Is modern parenting damaging to kids?

[Rainbowsponge]

My friend’s husband is a professional in the area of child development and education. He’s taught at numerous schools, SEN schools and is now a researcher. He doesn’t have children, but I do, and yesterday we were talking about the seeming increase in children with anxiety, mental health issues and what he described as ‘delayed adulthood’.

He’s British but his extended family are from India, and he said visits to see them make a striking contrast between how our children are raised and how theirs are raised. He said children are sort of left to run around in packs and find their own amusement from quite a young age, and as a result they seem more mature and confident.

His theory is that we are interrupting normal development opportunities for kids brains, and therefore they’re not properly developing. He thinks we intervene too much in perfectly ordinary learning opportunities, like playground disagreements, and our quest to make sure our children never feel challenged or upset is actually making them more anxious.

He also thinks softer, more modern punishments are bewildering children and reinforcing bad behaviour, leaving them confused about right and wrong. Children read facial expressions, so seeing us look calm/unbothered rather than angry/disappointed when they’ve done something wrong is counterproductive and blocks them from naturally learning human behaviour and socialisation.

I’m not professing to be a perfect parent at all, but it was a really interesting chat and I want to discuss it further!

But gentle parenting isn’t about no boundaries or never getting cross. It’s about building a strong attachment and not using fear or shame to manage behaviour but instead helping them to develop empathy and guilt so they manage their own behaviour over time.

Getting cross and saying ‘I’m feeling cross because I’ve asked you three times and you are ignoring me’ is different to angrily saying ‘you are so bloody ignorant. If you don’t listen to me I’ll…’. Both are feedback about the same thing. One builds trust and models congruent expression of emotion and emotion regulation the other ruptures the relationship and models verbal aggression and threats. If it’s followed by, ‘if you keep ignoring me and not putting your shoes on we will be late and you don’t like being late’ is different to ‘if you keep ignoring me I’m going to smack you/take screens away’.

Both are boundaries with consequences one is a natural consequence of the choice the other is a threat and use of fear to coerce.

Im not saying either is right or wrong, but one builds a trusting relationship the other uses fear or shame to manage behaviour.

Also, no parent is perfect and we all make mistakes so these are examples rather than saying it should always be like X or never be like Y.

Also ruptures to the attachment relationship happen all the time and then are naturally repaired in healthy parent/child relationships. It’s only if it’s mostly rupture and little repair that it’s harmful.

It is actually physical assault to smack a child. It was the norm but it’s not now and has been made illegal in some countries. If I smacked you to try and get you to behave would that be ok? No. So why is it OK to do that to a child? I’m not judging you. I smacked my DC twice when he hurt me physically. It was an instinct because I was smacked. It’s only recently there is a clear legal line in the sand and up until then it was parental choice unless a mark was left.

Not letting him go to the school fete seems an extremely harsh punishment!!

I know this might sound silly but one thing I wonder is the impact of kids not watching soap/drama TV anymore. When we were kids/teens in the 80s and 90s we'd all be watching neighbours and home and away and learned loads from it - cried along with the deaths, witnessed marriages, break ups, single parent families, money worries, school challenges, funny situations - but we were watching and learning about relationships and dynamics and characters dealing with situations with various repercussions - all in a harmless way. I learned so much about life from Neighbours!
What equivalent is there for kids nowadays when they're watching YouTube shorts?

Well I imagine it’s because children can’t have the same punishments as adults. We don’t sent them to prison, they can’t be fined or tried in court or sacked. Their brains are not developed enough at 2/3 to process delayed punishment (‘we won’t go to the park later if you carry on pushing’) and my parents always said the smack was more about giving a shock than actually hurting us - a slap on the nappy made a loud noise but didn’t harm us. Most parents smacked when I was little, I don’t feel remotely traumatised by it nor do I think violence is acceptable. I don’t smack and never have but I can understand why my parents did.

But empathy is a psychological milestone that doesn’t even start to develop until age 4-5 minimum. You can’t force a toddler to feel or understand empathy, it’s like trying to teach them maths. Gentle parenting doesn’t work because it frankly confuses children by using concepts which are far too complex for their little brains to understand. IMO it’s for the good of the parent not the child, because they can’t handle their own negative feelings around effective and age appropriate discipline. Every gentle parented child I know is deeply unhappy and you regularly see threads on here saying ‘my 3 year old is out of control, I gentle parent so why are they like this?’

It’s not about trauma (although that can happen) it’s about a better understanding of childhood development. New research and attachment theory is now the dominant model of understanding child development and is backed up by lots of neuroscience.

You may think it’s not impacted on you but how do you know what you’d be like if you hadn’t had that experience.

You can believe it’s fine but research doesn’t back you up. You are also assuming that fear of prison or other such punishment is what stops people committing crime but that’s not necessarily the case.

My very nearly 5 year old has never been on a tablet or my phone. We have a no tablet rule in the house and she won’t get a phone until she’s 11, even then it will be a basic one without smartphone capabilities. When she screamed as you described as a toddler, I ignored it. I would strap her into the car seat or high chair regardless and either try a bit of distraction ‘oooh look a bird’ or she would stop once the food arrived/car started. Either way what I wanted to happen was happening.

Also what’s your evidence that ‘gentle parenting’ doesn’t work and what’s your definition of gentle parenting?

What the research consistently shows is hill warmth/love with consistent boundaries is best.

How old is she now?

How many parents in history do you think have been experts in child development? We as a human race have survived against the odds and built civilisation. Whatever trendy methods they’re coming out with now can’t be studied over the course of a lifetime because elderly people alive today would’ve been raised very differently to how you describe. Even if you look at nature, cubs taking the mickey will be roared or snapped at by the lioness.

