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.

There is a difference between serious mental health issues such as psychosis and suicidal depression, and anxiety and feeling sad that most people get. The latter has always been common. But ruminating on this can make it worse. Being physically active helps. We know exercise helps and in the past people had to be a lot more active just to live a daily life.

This is a bit of a grim suggestion, but if you're thinking back to the 1960s, child mortality was much higher back then. Some of that is childhood accidents from less supervision and looser safety standards, which surely must have happened at a higher rate to children more inclined to ignore rules and instruction, while much of it is disease related and was helped greatly by vaccination. But disease rates and mortality have always been higher among lower income households, and it's likely that adults with MH or ND type problems in those decades would have struggled more with employment and therefore had lower household income, resulting in higher risk to their children for disease in the times before vaccination was widely available.

It could be that more children within these more vulnerable groups are surviving childhood now and becoming vulnerable older children/teens. Also, we have much better survival rates for premature babies, and it's known that children who were born premature have higher incidence of learning and attention/behaviour problems.

I come from a very deprived background. The children in the main having serious accidents were those with chaotic and neglectful parents. Those children will still be at risk in other ways, but more likely from County Lines. Children did not get stabbed by other children in my deprived neighbourhood.

Yep, deprivation is one of the strongest indicators for mental illness in all age groups- deprived children would have been more likely to die in childhood for a myriad of reasons, before they became a mental health statistic.

Chronic illness (like diabetes/epilepsy/IBD etc) is also a major indicator of depression in children and adolescents- children with these conditions would also have been more likely to die before they were old enough to be a mental health statistic.

Also, people simply weren’t looking for these conditions in children, so they weren’t recording them, so the rates look low.

Yes, but there is also evidence that (for most of the population) emphasising mental health as a "problem" and ruminating worsens mental health.

No idea about rates of mental health issues in the past obviously but I do think we are a very introspective culture and I don't think that's always a good thing. Personally I've had times in my life where I did need to just get on with things and times where I needed help and acknowledgement with my mental health. It's telling the two needs apart that's the problem.

Where is this evidence?

Ruminating and receiving mental health treatment are not the same thing, neither are ruminating and receiving a diagnosis of mental illness.

This doesn't have anything to do with what I'm talking about tbh, and I'm dubious at this claim anyway. Rumination itself is part of some MH issues including OCD.

There's hours and hours of screen time and no boundaries and then there's the concept of self-settling. Sleep deprivation isn't caused by supporting your child to sleep when they need you, and good sleep doesn't come from leaving them to cry. There's no proof that sleep training is damaging but a lot of studies have shown the amount of extra sleep it provides is minimal and that the children who have been sleep trained wake just as often and have just been taught not to call for an adult. There's a gap between not setting a bedtime and giving your child screen time at bedtime, and other poor sleep hygiene, and believing in self-soothing at a young age. You don't need to be taught how to sleep anymore than you need to be taught how to eat.

@MrsSunshine2b it is normal for everyone to wake during the night. What most of us learn though is to quickly go back to sleep so we do not remember the waking. That is what children need to learn. To link their sleep cycles together.

Most of us instinctively do that. Whether we need to "learn" or whether it's just something which comes naturally to us when we're ready to do it is debatable. As mentioned, there's no evidence that responding to a crying child decreases the amount of overall sleep they get.

@MrsSunshine2b I think we need to learn it. People did not sleep the same way before electric light. They used to have two sleeps and got up in the middle and did things.
And not all adults learn it. Lots of adults still wake in the night and struggle to get back to sleep.

But do those adults never learn to do it because they weren’t sleep-trained as children?

(I quite often wake and struggle to go back to sleep - and I was sleep trained…)

I have no idea. I just think it is clear that at some point we either learn to do it, or we do not.

I didn't say "treatment". I said "emphasising mental health".

This researcher in the Psychiatry department at Oxford has done a lot of work on it. I came across it in New Scientist and looked her up. It seems a lot like the "hey maybe you are trans - oh yes I am I tick all the boxes" promotions that go on in secondary schools too.

https://www.psych.ox.ac.uk/team/lucy-foulkes

They are all behind a paywall.

I will say though from what I can access (without messing about logging in to stuff) that it sounds rather like the “don’t teach them about sex, it will encourage them to do it” argument.

Mental illness will occur regardless of whether children are taught the language to describe and understand it.

And it won’t be caused by knowing it exists.

What I’m sure does happen to some degree is trends for this and fads for that, like with all teenagers. It’s well known and researched that peer behaviour is influential on adolescents- cutting themselves is more likely if they have a positive relationship with a peer who does it for example, but only if they are already in an emotional distress.

if you do an assembly on anxiety on Monday, then ask them to do a mental health evaluation on Tuesday, slightly more will likely identify with those types of feelings- but it’s a massive jump to then claim that the assembly has caused them to exist where they didn’t before, as opposed to having caused the child to identify feelings they already had but didn’t have words for previously.

I think it's a bit more than that. She's a professor, not an undergrad. I'm a scientist so can read the literature even though it's not my field. I'll see if i can find non paywall but most things are open access if you Google them.

Is it a bit like social contagion? I remember as a teenager there were loads of "shocking" articles about young people self harming. I suspect self harm has always existed but I don't think that I or as many of my friends would have been cutting ourselves if we'd not been exposed to this.

It's exactly like social contagion (MH this is not ND).

@Theresstilltonighttocome this is the most wide ranging and it's open access. Let me know if there are any others that aren't, like I say most things are these days.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0732118X2300003X

I agree. When I was about 14 I had the usual acrimoniously splitting parents at home and sort of threw myself into ‘emo’ culture as a rebellion. Cutting yourself was kind of fashionable, you’ll see lots of 30 somethings now with permanent scars from this. If it hadn’t been the ‘in thing’ I doubt I would’ve done it.

What confuses me about Mn is how, if a poster agrees with the premise of what a person is doing or has a certain narrative to stick to, they’ll never accept that people lie or do certain things for alternate reasons. For example people would never game the system and claim benefits if they didn’t really need to, they would never pretend to be unwell or exaggerate an illness, they would never get signed off work unless they were genuine about their reasons.

The only group this thought system doesn’t apply to is trans people, whom many posters on this site believe to be influenced by social contagion or claiming to be trans for nefarious reasons. I’m gender critical so understand the argument but I also apply the same scepticism of human intent to other things, so I don’t know why they can’t.

But anyway yes, social contagion does exist and I believe it applies to mental health in teenagers. It did when I was at school it’s just instead of depression and self harm, we have anxiety and sensory type issues.

I know they are, I just didn’t have time to mess about looking for things.

I’m also not an undergraduate, and this is my area. I can access and read the literature.

That one was linked, open access, on her web page. So you could have read it and seen it wasn't just "giving them a survey on Monday and asking them on Friday if they are anxious".

I clicked on the first link in her webpage, which opened the pay or access through your institution page, and couldn’t be bothered anymore. This is just wasting time on mumsnet, not a research group, proposal to an ethics committee, or anything else that matters.

It’s literally filling in time between actual stuff… I’ve read thousands and thousands of papers- it was not important I read that one right then.