Gentle Parenting has failed, lets accept this.

[Zod666]

I read everyday about children's behaviour, even primary school age where they are out of control, don't fear or respect adults and this is all down to that loverly middle class BS known as 'Gentle Parenting'.

Let's just call this out for what it is, because it does not work. I have a friend who's 8 year old son does what he likes, is disrespectful, hits his mum and no amount of 'punishment' such as removal of electronic devices etc makes a blind bit of difference, he just does not care.

So how do we discipline children like this? is it really bad to give them a measured smack on the back of the legs/bum? Obviously there is a difference between a smack to correct a child and beating the hell out of them which is child abuse and should be prosecuted, and in England smacking is still legal.......

In years gone by their have always been kids that will go too far, and by this I mean the James Bulger killers who I think no amount of discipline would have changed their outcome in life, but for the majority of kids I feel we are failing them with this soft approach where there think they can do anything without repercussions.

AIBU?

I'm a gen X er and was occasionally smacked (called marking smacks by us children) and it didn't traumatise me (we found it slightly amusing in fact) but nor did it improve my behaviour so it was pointless. I do think my parents did it so it didn't hurt though (despite the name)! For me, it just didn't work. I have never even thought of smacking my own children.

Too many kids are poorly behaved nowadays and having a young child myself I see it all the time. You can tell the children who have parents who ‘gentle parent’ and 9 times out of 10 they are the little shits in the play parks or kids groups, doing whatever they want, whenever they want with no consequences.

Gentle parenting doesn't cause that though.

Weak, fearful, nervous, lazy, absent parenting causes that. Not raising your child with empathy and respect.

Childen who are raised with empathy and respect respond/behave with empathy and respect because it's all they know.

Children who are raised in fear and intimidation cause fear and intimidation because its all they know.

Children raised with weak, permissive, ineffectual parenting take control because nature abhors a vacuum and, if no one is making the rules for them, they make their own because someone has to.

So people find a set of rules and have a baby or more, why is it assumed the child knows these rules?

Isn't it like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole? at times

So while parents are spending a lot of time and energy trying to 'philosophising' and fit that around the child, wouldn't it be better to focus on the child/ren they do have?

It makes me laugh when people say that parents who gentle parent are just too lazy to deal with their children.

It's way, way easier to just shout and smack than it is to gentle parent. Gentle parenting is really hard on the parent. It takes huge amounts of patience, self control and pushing through when everyone tells you just to take all their stuff away/shout/smack, that'll teach 'em.

But at the end of the day my children are now happier, more compliant, less stressed and are growing up to be kind empathetic people.

If you think gentle parenting is the easy way out, why not do a little experiment and try it for a month. See how you get on.

Also a parent of a ND child and totally agree with this approach. During meltdown we get every abuse under the sun thrown at us. Shouting just escalated things. We have learnt that we just need to bite our tongue and let the storm pass before we can address it.

we always have a VERY contrite child who punishes herself about it more than we ever could quite frankly.

Decision making is a life skill. My mother was like you. The net result was that it was years into adulthood before I learned how to make decisions without needing the approval of someone else.

Allowing your children to choose what they wear from a wardrobe you've bought anyway, so shouldn't contain anything wildly inappropriate, is a small way you, as an adult, can help them develop a skill they'll need when you aren't telling them what to do.
They need to learn what's appropriate for the weather/occasion, etc, without being told.

It baffles me when parents proudly announce their children aren't allowed to make these sorts of low-level decisions on a daily basis in a safe environment, then wonder why their children can't seem to do the simplest thing without 'being told'.

Absolutely.

I agree - and it has worked really well DD is very good at working out whst she is ready for. For example lots of her friends want to go to Reading Frstival this summer after GCSEs with many being told no and getting upset and some are going.

DD on the other hand after looking into it worked out she was definitley not ready to go and handle that at 16 because she just isn’t and now there are 2 years to get her ready if she wants to

gentle parenting is for me all about striking the right number of boundaries for them and for me and for society in general. Whst is appropriate outside behaviour, whst my boundaries are and also what their boundaries are in terms of others

because I think people pleasing at all costs that you see very much in our generation is a downside of all of the 1970s parents who hit (not mine mine was an advocate of gentle parenting before her time) and that is NOT what I want from my children

gettong the balance between respecting others rights while making sure their own are not breached is vital for me

Your parenting style can be gentle, or it can be permissive. The two do not go hand in hand. Some people may call their parenting style "gentle" when it's permissive, but that doesn't mean the two are in any way similar.

