got to get to work or they've been at work all day and they're knackered.

Or they confuse their children by "Jemima, darling!" them for 30 mins with no effect and then snap and end up just shouting at them which raises the children's anxiety and stress levels.

This is the problem. Not parents deciding not to smack their children.

I see it in schools - children have low/no resilience because they've never been allowed to develop it because their parents have always protected them from failure. They can't manage even small disappointments without either bursting into floods of tears or lashing out physically at the person they see as being responsible for their failure.

Children who are smacked are fearful of being hurt. They try and avoid being smacked and so are compliant (if they are) for that reason. They are not making better choices because they understand or taking responsibility for their behaviour or because they have developed empathy for other people or because they have learnt a more appropriate response. They just don't want to be smacked.

Anybody who is against smacking on principle is often a terrible parent who sets no boundaries for their children, who are all awful selfish kids. Of course not everyone, but it usually works that way.

It really doesn't.

Children who haven't been set boundaries or who have been hit themselves and haven't been taught alternative ways of managing their emotions (or find it more diffiicult) might hit.

I've never smacked my children and, to my knowledge, they've never hit anyone. They've never even hit each other in an argument.

"Yes this is a true life event my child has been electrocuted, run over and mauled. They are examples of worse case scenarios that can very easily arise when children don’t understand dangers and boundaries because their parents are so obsessed with being ‘gentle’ "

So, your are not obsessed with being gentle, and your child has been electrocuted, run over and mauled.

I am gentle to my child, I gently taught him to be careful with plugs, roads and animals. He has never been electrocuted, run over and mauled.

I mean... Are you not the seller of the year?

That is what I often notice too.

I think you are confusing your perspective now as a parent and an older person, with your perspective as a child and then a teen, thinking you noticed things the same way and can therefore compare.

In truth, there is not a lot of evidence that children now are the most violent.
Parents at the time we were children were probably thinking the same things, noting how degenerated children were compared to the past.

The person you replied to is correct that many current adults are, and were as children, well capable of violence and abusive behaviour.

This

This is how we try and raise our DC.
Let them be their own self, navigate options/decisions/circumstances etc with our guidance. They're inquisitive and they ask questions and they love to interact with others. They love communicating and connection.
They have mega high energy because they have ADHD. They're not feral because they know what I expect from them especially when out of home and they will have consequences and they know that means no gaming/YouTube.

People always say how lovely and polite they are and as long as they are able to present respectfully to the public (not feral) I don't mind the little things at home. It's their safe space and their home too. Of course it doesn't always work out but more often than not it does.
Gentle parenting definitely doesn't mean let them be little shits and get away with it. Boundaries, respect, love and compassion and FUN but not at others expense

It depends on how gentle the parenting is.
I don't punish my children or give them pointless times. They have boundaries and rules and understand why they have them. Sometimes they've negotiated them with me.
This doesn't mean they're always compliant. They will still push boundaries, like normal kids but I'll just tell them off and remind them what the rules are. If they've done something pretty bad, I have been known to lose my rag then it's not gentle at all.
If it's things like being on their electronics when they shouldn't be, then I'll take it off them, reminding them what the rules are.
Dc are well behaved and doing well.

Punishing children can have other affects than just correcting behaviour.
The few children I know who had the marble jar punishment/reward system seemed to be really anxious because of it.

My kids are all in their 20s and doing well. I did probably a mix of attachment parenting, talking to my kids and firm instruction. What struck me then and more so now is that some parents just don't pay enough attention to their children/don't sound serious enough when they want something to happen or their children to take notice. You can't just waffle or take the easy way out.

Gen X here too.
I remember the hand prints on my legs/ arms. Although I remember it, it didn't traumatise me.
What she said to me as a joke did more damage than the slaps . I wasn't beaten by any means but I had a few slaps, her angry face was enough lol and the "stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about". Ugh gives me shudders just thinking about it.

My story is different to yours.

I wasn't blessed with the pretty stick as a child and the epitome of a pretty child to me was blue eyes, blonde hair probably curly. Idk where I got that from. Little House on the Prairie perhaps anyway, I had a wonky eye and brown wonky hair. One day I asked my mum if she thought I was pretty and she flippantly said, as a joke, "pretty ugly".
I didn't know she was joking. I was 7 and devastated and I have lived with that insecurity since then until only recently really. I definitely feel better about myself since I entered my 40s.

I discovered last year that I've lived with ADHD without knowing and it explains so much and I've had to confront a lot of things my mum said and did in the first 10 years of my life that massively impacted my life and mind. Force feeding me to make sure I ate/had something iny tummy despite the anguish it brought me because of food sensitivity. Nope, I was a fussy eater.
Oh and a hypochondriac known as health anxiety today. My DS has this too.
I don't blame her for any of it, knowing all this, it's helped me to understand why I am the way I am/have been and I actually finally feel seen.

So I wasn't traumatised by the slaps.
I've smacked both of my children in the past but it didn't do anything apart from make me feel like a hideous monster not really anything else. I haven't spanked them for a long time and I can't say 100% that I never will again. I can't. But I will do everything in my power not to because I dont want my kids to grow up traumatised by me. I try so hard with what I say to them also.

Sorry that went a bit longer than I expected.

