To think "gentle parents" are setting their kids up for a lifetime of friendlessness and struggling to hold down a job?

[ForestGoblin]

You get one chance to build the neural pathways that guide you for the rest of your life and if you don't learn that you're not the centre of anyone else's universe as a young kid you never will.

Gentle parenting means when your child beats up another child or wrecks somebody's house you say in a calm voice no darling we don't do that. (Even though thats not true and its quite obvious yes we do do that and on a regular basis). Sorry I'm not a fan

Ah there you go, thanks for defining gentle parenting so succinctly for us all 👍

I have friends who were brought up with gentle parenting. As grown ups, she cannot cope with the slightest inconvenience, regularly needs help with day to day tasks, has so many ideas and never able to do them. He has been through many jobs and hobbies, schemes, university courses, dropped out of this or that, started half hearted businesses, never follows through on anything.

They aren’t friendless though, very fun in fact!

Not a fan of a style of parenting you've made up in your own head? Rich inner life.

That's not what gentle parenting is.

This kind of smug rejection is often what shouty, angry, mean, mocking parents do to make themselves feel better.

The children at DD's school whose behaviour is the worse aren't gentle parented. The worse consequences of gentle parenting are slightly wet children IME. The violent ones all have abusive, violent homes or neglectful ones. Parents with addictions, absent parents, shouting/hitting parents. Those are the bullies and buggers.

Also she gentle parents now and is chronically late as she won’t stop her children doing anything. So a walk to school will take 45 minutes as every leaf or dog poo has to be stopped and inspected and discussed and made in to a life lesson, and suddenly she’s late again.

she asked me how I get to do so many things with the kids, she’s in awe of me etc. well she doesn’t tell them to hurry up, ever!

if she has bought tickets for something and the children decide they don’t want to go, she loses £150 and then berates herself for not thinking of her child’s needs appropriately.

This is one of these situations where everyone is talking at cross purposes because no one actually agrees what gentle parenting is or they think permissive parenting is the same thing.

Personally I prefer to call it respectful parenting and mostly agree with Janet Lansbury etc style, but it's probably somewhere under the gentle parenting umbrella, but then other than authoritarian parenting (not to be confused with authoritative parenting), which I hope isn't too popular, most people use substantial elements of gentle parenting in their parenting without even thinking about it. It's just the label that seems to upset people.

Good post!

I know what you mean OP. I don’t think ‘gentle parenting’ is supposed to be like that, but some parents do interpret it as never saying no, and allowing children to do whatever they like and behave however they like, no matter where they happen to be.
Which pretty soon = the sort of children who make your heart sink when you see them coming - and avoid whenever humanly possible.

That's what gentle parenting means to you.

I don't think anyone is a fan of that kind of parenting but I don't think anyone who uses gentle parenting would behave in that way.

My children are now successful well balanced young adults (just being honest) They say they couldn't have wished for a happier childhood. They knew who was boss and recently they admitted they liked this cause it made them feel more secure. We always encouraged them to speak about issues they were having so we could help sort it out. I wouldn't say we took a soft approach or a particularly hard approach to parenting but again they knew who was boss.

This. I work with troubled families. Not one of the violent young people I work with was parented gently.

I know a couple of children who were gentle parented and they are fairly averagely-well behaved. Not the most well behaved but better than average. They were a lot more sensitive than their peers, crying if they fell over in upper primary, couldn't take gentle teasing and always felt like they were being bulied etc and this did course issues socially.

I try to gentle parent as much as possible but i do use consequences sometimes.

I like the term "respectful parenting" @Clefable. I don't know if that's an actual thing but it pretty much sums up how I tried to approach things with my dd.

I think a good many parents have wildly misunderstood gentle parenting, using it as an excuse to not parent.

No, that’s ‘I’ve been reading too much Guardian’ type parenting.

I try my best to gentle parent as opposed to ‘demand parenting’ - that is expecting a child to meet adult standards of emotional control or time expectation. It’s understanding that children do not have the same processing abilities as adults and that they learn by modelling expected behaviour to them, not ‘do as I say not as I do’. That doesn’t mean my children do not suffer consequences of poor decisions, it certainly doesn’t mean I deal with them causing harm or disturbance to others with an airy ‘oh no darling we must not do that’. I do speak firmly to my children but I also explain to them when we’re all calm exactly why their actions are unacceptable (as much as I can to my severely autistic child anyway).

I was a product of a shouty, angry parent who hit me well into my teens. All I remember is humiliation and as an adult I cannot process negative emotions well at all. Or even happy ones (being overly happy or excited about something was also frowned upon). I don’t want my children ever to feel the way I did, I want them to learn emotional regulation in their own way but that doesn’t mean they get to take dysregulation out on anyone else.

Ive said it a million times now but if anyone wants a real idea of gentle parenting, watch a few episodes of Bluey. They’ve knocked it on the head and then some.

Out of interest, a lot of people are saying that they know children who have been "gentle parented" etc. How do people even know how other people are parenting their children? Do they spend hours discussing parenting philosophies with other parents or do they just make assumptions on the basis of the limited interactions that they witness between children and their parents?

I couldn't honestly put a label on the parenting styles of most people I know. I am pretty clear on how my dsis raised her son, and I have some insights into how close friends raised their kids, but not enough to put a label on their particular brand of parenting philosophy!