I’m well aware a lot of the softer ‘attachment’ parents in my life think of me as strict, but my child is very confident and sociable (as remarked upon by her teachers) and doesn’t seem to have a lot of the anxiety many of the other girls in her class do. Other parents regularly seem surprised that she answers them when spoken to rather than clinging to me, and doesn’t seem fazed or overwhelmed in social settings.

I'm astonished by manners or lack of them. We as children were briefed before a social engagement on how to behave and what was expected of us.

I did the same for my children. It gave them confidence to interact and when they could take themselves off politely to play.

I am sad for children who can't hold a conversation, say please and thank you or look you in the eye. These kids are prepared for nothing and will not contribute as nothing is expected of them.

I find "kind parenting" phraseology is a patronising in that it infers that previous parenting weren't kind.

We should be raising children to be helpful kind adults, not spoilt children who don't know the word no.

What if the child DOESN'T hate being late? I understand the logic behind natural consequences for some things. You throw the toy and it breaks so you no longer have the toy. You keep hitting the child at soft play so we leave soft play.

But I genuinely don't see how it can be applied to all areas.

If you don't put your shoes on we'll be late and you hate being late. But if they child doesn't hate being late and doesn't care then what is the consequence? What else can be a consequence of that? Surely if you use a "consequence" of taking a nice thing away you're now heading down the punishment route not natural consequences.

What if you're at a friend's house and the child wants to go home and you don't so starts breaking your friends possessions. You can't say stop that or we'll leave as that's giving the child exactly what they want. You can't say well if you don't stop it we'll stay longer as that's not a natural consequence and is pretty much just a punishment again.

I am sad for children who can't hold a conversation, say please and thank you or look you in the eye. These kids are prepared for nothing and will not contribute as nothing is expected of them.

I think this is key. A lot of parental attitudes are ‘they’ll do it when they’re ready’ but parental encouragement and a child’s desire to please is completely natural, you see adult birds encouraging their babies to jump from the nest and fly.

I saw one of those awful twee slogan photos online the other day about ‘never tell your child you’re proud of them. Tell them they should be proud of themselves’ and I thought, how sad and a bit pathetic. Children love praise and to feel their parent is pleased with something they’ve done.

Interestingly this thread just prompted me to look at the instagram posts of probably the most extreme gentle parent I know. Upon reading the captions rather than scrolling past like I usually do, half of them start with ‘Amy can be very shy and anxious in social situations, so it was great today to watch her spend 2 minutes at the play park before wanting to leave..’. Ok, but the preface applied to all of her children, all of them are apparently socially anxious and easily overwhelmed. What’s the common denominator? Chicken and egg situation, she clearly thinks her parenting is ‘responding’ to their issues whereas I can see it’s creating them.

Why does it matter to you if a child unrelated to you can’t make eye contact with you or say please / thank you?

Most children are fundamentally honest and have valid reasons for everything even if an adult eventually bullies them into submitting.

Eg in my culture we don’t say please or thank you. It’s considered morally wrong (it’s seen as akin to begging). So of course my 4 year old doesn’t as his social interactions are centred around our home and we can’t expect him to use words we don’t.

It’s a little bit of both.

children figuring out playground disagreements does not generally result in fair or reasonable results. It results in ND or otherwise different children being bullied repeatedly. A degree of adult intervention is required.

I do still wish my child had a bit of the freedom and responsibility that I had as a child. We are trying to work her towards it, but it has been challenging. Partly because society isn’t really set up for her to have that freedom, partly because of her personality, and sadly, because she lost a critical developmental window because of Covid.

Because manners bond society together and provide a comforting loose rule book that we can all follow for the sake of cohesion and community. Even animals have societal norms.

Nobody wants to live in a society where people can’t make eye contact and show the bare minimum of manners. It would be depressing, feel unfriendly and ultimately the individuals concerned would end up lonely as nobody would feel inclined to socialise with them.

In many societies not making eye contact, not smiling at strangers, and not saying please and thank you is the norm. The white / British way isn’t the only way.

You only have to read some of the posts on MN, parents getting involved in playground squabbles, anger at teachers who attempt any sort of discipline etc. The real world will come as a shock as these children enter adulthood.

No, but the British (not necessarily white) is the way in Britain, where we live. Other countries can do as they see fit.

I don’t think there will be a real world to speak of. They’ll live at home, ricocheting between stretched mental health services and the generosity of their parents, playing computer games until the parents pass away then they will likely end up in the criminal justice somewhere. Our economy will shrink due to a lack of workers, and the dependent population being enormous.

What annoys me is, some people seem to think that children are either inside on screens or playing out unsupervised as the only 2 options for a childhood. My child spends lots of time outside and doesn't even own an ipad, we live by the sea and he's always at the beach but I'm there with him.

Similarly, the older generation seem to think there's smacking/ultra strict parenting or gentle parenting and not a lot in between, whereas most parents will fall inbetween.

True. But if you do not follow the social mores of the country you live in, you will struggle socially.

Absolutely this..

Grinds my gears..
I've a friend who's DM is from another country and many a time they'll remark about not doing xyz as it's not the done thing, or an item isn't called such and such in their home country.

Lol perhaps you need to consider that the reason why white British kids don’t do as well as kids from Indian or Chinese backgrounds (and report higher anxiety) is because their parents are focussing on the wrong things.

I’m of an Indian background. Never say please or thank you, rarely make contact, talk directly, never shake hands. I earn £130k and am near the top of my field. In the UK. Where all of my contempories are the same as me ie not white British.