Gentle parenting?

I genuinely want to understand this.

How does this approach work in a class of 30 children?

How does it work when a child is with other family members or out socially at birthday parties or groups such as Beavers or dance?

I have an education degree, four years of training including child development, a post graduate qualification again in child development, and years of experience in early years and across primary. I have completed research into ‘four year olds in school’, ‘trauma informed support’ , ‘boys in school’ - you name it.
I have supported the PVI sector, worked as a head teacher, and now work in a senior education position within the local authority.

Our grandchildren are being gently parented. Their parents are knowledgeable, well meaning, and experienced in mental health.

And yet, it is incredibly difficult to be with the children.

We see the children throwing themselves on the floor in cafes, with responses like “are you having big feelings?” They are left to regulate themselves ( I sometimes think those ‘big feelings’ will come when someone trips and drops a hot drink on them!)
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They were not toilet trained until four and a half. One has not started school yet and has been deferred for a year. They still use a pushchair. They break things when they visit us.

One child is now in Year 2 and is really struggling. She cannot meet expectations such as sitting for a ten minute phonics session, working with others, or staying regulated. She sulks and removes herself. She is far behind in learning to read, largely because she chooses not to engage at home or school.

I do not enjoy their company and that is painful to admit.
Everything feels tense. The skills and experience I have built over a lifetime do not seem to count and do not work. The usual norms feel irrelevant for these children. I don’t want to offend by advising and don’t know how to work with our grandchildren.
The most I can do is create situations that are less tense and less likely to cause issues (lots of walks in the park, much less time at home). If they visit I am careful to make sure there is time outside and that we are with them constantly. It is rather like having toddlers in the house, the same needs, the same acceptance of less focus, less understanding of expectations.

I strongly believe in communicating well with children, explaining the ‘why’ behind boundaries, involving them, and creating shared thinking. I believe in warmth and understanding. But this feels like something different.

I genuinely worry these children are being done a disservice and that they will struggle to function in wider society. A society where the rest of us don’t understand or practice gentle parenting or where a group situation makes recognising and addressing each individuals needs impossible.

Gentle parenting might work if you have the right kind of kid. Maybe. But more of us are getting confident in our own parenting style: I’m in charge, I’ll say no to you when necessary.

Kids raised with gentle parenting are now in the workplace and they are often a fucking nightmare to manage - struggle to deal with even the most constructive feedback. I don’t think it makes for well adjusted adults at all.

Thank God for some common sense posts, including this one.

The "gentle parents" brigade is just as insufferable as the "be kind" brigade. They'll soon be backpedalling from this parenting fashion, give it another 5 years if that. It's a trend that will backfire. I feel sorry for the teachers and those children who are mature enough to understand "no" and social norms because their parents actually parent.

The fact this parenting guru records his children's tantrums and plasters them all over Instagram for money is sickening. The blind following gentle parenting sheep love him though because unsurprisingly, lack of critical thinking is prevalent in that group.

I haven't laughed as hard as I have reading some responses on this thread in a while, particularly those referring to first time parents not knowing how to parent when they bring their firstborn from hospital. I mean, I'd risk a statement this has always been the case and it has precisely nothing to do with gentle parenting, but hey ho 😂 thanks for the laughs! 👌

Well my kids have totally weird half English half German accents, so I have totally lost that battle

Well kind of. But I don't actually think it's unique at all to gentle parenting that children pick things up from the social context, ALL children are doing this, and I don't think it's quite right either to assume that permissive/gentle parenting means relying on "herd social normity" because some gentle parenting can be quite in depth similar to the speech therapy example I gave before.

All parents do not get the same information and certainly a lot of people are not aware of the academic recommendations or whatever it is. And even social norms and rules themselves vary based on context, culture etc. For example it's perfectly normal to wear a swimming costume at the beach or a swimming pool but it would not be acceptable to wear it to Tescos on a wet February afternoon. And it's important never to lie but it's also important to smile and say "Thank you for the lovely present Aunty Kate!" And children in junior school and older typically have different ways of acting among themselves compared with how they act around adults. Teenagers even more so. So social rules are extremely nuanced and it's very normal for children to get them wrong.