I imagine that lots of people have made assumptions about how I have parented my dd over the years. I'm willing to bet that a lot of them are wrong!!

Gentle parenting is not permissive parenting. It is respect and boundaries.

A hairdresser I know had a mother and her young son visit her house to get a hair cut recently. As soon as they arrived he started rifling through her drawers. She told him to stop and that she wouldn’t do the same if she ever visited his house. This little boy then proceeded to kick her legs over and over and the mother just stood there and did nothing. The hairdresser was so aghast at his behaviour and the fact his mum did sweet FA about it that she told both of them to leave. I guess the boys mum was a fan of gentle parenting. Personally I think it’s an excuse for being lazy and letting kids run wild without any care for how their child’s behaviour affects anyone else.

I think you are wrong in the first part of your sentence. It is not true that 'You get one chance to build the neural pathways that guide you for the rest of your life'. There is a great deal of plasticity in the human brain, or no one would be able to learn new skills or a new language in adulthood (yes, learning a new language in adulthood is often more difficult than in childhood, but plenty of people do it); no one would be able to adapt to changes in the world over time; no one would parent differently from the way that they have been parented. Yes, it's best if children don't begin life with bad habits that they will have to unlearn; but that's not the same as 'If you don't learn X as a young kid, you never will' - there are very few things where that is the case. If young people find that their behaviours are resulting in friendlessness or employment difficulties, and if the behaviours are simply the result of learning bad habits, they can usually learn to modify them.

Also I think that there is a difference between 'gentle parenting', permissiveness, and being the 'centre of a parent's universe'. Almost all babies and extremely young children are to some degree the centre of their parent's universe, and vice versa. Usually they partially detach from one another to varying degrees as the kid gets older. And it doesn't necessarily entail permissiveness, Some of the most over-permissive parents whom I've encountered have been people who've found it easiest to ignore their children and let them do as they please so long as they keep out of the way; and some of the strictest have been people who did regard their children as the centre of their universe, and this included moulding them into a very specific shape.

Gentle parenting is not the same as permissiveness or lack of parenting, though I suppose it can sometimes be used as an excuse for it.

What probably is true is that a mismatch, in either direction, between level of aggressiveness in parent and child may make parenting more difficult. A naturally aggressive, even if loving, parent may intimidate a gentle child; and a gentle parent -whether on principle or by nature- may find it very difficult to understand and to discipline an aggressive child.

When will people learn that the parents of our parents were saying the same about their parenting skills.

I think kids are pretty well behaved now. Adult-like quite a lot of the time. When I was a kid in the 80s children were left to their own devices and were ferral and got a clip around the ear if they fucked up and caught. It was fine if they didn't get caught 😂

Well done for just reading the words ‘gentle parenting’ and jumping in with your view, rather than reading the thread and learning the difference between gentle parenting and shit parenting.

*What you do as a gentle parent with the tantrumming toddler is take them away from the situation, wait for the tantrum to die down, keep calm and don't shout. So as a gentle parent - yes, you absolutely can cart them out of the supermarket. You just do it without anger.

When your child clobbers another, you take away the toy truck, you remove them from the situation, you calmly tell them off and depending on how things have been you either let them back on a final chance (if they are able to understand this) or take them home altogether.

It's about being firm with boundaries but
without the anger and the shouting*

As someone in their 60s, this I was standard in my time. I agree with a pp saying it's just been re-packaged and called "gentle parenting "

There’s nothing new about gentle parenting. It was what I did 30 years ago, though didn’t call it that.
Being autistic, I just went for “logical parenting”!
Offered toddler DDs a choice of t shirt rather than just demanding they put one on that I’d picked, gave them a simple reason why they couldn’t do something- “it will burn you, it’s dangerous, we don’t have time, it’s too heavy” or whatever.
Made them apologise if they were naughty, but also made a point of me apologising to them when appropriate, so they felt respected and saw that consideration goes both ways.
Made a game of eating their greens so it was fun, rather than shouting at them or making them sit over their uneaten food for hours.
I still had firm boundaries, but only where necessary, eg not running in the road.
The DDs grew up into delightful, thoughtful adults, with lots of friends and lovely partners.

I think it's how Janet Lansbury classes her 'style' of parenting advice. She has a podcast called it I think. I really like her stuff as it's very pragmatic and common sense (and definitely doesn't lead to children who wreck the place or attack other kids! Whatever parenting method that is). I think it's odd when some people afford grown-up strangers more respect than their own children but it seems to happen quite often 😕

I think there is a world where gentle parenting is the right way to do it, and if you are of a calm, patient, level-headed temperament and are able to model firm boundaries, consequences in proportion to behaviour, independence and kindness that’s great. The reality is a lot of parents just don’t believe in enforcing boundaries around behaviour and the result is messed-up children who have never been told ‘no’, or adults who think that consequences don’t apply to them (as a uni admin I see a lot of young people who are shocked when failure to attend/submit work etc leads to being removed from a degree or a capped mark).

Also, I personally am not a naturally calm, level headed person and my wider family and culture is not ‘gentle’ - I think it’s important children experience a range of emotions, and see that their behaviour influences the social responses of others. So if they are naughty, or repeatedly don’t listen shouting at them isn’t abuse - it’s a consequence of their behaviour. There are some children who just don’t respond to ‘gentle’ and need to be told loudly, ‘stop it now or we’re going home!’