to think sometimes gentle parenting is taken too far?

[GPgonewrong]

This week I’ve spent a few days with friends, their baby and son who’s almost 4. I have DS who is a few years older.

They gentle parent (which I also do, to an extent) but it means their toddler never hears raised voices, I didn’t ever hear “no”, everything was dealt with through a compromise or sitting down with him. All sounds fine, until you experience the behaviour. He bounced on every single chair and sofa, constantly pulled out furniture, wouldn’t sit down for a meal, eating little bits and buggering off running round, never ate a full meal but fed on demand. He shoved me out of the way several times, complained every time he was explained to why he shouldn’t be doing that, which he shouted back “NO! You can’t say that”. Completely unable to share, always snatching off the other kids, and didn’t say goodbye when we left. He is almost four but still won’t play nicely, instead his idea of play was destructive, throwing things around and knocking things over.

AIBU to think it’s gentle parenting taken too far and no discipline? Or maybe a separate issue?

They’re not gentle parenting.

But why call it 'gentle parenting', when in fact, it is nothing of the sorts. This is what gives gentle parenting a bad name. If you're a gentle parent yourself, you'll know that.

This is obviously no parenting. Nothing to do with gentle parenting. I would find it VERY hard to be friends/spend time with someone who parents like this!!

Gentle parenting is based on using the quality of relationships and attachment to guide and support children to make their own decisions so "no" on its own is not very helpful. However it sounds like there was just no response to the behaviour?

Exactly. It’s actually called authoritative parenting (not to be confused with authoritarian parenting!).

Schools been mentioned a few times, if they are gentle parents, perhaps they’ll homeschool?

So what is done when the gently parented child consistently makes poor decisions that create misery and chaos for everyone else.

I sort of agree that isn’t gentle parenting but it’s certainty the kind of parenting lots of people I know are doing and claiming that it is GP!
Friends of ours have a young son who hits all the time, full on smacks kids in the face. He has never been pulled up on this properly just lots of ‘gentle hands’ ‘we don’t hit’. He’s 3 and knows it’s wrong. We’d have been bollocked by our parents back in the day (verbally no smacking) and that would have been it! So much easier back then 😂

Child is currently at a Montessori nursery, not sure what they’ll do when it’s time for a regular school, or whether those ones go up to school age too?

I suppose part of me wondered whether it is acceptable to let kids jump on sofas, I mean it’s her property and they’re obviously okay with it, it’s just not something I would ever let my child do. We went out for tea one night and he was climbing all over the furniture there too which obviously he would because he’s allowed to at home. It made me feel like I was perhaps a bit uptight with my parenting but I wouldn’t ever let my child (past baby years) bounce on a sofa. I know that’s only a very tiny thing regarding the behaviour but how blasé they were about it all had me feeling like I was wrong to feel it was inappropriate!

@tothelefttotheleft the idea is that you try and work with the child to figure out what's wrong rather than policing and punishing.

So for eg if my DD (who is now 6) is getting stressed and cross we talk about why and try and find the reasons and the solutions.

Or if we disagree about something we try and find a compromise (assuming it's something we can compromise about)

When she was tiny if she was doing something that upset someone else I would say. Oh dear, I can't let you do that and would take her off or distract her. I would empathise with the emotion not accept the action.

For us it worked like a dream and I can only recall her having about 3 meltdowns (all exhaustion related).

I never say no. I role model good behaviour (hello, goodbye, thank you, sorry, hugs when someone is hurt etc.), I distract and redirect poor behaviour (the only exceptions here are if someone is getting hurt eg. biting, hitting, pushing etc.)

All behaviour is communication; children aren’t naughty, and any attention on a behaviour will see an increase in that behaviour.

My daughter is very well behaved and I would never allow her to behave the way the child in the OP does.

Honestly kids can easily understand different rules for different places. Their whole job is to push boundaries and learn from the effect of that.
The parents job is to support them in learning what the effect is, which means holding boundaries and very often enforcing appropriate consequences.

Yes I agree op. I follow someone on Instagram and she is bonkers with her child. She doesn't believe in sleep training which is fine (I don't do it either) but she allows her kid to basically get up multiple times in the night, change into various outfits, clamber all over her. It's insane. Consequently the child seems to behave pretty badly during the day because she's so tired! She's very open about all of this and there have been many times where I've thought 'just say no you can't put that frozen dress on at 4am' instead of having a sit down discussion about it.

Part of parenting is setting boundaries. Some gentle parenting approaches seem to totally hand over control to the kids when they aren't emotionally or practically equipped to know what they should do. I don't get it.