What I mean by practice is that children will typically try out various approaches to get things to happen e.g. if they are negotiating how to get a turn with a toy another child is playing with. Some of them might not go very well e.g. just trying to snatch the toy, but they will also see other children doing things like asking for a turn or waiting until the toy is discarded, giving the other child an alternative or suggesting playing together and most of the time children will try these other strategies out and they usually find that the outcome is better, which leads to them choosing it more often and getting better at it. Because even if an adult doesn't intervene, the outcome of trying to snatch another child's toy is likely to be that the other child will hit you, scream or snatch the toy back. A child aged about 3+ is also likely to be aware enough of others' emotions that they recognise they have caused distress in the other child by this action, which most people instinctively don't like (even small children, even if selfish urges often override). Some children struggle with speech or patience or they don't think to try these other strategies and snatching works well enough for them and so they continue with that approach for longer and actually probably get better at doing it and running away quicker. But the vast majority of children will try out various strategies and find the ones that they like the best, and most of the time, the strategies which work the best are the prosocial ones, which is probably why we as adults have also communally decided that they are the best approaches which we keep to and try to encourage in our children. Children will pick up prosocial norms more quickly if adults around them are generally also enforcing/modelling/encouraging them but they learn through their own experiences as well.

My middle child is diagnosed ADHD but probably also autistic and he simply does not pick up on social norms which is part of what's caused me to examine what I thought I knew in such detail. One example which was interesting to me is that he was getting into trouble at Kindergarten (which is basically nursery but goes up to age 6/7 where we live) because he was using bad language. I was baffled because he could not possibly have picked up this language at home because we only speak English, and in fact the direct translation wasn't even very rude in English, so wouldn't have "funny value" from that sense. Their playground overlaps with a local primary school so I wondered whether perhaps he had heard it there but then DH solved the mystery one day when he noticed DS2 and his best friend repeating the words and making each other laugh. When the friend noticed DH, he immediately clammed up and stopped laughing whereas DS2 continued to say the taboo words while the friend looked a combination of worried and impressed. We realised that these words were circulating through some of the older children but strictly out of the earshot of adults, because all the children aside from DS2 were completely aware that they were naughty words, and I doubt very much that every single child was told explicitly by an adult about each of the words individually - they had just picked them up, the same way that DS1 automatically knew what language he could use around adults and which he should not without us ever really saying.

Most things that children pick up as they get older we don't explicitly teach them, they just get there in very much the same way as most children learn correct pronunciation whether you correct it or not. In terms of conversations about what other children and/or parents are doing I would probably use it as an opportunity to discuss and say things like hmm yep running away is not so good is it, what could happen? And whether another parent is telling off or drawing a boundary or not I would probably just say different families do things differently. My children have asked me about other children getting hit if they do something wrong. We don't do that in our household so it's strange to them and I just say that parents are not supposed to hit children but some families do and I don't agree with it/think it's right.

Going back to DS2, he has two close friends whose parents have extremely different approaches, one of them comes from a family where there is more talking and less consequences, but the parents are warm and fairly protective in terms of the environment (e.g. much restriction of screens) and their child can be a bit cheeky and boundary-pushing, but will generally feel out where the line is and stick to it or listen to a reasoned explanation. The other child comes from a family which is fairly chaotic and categorically not gentle, but they are also apparently left to their own devices a lot of the time with not much modelling of norms, and consequently they are quite wild but actually this child is quite aware and almost fearful of adults' reactions and seems to very much crave the structure of school/Kindergarten but will occasionally surprise you by doing something completely unexpected because they are just completely unaware of the typical expectation.