Teacher here- IMO it's defo not the gently parented kids that cause problems. It's those who have been neglected, traumatised, and controlled through fear who struggle to cope in the classroom and in society.

Yes.

It seems that gentle parenting is really meant to be a form of authoritative ( nit authoritarian ) parenting not a form of permissive parenting

But it is often misunderstood
The name probably doesn't help

@Wishihadanalgorithm to me though gentle parenting is exactly about setting clear boundaries and understanding consequences - in essence it is simply taking away from the more traditional parenting punitive violent unnecessary punishments respecting the child as an autonomous being in their own right which means respecting them whilst instilling the need to respect others

That's not gentle parenting 🙄

Wishihadanalgorithm

I would still consider that to be non parenting rather than gentle though.

Gentle parenting (to my mind) means calm, measured, quiet, empathetic and respectful.

Being scared of upsetting a child results in no active parenting at all. That's where the problems lie.

Gentle parenting shouldn't be about no having boundaries but about how they are presented and enforced.

There are a lot of parents who THINK they are gentle parents, and tell everyone they are gentle parents, and are really anything but.

I have a family member who I think falls into the same category as a lot of other "gentle parents" who aren't really. She's traumatised from her childhood. As a result, she associates discipline with abuse. From her child's babyhood, she's never been able to enforce a boundary on anything, because she can't deal with saying "no" and hearing her child cry. So her solution to him misbehaving is to try to cheer him up with chocolate and toys.

Ironically, she also has terrible emotional regulation skills and is extremely easily overstimulated so in private she will lose her temper and shout over almost nothing. She passively watched her child kick, punch, scream and refuse to do anything all day and tried to solve it by buying him heaps of toys. Then when we went back to her house, he started singing, not even loud, and she lost it and screamed at him to shut up.

Her unstable and volatile lifestyle means that on multiple occasions (mental health crises, big arguments with boyfriends, drug overdoses), her child has needed to be collected from her house at ~midnight by his Dad, who she feels is abusive because he has consequences, and she has now lost custody of him entirely and he lives with his Dad. His behaviour is improving rapidly.

THIS is the kind of person you will encounter in the park, a child running around, taking other children's toys, hitting and pushing, screaming, and the mother saying, "Sweetheart, please don't hit Mummy. I've got some chocolate buttons. Do you want some chocolate buttons? OK, I'll buy you a toy from the shop if you stop pulling that little girl's hair. You're still pulling her hair, so I'm not going to buy you a toy. Oh don't cry sweetheart! I will buy you a toy. I'll buy you two toys! Just stop crying!" and then turning to little girl's Mum to say, "I'm gentle parenting!"

There was nothing gentle at all about that household.

My DC haven’t had gentle parenting and neither have they had smacks. There is an in between stage.

I have a relative who uses gentle parenting because they are scared to upset the child. When we’ve looked after the child and done more traditional parenting, they have behaved well. When their parents are present giving them lots of choices, asking and not instructing them for correct behaviour and manners it all goes to pot. The child’s name is always followed with “darling” or “sweetheart” which, when they are really misbehaving, is quite nauseating.

Children need clear boundaries and clear understanding of consequences that are followed through on. If you can nail this by the time they are 7, it makes life easier when they are 12+

Giving children too much freedom and autonomy makes them insecure and they push to find the boundaries. Smacking isn’t a useful tool but neither is gentle parenting.

I'm sorry you went through that. I can relate to the feeling of a parent having lost control, bigtime. My parents were good parents in most regards, but not in terms of physical punishment. From an adult's perspective it now seems to me that sometimes when I misbehaved, they would bottle up anger for too long and then 'explode', sometimes physically, instead of imposing more appropriate consequences in the moment. It wasn't anywhere near the scale of beating me up, but I do remember a smacking that was so forceful it took my breath away, and once my dad accidentally broke my finger while grabbing my hand to hold me still so he could smack me(!) I was also hit with a slipper once, and slapped across the face on another occasion.

I have enough recall of events to remember that on at least some of these occasions I was behaving like a complete arsehole 😄but only in the way that most children do from time to time. It's taken me a lot of years, as an adult, to properly accept that although consequences for my behaviour were needed, I did not deserve to be hit like that, and especially not to have a bone broken. It damaged my self-esteem big time, as I thought I must be an exceptionally awful, unlovable child if people who professed to love me were so infuriated by me that they were driven to hit me like that. The psychological effects were far more lasting than the physical.

I do realise the 'taps' and 'smacks' some pps are describing aren't in the same league as more serious hitting, btw, but to me it's still relevant, because violence is a continuum. Maybe those who are advocating 'taps' know they would never go further, but imo the fact that 'taps' or 'little smacks' have been considered acceptable in past decades has partly paved the way for the more serious violence some parents, who don't have good anger management or were brought up with violence being normalised, inflict on their children. I was once literally told by my mother that smacking 'wasn't the same thing' as hitting and that I must never say to anyone outside the house that I was sometimes hit, because people would 'misunderstand' and not realise it was 'just' smacking, which 'all parents' did (probably true at the time, sadly).

It's time society stopped with the mealy-mouthed quibbling about what constitutes hitting a child and what doesn't. Plenty of other ways to impose consequences for bad behaviour. It's not OK to hit an adult in any circumstances, and it shouldn't be considered OK to hit a child in any circumstances either.