I work with children. The worst behaved ones are the ones in abusive/violent households (vast majority) or not parented (gentle or otherwise) at all. That’s a small percentage of kids though(just like the always perfectly behaved , quiet kids -and I do worry about them sometimes too), the vast majority are your average kids that have their moments, good days and bad days .

Yeah, I will wait to talk to them after DH or I have been beaten black and blue first🤨

In theory the idea sounds great but in practice wouldn't work.

That's great. That's a child raised to know her own boundaries, as opposed to one like me who left home at 18 to escape the imposed boundaries I wasn't given leeway to properly understand. I was damn fortunate to meet a good man who gave me a safe environment in which to find those boundaries and the confidence to trust my own instincts. That could have gone badly wrong because, of course, if I had been raised like your daughter, I wouldn't have been looking for someone else to give me boundaries. I'd have been more capable of making my own.

It does work though. Have you tried it? Have you looked into what it actually involves?

You carry on as you are and nothing will ever change. So it is within your power to change what's going on in your family, even if it doesn't feel like it. I felt similarly powerless until i decided to just take the leap and change how i reacted to my children. I became more proactive in preventing meltdowns in a safe and healthy way, and as i say, i haven't been hit in a long time.

It doesn't happen overnight. Took us between 6 months to a year to get from where you are, to where we are now. But we saw a sight improvement immediately, which built every day until we turned round and realized we hadn't seen the violent reaction in a while.

The biggest shift was my stopping seeing myself as a victim of my child's behavior and instead realizing that it's in my power to change how i parent to prevent my child getting so angry and frustrated that they feel the only option is to hit out. Which meant i had space to teach them how to express themselves.

It's not perfect, they still meltdown because of their asd/adhd, but its so much better than it was.

If my husband started giving me a gentle tap to get me to do what he wanted, I would report it to the police, divorce him, and go for full custody of my daughter. Hope that helps.

The "tap" language is so telling, too. They're trying to make themselves feel better by using a word that equates to a touch to get someone's attention - a tap on the shoulder, say - with a smack that needs to be sharp enough or a shock enough to be some kind of deterrent for future behaviour.

I didn't encounter it until I moved to the UK and it feels a bit culturally constructed to try to be socially acceptable. It's a bit silly really.

I'm sorry you went through that. I can relate to the feeling of a parent having lost control, bigtime. My parents were good parents in most regards, but not in terms of physical punishment. From an adult's perspective it now seems to me that sometimes when I misbehaved, they would bottle up anger for too long and then 'explode', sometimes physically, instead of imposing more appropriate consequences in the moment. It wasn't anywhere near the scale of beating me up, but I do remember a smacking that was so forceful it took my breath away, and once my dad accidentally broke my finger while grabbing my hand to hold me still so he could smack me(!) I was also hit with a slipper once, and slapped across the face on another occasion.

I have enough recall of events to remember that on at least some of these occasions I was behaving like a complete arsehole 😄but only in the way that most children do from time to time. It's taken me a lot of years, as an adult, to properly accept that although consequences for my behaviour were needed, I did not deserve to be hit like that, and especially not to have a bone broken. It damaged my self-esteem big time, as I thought I must be an exceptionally awful, unlovable child if people who professed to love me were so infuriated by me that they were driven to hit me like that. The psychological effects were far more lasting than the physical.

I do realise the 'taps' and 'smacks' some pps are describing aren't in the same league as more serious hitting, btw, but to me it's still relevant, because violence is a continuum. Maybe those who are advocating 'taps' know they would never go further, but imo the fact that 'taps' or 'little smacks' have been considered acceptable in past decades has partly paved the way for the more serious violence some parents, who don't have good anger management or were brought up with violence being normalised, inflict on their children. I was once literally told by my mother that smacking 'wasn't the same thing' as hitting and that I must never say to anyone outside the house that I was sometimes hit, because people would 'misunderstand' and not realise it was 'just' smacking, which 'all parents' did (probably true at the time, sadly).

It's time society stopped with the mealy-mouthed quibbling about what constitutes hitting a child and what doesn't. Plenty of other ways to impose consequences for bad behaviour. It's not OK to hit an adult in any circumstances, and it shouldn't be considered OK to hit a child in any circumstances either.

My DC haven’t had gentle parenting and neither have they had smacks. There is an in between stage.

I have a relative who uses gentle parenting because they are scared to upset the child. When we’ve looked after the child and done more traditional parenting, they have behaved well. When their parents are present giving them lots of choices, asking and not instructing them for correct behaviour and manners it all goes to pot. The child’s name is always followed with “darling” or “sweetheart” which, when they are really misbehaving, is quite nauseating.