Anyway I am not sure where I was going with this ramble but my point is that the more mature functions are generally nicer, more versatile and more pleasant to use, and most children will naturally find that out and prefer to go in that direction. (Could you imagine if you suddenly lost the power of speech? You'd probably prefer to fall back on writing and miming, rather than resort to screaming and snatching, because the more mature skill is nicer to use and not only because other people would disapprove.) Generally the ones who don't either are struggling with that particular skill (whether they are aware of this or not) or they have never had it introduced to them in a way that seemed accessible. And most children will pick up on wider social norms which are much wider than simply what is enforced in their own family and among their same-age peers because they are aware of wider social contexts and because social approval/disapproval is extremely strong as a motivator in NT humans, which most likely stems from very old instincts about being safer if you are part of a tribe.

I've just watched another couple of this guy's videos and I just find them exhausting.

I'd love to know how his children cope at school.

Well I don't know exactly how old it is - I just remember seeing it advised back when my half siblings were little which was about 20 years ago. The idea is if a child is struggling to speak because they have a stutter or a speech delay, you can accidentally discourage them by trying to correct everything they do manage to say. It probably isn't as big of a deal if it's an occasional mistake, but they do generally get there themselves whether you correct them or not.

That said, my youngest is in speech therapy because all his consonants are ps, ds or ts so it's quite difficult to understand him still, and the speech therapist has said when we're specifically working on practising a sound, to correct him if e.g. he is saying "bish" instead of "fish" and not to accept the ffffffpish which is what he tends to do because he CAN produce "ffffffish" and when he's saying fffffpish, it's because the b/p sound is stronger in his muscle memory, and we're trying to overwrite it with the f sound. But I think she is saying this now because he's done a lot of practice to produce the fffff sound and can do it some of the time. If he wasn't yet able to do this, then correcting him saying "bish" or "fffpish" would have completely put him off trying, and the ffffpish is actually an in between step, which he had to come up with before he could manage fish. There's also an extra in between stage we use to prompt if he isn't hearing himself do the fffpish, which is "hish - fffff hish" which helps him to join the longer, softer consonant onto the word which he's not used to doing naturally.

But I think this also illustrates another point really nicely, which is that he's 4, and if I had tried to teach him how to say the word fish properly just by explaining that he needs to join the sounds ffffff and ish, that wouldn't have worked. The speech therapist has an in depth understanding, much more than mine, about how speech develops and the different underlying skills and muscle memories that work, so she first worked with him on creating a lot of the sounds in a fun way (e.g. we were ghosts or wind or trains making a ffff ffff ffff sound) until that sound was really strong and then she worked on joining it using the "hish - fff hish" method because he could already say words beginning with H correctly, because that is a completely different type of consonant apparently. So she is strengthening each skill and then building on that. And I do think that is a huge amount of how child development, and skill development works as a whole. And I think that behaviour (any behaviour) whether it's tantrums, running away, how to deal with food you don't like, and even pronunciation/speech, is all developmental/skill related. Sometimes you need a helping hand to pick up the skill (like us practising being the wind saying ffff) or join some dots (like saying hish and then joining on ffffhish) but you can't always progress to the next skill (like saying fish) without working on these in between stages. And I think some of what is presented as gentle parenting is this kind of approach, where you identify the steps and skills, and it looks slower and more complicated than just saying "No not bish, it's fish!" but it actually supports them in the process more. I think my eldest probably could have done with speech therapy, but nobody suggested it to us and he did eventually sort out all his pronunciation.

For my youngest, I think it is turning cogs for him in his head because I was reading Dr. Seuss to him the other night and he pointed to the word box and said he couldn't say it (because the k and s of x are both consonants which get turned into t) so I said hmm yes x is a bit of a tricky sound and we practised making both the sssss like a snake, and ccccchhhhh like a hissing cat but it was still tricky for him to put them together. But that was the first time he's actually articulated that he struggles to say a sound. Usually he's like "BIS MUMMY, BITTTTTSH!!!!" until I realise he means fish 😅

Just watched that video incredulous that the 4.5 year old was out of his sightline for a good while. In a public place too. What is he thinking ? She could have been run over or injured while he’s making his point about how to deal with a tantrum properly. Ridiculous.

