To think gentle parenting is being taken too far?

[gpbs]

I've got DD 2yo and we meet up with mums with similar age kids from time to time, people I've known since pregnancy or since DD was very small. Examples are taken from some of those mums I know but also some mums I randomly encounter when out and about. Some of them take gentle parenting to the extreme I feel. A few examples:

1. Child A chasing Child B with a stick. Mum A says to Child A "sticks are for looking at, not for hitting" or "gentle hands please". Child A hits Child B with a stick "oh no we don't do that, do we? Hitting is mean!" (Wouldn't you grab the stick out of their hand before they hit?!)

1. Child A snatches the toy off Child B whilst B is holding it. Mum of A says "we don't snatch, do we? Can you give it back? Please give it back? Ok at least say sorry? No snatching please" as Child A walks off with the toy that she's just grabbed

1. One mum told me that she asks her son before brushing his teeth and if he says no, they don't brush it. Because body autonomy. He's 2.5.

1. Child throwing sand around, including at other children, whilst their mum calmly explains that it's best not to and how it would hurt other peoples eyes. Child not paying any attention, sand still being thrown, mum still talking at him. (Wouldn't you move them away from sand so it can't be thrown?)

All examples are things I've seen but all are about different children. Ages 1.5-3 in all.

And I know that's not what gentle parenting is MEANT to be about, but it's how the majority of parents who say they gentle parent actually parent.

I know, and on a societal level it’s probably impossible to untangle all the factors (parents working outside the home, fewer close family ties, technology, the funding cuts to education etc) to give definitive answers. I think one of the better comparators is between cultures where compliance and social cohesion is the norm (Korea, Japan for example), versus more individualistic socieities such as the UK.

I would, however, listen to the increasing cohort of teachers and childcare professionals who are commenting on the state of classrooms and early years settings, before individual parents.

Wasn't for my son, hence the home ed!

You don’t have to answer this, because as I said previously, I’m just a random on the internet and the purpose of this thread isn’t to be personal.

Do you think that your upbringing from gentle parents influenced your ability to cope with your school settings? And if you weren’t happy at school, did your parents move you?

No, I don't, because I'm one of four siblings all parented the exact same way but all of us had different experiences with school. It is personality. But this is my point - schools (and nurseries) tend to advocate a "this is best for all children" approach which fails to take into account the needs and temperaments of individual children. For me, that's a pivotal part of responsive parenting and why I absolutely don't agree that parents should receive "training" on the best way to parent their own children. There IS no best way. It depends on the child.

I hope so.

My ‘seems fine’ son had to be removed from school at 7 when he had become so desperately unhappy there he started asking me how people kill themselves.

School, while admitting freely that he needed 1-2-1 support full time at school in order to access any learning at all (holding a pencil or spelling his name for example), were unable to provide any support because he was never a problem.

While there was a child in his class violently attacking other children, another child weeing all over the floor on purpose regularly and 2 others with identified SEND- no funding was going to be given to a boy who sat at his desk and never flipped any tables.

I really wouldn’t use high compliance cultures as an indicator for success in child rearing. There are culturally bound phenomena there that no one would wish to replicate.

Classrooms may well be in chaos compared to 30 (or whatever) years ago, the teachers could all be absolutely correct there,

but distilling the data to control for economic recession verging on depression, pandemic, underfunding of all levels of public services, shifts in (non parenting) social norms etc etc etc means it’s so reductionist as to be meaningless to say “gentle parenting, whatever that may or may not be, is causing the problems in todays classrooms”.

This will sound harsh but I find some posters on here completely ridiculous. You can’t have it both ways - “oh, my parenting is so based on science in child brain development “ and at the same time claim that not sleeping well is A OK and that the only problem it’s causing to nursery workers is a lack of break during nap time. There’s tonnes of research on how extremely important sleep is to child brain development. Interesting, this includes lack of emotional regulation when not getting quality sleep. So if you think that your son whacking other kids is completely “age appropriate “ and “normal “ maybe you should revisit your attitude to sleeping.

No idea if you are talking to me but my child has never hit another child in his life and nor, despite being a terrible sleeper as a child, did I.

Personally I think the whole way we approach education in this country needs a massive rethink but that's another thread.

@Nonumbersplease and @Theresstilltonighttocome I’m sorry your children’s teachers failed them. We’re doing what we can with an ever-expanding job description and, crucially, very limited funding - but most teachers do it because they care about children. We really are doing our best…

I don't doubt it. The system is simply not set up to care for the child as an individual. It doesn't have the funding.

Who are you talking to?

No one has said it’s fine for kids not to sleep?

It’s fine not to ‘sleep train’.

Clearly it isn’t at all fine not to sleep.

Its an extremely difficult side effect of neurodivergence and other illnesses/disorders.

Yes, lots of teachers are really doing their best in a bad situation.

@GooseClues No-one said sleep itself didn’t matter - it was the importance of self-settling that was queried. A child who has 12 (or whatever) hours sleep and was sleep trained won’t be any better rested than one who wasn’t. (Their parents will be! - but that’s not why it was brought up.)

Well, quite - plenty of children who weren't sleep trained still managed to learn to self settle.

Most children in the past were sleep trained. It’s become increasingly unfashionable and this again has tallied with overtired children in the classroom, along with the accompanying poor behaviour and attention spans.

Presumably they all do, eventually, it’s just a question of when!

I teach secondary school kids but I am going to hazard a guess that the kids in primary school classes with poor behaviour and attention spans are more likely to be the ones who are on screens until late into the night rather than the ones whose parents didn’t sleep train them….?

Screens are a MASSIVE problem IMO.

Ok, if you are sure of that would you like to provide some evidence?

Or is it purely an unsubstantiated claim based on what you happened to do with your children?

This seems like a perfect example of what I was saying earlier about people who need everyone to agree with them in order to validate their choices.

I also don't think it IS that unfashionable. When you say "sleep training" others seem to think "cry it out" but there's a huge spectrum. I sleep trained my DS but he wasn't ever left alone to cry.

I definitely know lots of parents that did some form of sleep training or other. Definitely very normal and mainstream from what I’ve observed.

TBH I think what a lot of people who talk about "modern parenting" in a disparaging way actually mean is that children used to know their place.

Children need to know their opinion is not of equal weighting to an adults. That doesn’t mean they’re not just as valuable (if not more valuable) or that they shouldn’t be treated with love and respect. But they are just that, children.

No expert "came up with" gentle parenting (as far as I can tell, it originated in parenting forums) and there is no one method. It is a social media hashtag.

People have been parenting indulgently since the world began, probably.

But more so now.