Gentle Parenting has failed, lets accept this.

Her husband gave her a gentle slap because she wasn’t doing as he said ….. unacceptable for adults, unacceptable for children

if you can only communicate using violence then I’d suggest emotional intelligence and communications skills need work

Lost in the rainy day.

I can entirely get on board with your definitions in general. But I don't agree with your definition of strict parenting.

Strict parenting done correctly is firm boundaries and appropriate punishments. If my child throws his switch across the room in a rage because he has been told, it's time to let his sibling have a turn.

Sending him to his room cool down is not unrelated to the behaviour in question (real life example from this week!). It's a reminder that throwing objects and aiming for younger siblings is not acceptable and therefore extra consequences required. Yes eldest was very tired after a long week, yes younger siblings had said something that annoyed him but unacceptable behaviour requires strict consequences.

I don't smack my kids, precisely because I can sometimes have a temper and much prefer to remove myself from.situation where I start to lose my cool. But neither do I believe it's fair to say reasoned, thought through, increasing scales of punishment that end in a pre-warned smack on the back of the hand, is abuse.

It DID affect you. It normalised for you physical assault on children

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.

Interesting because in my experience (anecdotal only, of course), it’s the parents who can’t cope with parenting who smack - they can’t manage the time and effort to actually parent their children so they use physical pain and fear instead.

Exactly this. On what planet is hitting people to get them to do what you want, 'parenting'?

We don't hit people. Any people. Especially vulnerable people. If you think smacking isn't hitting, it didn't do you any harm, and it's ok to hit vulnerable people - you are evidencing the harm that it did.

Gentle parenting works. Most people don't understand it and confuse it with permissive parenting, or never saying no. These threads are boring...

It’s not gentle parenting that’s failed per se, it’s that some (many) parents can’t parent gentle or otherwise. Similarly some parents can parent gentle or otherwise.

The basic problem is that many parents, who themselves are very ordinary, unintelligent people (remember half the country is by definition below average) seem to think that their children are “special” and that rules / boundaries don’t apply to them and only to other people.

They have absolutely no idea how awful at parenting they are because they can’t see what obnoxious selfish children they’ve brought up.

The debate over smacking is a complete red herring (although is is quite a helpful identifier as to who the bad parents are). Children were routinely smacked 30+ years ago. Generally didn’t do them any harm. People who don’t have a problem with children being smacked, whether or not they would smack the themselves are usually reasonable parents.

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.

But it has - because you think it’s ok to smack another person , a small person at that even to get them to do what you want.

I think many times people misinterpret gentle parenting for permissive parenting. If you are doing it right then it works. For me it’s common sense to treat you kids with the respect you want back whilst showing them what could looks like and having boundaries and structure.

screaming at kids and punishing them teaches them nothing. And if does creates the behaviour you want you’ve basically taught your child to behave out of fear - who wants their kids growing up with that mindset?!

Tbf, a lot of children don't like having their teeth brushed but I agree that restraint isn't the way. I turned things into a game based on Monsters Inc - scary teeth, scary teeth, scary teeth - brush the fronts and sides; roar - brush the rest of them.

On repeat until teeth had been fully brushed.

But why are you routinely needing to physically restrain your child to brush their teeth? Neither of my kids have ever been massively resistant. One of them hates mint flavour so when I accidentally bought mint flavour toothpaste I quickly did it for her whilst empathising with the fact she hated the taste, then bought strawberry the next time. She wasn't keen but she didn't fight me off. I wouldn't want to brush with a flavour I hate either. The other one is a bit lazy and needed a bit of nagging to do it.

I've never had to physically hold them down and force a toothbrush into their mouths. I'd be a bit worried about them if they were that angry about having their teeth brushed.

Having said that I’m not in the gentle parenting or permissive parenting camp either.

I am confident happy kind conscientious and responsible. I would also say I have issues from being smacked as a child.

My children are also all of the above despite never having been smacked.

Correlation is not causation.

This! If a child is raised properly from birth then you will never need to hit them. I’ve got a 13 year old DD who has always been an angel and an 11 year old DS who is ‘lively’. Neither of them get into much trouble at school as they were brought up with respect. DS has had 2 incidents when he followed some other boys and done something stupid at school, resulting in the teacher having to speak to me. Both times, he was sobbing his heart out at the thought of his dad and I finding out what he had done. He cried in the car all the way home - I didn’t even need to tell him off, just say how disappointed we were.