And yes, I have tried every way to discipline, teach, mirror…
DS is only 5, so plenty more time. But not all kids are easy.

I don’t know what gentle parenting, or any other type is.
I just do what l think is right. I’ve never read a baby book.

My DS is non-compliant. I can’t just change how he is…
I’d love him to sit down, do as he’s asked. Life would be easier!

I also think that the points some people made about it being exploitative to film, that there were bits edited out and that parenting with a gopro strapped to your chest are unrealistic are also fair. This is only the bit he chose to upload to the internet and that is going to show things in a certain light and he is also growing his "brand" and channel and so adherence to a certain message is key.

I much prefer parenting books or podcasts over social media for this reason. There is only so much you can glean from titbits or snapshots of someone's life. You can learn much more from listening to or reading the results of in depth research, professional experience, or interviews between someone who has practical day to day experience of being a parent and someone who is more of an expert in the field. And when I had one child I was always keen to hear from parents who were more experienced than me. I have three so I am further along that path now than I was back then but I am still only a parent, albeit one with an interest in psychology, child development and behaviour.

OP you also said: I am getting a bit philosophical here but I am wondering whether the idea that good behaviour is inherent human form and not something which is learnt and practiced. Managing it like this to me is assuming that one day 4 yo will grow out of running away and tantruming just through virtue of brain development of natural age. Is that the thinking behind this?

I actually do think that is true or at least mostly true. I don't think running away and throwing tantrums are things that people choose to do when they have the skills to do otherwise. There is an aspect of learning involved in behaviour and skill development, of course, but I also think that the form of learning which comes from explicit instruction is vastly overestimated by most people and that applies also in parenting. Most learning happens by repeated practice, observation of social norms, and brain development plays a huge part for children. I also think that the role of punitive discipline is vastly overrated. Some of the research around consequences shows that essentially whether a consequence is large and harsh or mild and short lasting it has about the same effect on deterring future repetition of the behaviour, and it's not a very large effect. The bigger effect is seen through positive consequences (reward/reinforcement) and it's usually a combination of brain development, successful modelling/copying of the preferred skill and positive attention/reinforcement of the preferred behaviour which is developing this skill. We tend to remember the instances when we got cross enough to deliver a major consequence so we put more importance on that, but actually what helped is probably more likely all of the other positive, mostly unconscious and small things that we are doing around the preferred alternative behaviour.

Also about this: [Permissive] ...authoritative, authoritarian and neglectful. So where does gentle parenting fit in there? And what’s the difference between authoritative and gentle parenting?

These aren't really describing the same thing. The quadrants of permissive, authoritative and so on are terms used in research about parenting and effectively parenting styles can be mapped onto these quadrants - but things like gentle parenting, positive parenting, Supernanny parenting, 123 Magic, How To Talk or anything like this you can't map them perfectly onto quadrants although pretty much any parenting approach designed since this research will be aiming for authoritative which is the mix of warmth plus clarity and direction, because it is very well known and respected in the field. There are some outliers which don't advocate for parents to be very directive - some advocates of gentle parenting fall under this category.

It's kind of like asking "Well is Cadbury a sweet or a biscuit? And how does it fit into a balanced diet?" The question doesn't make sense because the categories are looking at something different, and whether or not a food can exist as part of a balanced diet depends on everything else in the diet. Same with parenting approaches.