We stopped going to forest school because of a completely lax mother who let her child ruin it for everyone else. She’d spend the whole time running around ‘redirecting’ her child from grabbing and trying to hug my daughter. Never once said no, just turned him around which clearly didn’t work.

When I told him ‘no’ as he grabbed at my daughter whilst she cried she told me that she practiced gentle parenting and didn’t use no. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the word no, particularly with an explanation.

God forbid you say no at toddler group though, the looks of horror you get!

I have friends who have done the same. Their (3!) children are little shits and I avoid seeing us all together at great lengths, as I spend the entire time trying to deal with the fall out whilst she sits there with a serene smile on her face acting like her children aren’t involved in any of it at all.

It’s clear when her children are a bit older they’re going to be full on bitchy bullies and have zero respect for their parents.

So called gentle parenting can end up with feral kids.

A happy medium is best.

I suspect gentle parenting works well for children who behave well.

Where i am sceptical is your belief that children aren't naughty. My first wasn't but boy oh boy, well in fact girl oh girl, my second was. Happily she is now a wonderful woman and my parenting role, for better or worse, is over.

I have a lovely friend who I now don't invite around because her kids use my house as a playground and it boils my piss that they are not told not to.
My lovely chair was being used as a slide the last time, and it was me who had to ask her child not to.
Can you guess what the child was doing 5 minutes later?
That's the result of permissive parenting, patient explanations of consequence, trying to engage the child in empathic understanding of how other people feel... just fucking look them in the eye, say, "No", give a plausible consequence, and then see that consequence through (is what I wanted to tell my friend).

Boundaries and saying no is a core part of gentle parenting. OP your friend is a passive/lazy parent.

The thing is some children are quite naturally calm, placid, not risk takers, compliant and keen to please adults. Oddly enough gentle parenting works pretty well on these children, because they don't really display challenging behaviour! Smug advocates of gentle parenting point to these children as evidence that it "works".

In reality lots of children ignore "explanations" and disregard boundaries and consequences unless they are basically unpleasant ones. "Gentle parenting" is not terribly effective on lots of children.

Gentle parenting also seems to disregard thar children can have wants and desires that are NOT needs, and that not all the emotions they experience need to be validated. Lots of young kids emotions are over-reactions and validating them doesn't teach them about proportional responses.

You can suspect whatever you like. Gentle parenting is thoroughly misunderstood and many people confuse it with permissive parenting.

Many “gentle parents” aren’t actually gentle parenting but permissive parenting.

And again, you can be as sceptical as you like. All behaviour is communication, they’re not being naughty, they’re trying to tell you something. You’re just not listening.

You want to try teaching these kids.

If we don't have enough challenges as teachers, this whole new 'gentle parenting' craze has taken hold and behaviour in schools is the worst it's EVER been.

'No' is a fact of life. 'No' builds resilience.

Teach your kids NO, please. Before there's no one left to teach them!

I only want to suspect what is true. It would be ridiculous to suspect things that were false, so I don't understand your first comment. Are you agreeing or disagreeing with me.

I am still sceptical although I am trying to understand. I can see that all behaviour is communication but what if they are trying to tell me is that they don't give a tinker's cuss about anyone else they are just going to do what they want?

Gentle parenting works if you have a gentle child. That's because they rarely need disciplining and are more tolerant of listening to explanations.

My dc3 has been gentle parented because he's a very easy child to parent. He never went through Terrible Twos or Threenager and even as a teen I can't remember him even slamming a bedroom door in anger in the past year. I've been extremely lucky with his temperament- he's never run into a road or made a mad dash for it because he wasn't in a buggy. When you have a child like that, there's no need to tell them off very much. I use the word no as it's sometimes necessary and I think he'd laugh at the idea that it wasn't a good word to say.

Your friend's child is on the fast track to not making friends or being liked by teachers at school. His peers will be spending their 2s and 3s learning about living with their emotions and regulating them so that by the time that they go to school they will be at the same stage as their peers and make friends. My other 2 kids weren't as easy as their sibling but were able to get along with their peers and with the structure of school so had an easier time there. They were not gentle parented but have turned out to be relaxed and considerate adults who get along with friends and employers.

Gentle parenting needs a rebrand as he word gentle is misleading and people
misinterpret as meaning ‘never say no’ or ‘don’t set boundaries’. However if you read any of the core proponents of the method such as Sarah Ockwell-Smith or Aha Parenting it actually involves lots of authority and clear boundaries.

He'll either flourish under some consistent discipline or else the mother will throw her hands up in horror at the harsh regime and decide to home school.