DS then lost everything he owned for a week - no devices, no tv, no toys, nothing fun. He came home and read and did extra work with me. He has never forgotten those 2 incidents. It’s healthy to have a little bit of fear of disappointing your parents - when children don’t have this, it becomes hard to parent them.

Some children do turn out well in spite of how they were parented.

So they just keep getting consequences on top of consequences. You hit them, then you still had to take away their stuff. So hitting them didn't work, did it?
If it was taking their stuff away that worked, just do that first. Don't hit children.

Also you can call it what you like - make yourself feel better by calling it a tap or whatever - it's still hitting. And if it was just a tap and didn't hurt them, what was the point in doing it? Parents who hit their kids and can't think of any other ways to parent are just shit parents.

Luckily the world has changed and these days lots of parents recognize that there are other ways to get results than resorting to hitting children. Id rather be a gentle parent than thinking we can teach right from wrong by hitting - sorry, "tapping" 🙄someone so much smaller than ourselves. That's just stupid and completely illogical.

If you don't want people to say you hit children, the best thing to do is not hit children. It's worked for me.

I think also the "I will make your brush your teeth" needs to be started early whilst you can physically control a child without hurting them - and many people don't like to upset their younger children because they are small - and suddenly they are too big to restrain

Well, you didn't say shout/yell you said Stern I believe.

Nobody thinks having a stern word is unacceptable.

Just seems a bit misguided to go straight to negative ways, rather than choosing a less aggressive approach.

"Do not hit with toys , otherwise the toy will be removed" - be firm, clear etc. then follow through.

No need to go aggressive, aggressive, then resolve 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

Look, face itz you messed up with parenting at times, and that's ok ... We all do.

Going back in time would you still use the same methods? Knowing that the removal of the toy was the effective way to teach the child? Or would you STILL resort to "tapping" then before removing the toy?

So you would hit your child on the back of the hand - sorry tap - sorry hit - sorry tap, not sure what you mean

I didn't explain why telling them off sternly was effective either, or was that me shouting, yelling, screaming, berating my child? I'm sure you will take that whatever way you want to take it

Enjoy your weekend

Ok, so you still haven't explained why "tapping" them on the hand was effective...

If it was such a light tap, what was the point of it? What, in your mind, did it achieve??

The only reason I'd tap the back of my child's hand is to get their attention if I thought they hadn't heard me, and that's more like... drumming/tickling of the fingers on their hand and physical sensation to get their attention.

And the reason people think you smacked your child is because you said that "It rarely got to the smack on the hand to be honest - a stern telling off was what it normally took. After the smack on the hand I would restrict some toys"

In the original definition of gentle parenting, parents have to follow through on these types of things.

A classic way of handling it would be: "I can see you are feeling very sad/angry about brushing your teeth. As your parent, it's my job to keep you healthy and safe, and that means your teeth need to be cleaned. I can do it, or you can do it yourself. OK, I can see you have thrown your toothbrush and are not ready to make a choice, so I will make the choice and brush your teeth."

If the child is so resistant to toothbrushing that they are fighting and need to be actively restrained then I'd suggest that any good parent would need to start looking at underlying reasons for this (Sensory issues with the toothpaste/toothbrush? Some sort of bad experience with the dentist? Toothache?) and address them, but in the mean time, the teeth need to be brushed. You are bigger than them and shouldn't need to hit them to get them under control.

Unfortunately, this calm approach is time consuming and frustrating (especially when you are on a tight timescale to get them to bed or out of the door) and if a parent is trying hard to avoid authoritarianism ("Brush your teeth right now or I will do punishment") they might instead become permissive and just say "Oh well, never mind," which is not gentle and is, in fact, abusive.

You can stop engaging with the thread but you can't stop people replying to you, and people are going to reply when you tell outright lies contradicted by your earlier posts. You hit your children.

While I am sure there are lots of parents who aren't potty training, tooth brushing etc with their children, I do tend to think that modelling behaviours in the home as opposed to training children works pretty well in the long term. Children get on their feet and walk if that's what everyone around them is doing, just as they enjoy books because their parents enjoy reading with them and they learn to eat with a knife and fork if they are given small (blunt) ones at table with the rest of the family. Things don't require massive investments if they are family normality.