On the internet the terms are also used differently to how they are defined in the research - people largely use "permissive" and "authoritarian" to mean too lax / too strict for what they personally consider correct, and authoritative to perfectly match their own definition of parenting. So people will call time out authoritarian, but that (again) doesn't make sense because the original definitions in research were not about individual actions, they were about the overall approach. Given that the original research took place in the 1960s it's almost certain that corporal punishment would have featured in all three of the original styles, including the "ideal" one. (Neglectful was only added later on in the 80s by different researchers).

I do allow my own DC to choose what they want from the menu in restaurants, but if they don’t like it when it arrives, there is no alternative meal. At home they get what they’re given, and we all eat the same meal.

Well actually I don't think it's especially helpful to correct any of those things, because either they know what they are saying is wrong and they are playing, so me playing into it is just going to lead to a pointless argument, or they don't know yet but they are only little and will pick it up whether or not I correct them. It doesn't matter that much. Correcting things like pronunciation can make them self conscious apparently - I am pretty sure all the guides for about 20+ years now have been saying don't tell children their pronunciation or grammar is wrong, simply repeat the sentence with the pron/grammar correct clearly to model the right way of saying it.

But in general a fear of something (like saying no) is likely because of the way social media algorithms work.

When I was on MN back in ~2010 or whenever it was we had the discussions about why no, or negated instructions (don't X/stop Y) can be less effective than the positive version but there was less confusion around it because it was a longer discussion and you could compare between the two and see the obvious conclusion which is that the positive version is a helpful thing to use when you can.

But social media driven by algorithms favours shorter content and content which provokes strong feelings such as anxiety or disagreement. So rather than this nuanced discussion you get "Ten reasons never to say Good Job" or "Why Time Out could be harmful". It's ironic in a way because these posts are doing exactly the thing they are supposedly advising against. They're telling you what NOT to do rather than explaining what TO do instead. (Or the what to do instead is completely ineffective and doesn't fulfil the same purpose at all.) But this kind of thing is all over social media and it gets stuck in people's heads and they remember all the things they shouldn't do and they don't focus on what to do instead. I also think that the what NOT to do is very tied to the identity side of gentle parenting. Gentle parents never agree on what Gentle Parenting is but they are all very clear and mostly in agreement about what it is not.

Well actually - I think that probably has always been the case a bit. Because I do remember when DS1 was probably about 3 or 4 I came to a realisation that I was trying so hard to avoid ever using generic consequences or negative feedback for him that I was winding up getting so frustrated that I would lose it and shout, and one day I just thought this is so stupid. Of course receiving a calm and nonscary punishment isn't worse than being shouted at, even if it is theoretically possible to parent without either, it's clearly not working for me. So I started to use a warning and then loss of TV time instead when I found myself getting wound up and it was instantly much better.

There are lots of people online claiming to be experts in certain styles of parenting, and then giving terrible advice to other parents. There are also a lot of people who want to be their kids best friends, or the "cool parent", so it's sort of a melting pot for people to misinterpret gentle/authoritative parenting advice and turn it into permissive/lazy parenting.

I don't think parents realise that by not saying no, they're letting their children down. When DD was growing up, I never avoided "no" - I just followed it up with an age-appropriate explanation. The result is that now she's a bit older, she knows that "no" is an answer she could get from anybody, and sometimes she'll get an explanation, and sometimes she won't - and that's fine.

I am not negotiating with a 6 year old terrorist

A 6 year old is a child, not a terrorist. How will they ever learn to negotiate beyond "because I said so" if you don't model that for them? Why will they ever see themselves as capable of behaving well if you're already labelling them a "terrorist".

I will not be dictated to by someone who isn't even old enough to buy deodorant.

There's a difference between listening to someone's views and being dictated to. We can't expect children to trust us and see us as safe people to confide in if we only value their contribution based on their age.

earned themselves a day stuck in their room with nothing to do but homework

I'm sure their teachers will appreciate you leading them to think of homework as a punishment; that's bound to foster a great attitude to learning.

starting from when they apologise.

So they're apologising to get the punishment underway and over faster, not because they're actually sorry or understand the impact of their actions.

if they speak to a stranger the way they just spoke to you, there's a fair chance they're going to get punched.

And you think you're modelling a better way of speaking to people; by referring to children as "terrorists" and "brats"? Do you think they're going to learn why speaking to people with respect is important, beyond "mum and dad are going to shout at us and take away the things we like"?

The most appallingly behaved children I've met and taught are the ones whose parents talked about them the way you do in your post. These kids had total restraint collapse; they behaved horrendously at school because they were terrified into submission at home.

Who started the can’t say no thing?

This is an interesting one. I think TBH the idea that any parenting style advocates for never saying no is a straw man argument. I have never found any account unless perhaps it's a rage bait one which literally suggests this.

There are a couple of concepts which can be found in various parenting approaches not all of which call themselves gentle, which involve avoiding or reducing the amount of "no". But all of them are fairly specific and refer to a specific use of no.

One is where you should avoid using "No" as a command all on its own (meaning "Stop doing that thing right now") - I am pretty sure this actually comes from positive behaviourism as it is also an idea in dog training. The reasoning in this case is that if you are only saying "No" then it's quite difficult for your [dog or child] to understand what specifically it is that you want them to do or even what you want them to not do, and in general, it is much harder to inhibit an impulse (stop doing a thing) than it is to follow an instruction. So rather than saying "No" you should give them an instruction/command which is incompatible with the behaviour they are doing that you don't like. So for example if the dog is jumping up at people, you should say "Sit" instead of "No". Or if your baby is dropping food off the high chair, you can hold up a spare plate/bowl and say "If you don't want it, put it here" (or just "In here") instead of saying No. The other thing is that using "No" as a command on its own doesn't really mean anything unless it has become associated with an immediate aversive, such as a smack. So it's an outdated method anyway because you shouldn't be smacking children or dogs.

If you have an older child who you know already knows the rule and knows that they aren't supposed to be doing what you have just clocked them doing, saying "No" probably works much better and wouldn't have the same downsides, although arguably you could achieve the same effect just by drawing their attention to the fact you have noticed them.

The second is similar and it's about wording a request in a positive way, so rather than saying "Stop running" you might say "Come and hold my hand" or rather than saying "No shouting" you might encourage a game of quieter I-spy. It's an idea which is more likely to get you the result you're after rather than an outright ban on using the term. Or it might be about assuming competence/positive intent of children - for example if you let them carry a glass of water but tell them "Don't drop it", it doesn't give a very confident impression of their abilities, but if you are genuinely worried that they might not be aware, you could give them some information like "This cup is made of glass" - this probably isn't a great example. I think this comes from How To Talk but it might also be related to the behaviourism thinking where it's much easier to follow a positive instruction than it is to put the brakes on something that has already started, especially for young children. I know for example that if my 4yo is being loud, telling him to stop being loud usually only results in him developing a twinkle in his eye and seeing it as a challenge to be louder. But if I give him a quieter suggestion to engage in, he's normally receptive to this and will follow it.

The last one is more about encouraging playfulness/thinking things through and not automatically saying no to every request because it can be easy to get into a pattern of automatically saying no. More of a "Why not? They are only little once!" kind of thing. This one I think can sometimes backfire and it makes sense to consider what kind of automatic response you tend to give in the first place.

What was the mother doing on her phone?

As usual, at the extreme of both ends, people who say authoritarian parenting or permissive parenting ‘works’ is because they have a naturally chill kid or a kid who naturally responds to authority.

Kids who are naturally very wilful have a strong sense of defiance categorically do not respond to ‘laying down the law’. Every day will be a battle. Every day will be hard. And there is nowhere to go but escalation. It doesn’t work.

I think this Instagram man did a great job.

These threads always get so whiny on both sides, with one side firmly insisting that things way back when were superior because they just were, and the other side endlessly repeating ‘well that’s not gentle parenting!’