Children need clear boundaries and clear understanding of consequences that are followed through on. If you can nail this by the time they are 7, it makes life easier when they are 12+

Giving children too much freedom and autonomy makes them insecure and they push to find the boundaries. Smacking isn’t a useful tool but neither is gentle parenting.

There are a lot of parents who THINK they are gentle parents, and tell everyone they are gentle parents, and are really anything but.

I have a family member who I think falls into the same category as a lot of other "gentle parents" who aren't really. She's traumatised from her childhood. As a result, she associates discipline with abuse. From her child's babyhood, she's never been able to enforce a boundary on anything, because she can't deal with saying "no" and hearing her child cry. So her solution to him misbehaving is to try to cheer him up with chocolate and toys.

Ironically, she also has terrible emotional regulation skills and is extremely easily overstimulated so in private she will lose her temper and shout over almost nothing. She passively watched her child kick, punch, scream and refuse to do anything all day and tried to solve it by buying him heaps of toys. Then when we went back to her house, he started singing, not even loud, and she lost it and screamed at him to shut up.

Her unstable and volatile lifestyle means that on multiple occasions (mental health crises, big arguments with boyfriends, drug overdoses), her child has needed to be collected from her house at ~midnight by his Dad, who she feels is abusive because he has consequences, and she has now lost custody of him entirely and he lives with his Dad. His behaviour is improving rapidly.

THIS is the kind of person you will encounter in the park, a child running around, taking other children's toys, hitting and pushing, screaming, and the mother saying, "Sweetheart, please don't hit Mummy. I've got some chocolate buttons. Do you want some chocolate buttons? OK, I'll buy you a toy from the shop if you stop pulling that little girl's hair. You're still pulling her hair, so I'm not going to buy you a toy. Oh don't cry sweetheart! I will buy you a toy. I'll buy you two toys! Just stop crying!" and then turning to little girl's Mum to say, "I'm gentle parenting!"

There was nothing gentle at all about that household.

Wishihadanalgorithm

I would still consider that to be non parenting rather than gentle though.

Gentle parenting (to my mind) means calm, measured, quiet, empathetic and respectful.

Being scared of upsetting a child results in no active parenting at all. That's where the problems lie.

Gentle parenting shouldn't be about no having boundaries but about how they are presented and enforced.

That's not gentle parenting 🙄

@Wishihadanalgorithm to me though gentle parenting is exactly about setting clear boundaries and understanding consequences - in essence it is simply taking away from the more traditional parenting punitive violent unnecessary punishments respecting the child as an autonomous being in their own right which means respecting them whilst instilling the need to respect others

It seems that gentle parenting is really meant to be a form of authoritative ( nit authoritarian ) parenting not a form of permissive parenting

But it is often misunderstood
The name probably doesn't help

Yes.

Teacher here- IMO it's defo not the gently parented kids that cause problems. It's those who have been neglected, traumatised, and controlled through fear who struggle to cope in the classroom and in society.

Gen X here too.
I remember the hand prints on my legs/ arms. Although I remember it, it didn't traumatise me.
What she said to me as a joke did more damage than the slaps . I wasn't beaten by any means but I had a few slaps, her angry face was enough lol and the "stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about". Ugh gives me shudders just thinking about it.

My story is different to yours.

I wasn't blessed with the pretty stick as a child and the epitome of a pretty child to me was blue eyes, blonde hair probably curly. Idk where I got that from. Little House on the Prairie perhaps anyway, I had a wonky eye and brown wonky hair. One day I asked my mum if she thought I was pretty and she flippantly said, as a joke, "pretty ugly".
I didn't know she was joking. I was 7 and devastated and I have lived with that insecurity since then until only recently really. I definitely feel better about myself since I entered my 40s.

I discovered last year that I've lived with ADHD without knowing and it explains so much and I've had to confront a lot of things my mum said and did in the first 10 years of my life that massively impacted my life and mind. Force feeding me to make sure I ate/had something iny tummy despite the anguish it brought me because of food sensitivity. Nope, I was a fussy eater.
Oh and a hypochondriac known as health anxiety today. My DS has this too.
I don't blame her for any of it, knowing all this, it's helped me to understand why I am the way I am/have been and I actually finally feel seen.

So I wasn't traumatised by the slaps.
I've smacked both of my children in the past but it didn't do anything apart from make me feel like a hideous monster not really anything else. I haven't spanked them for a long time and I can't say 100% that I never will again. I can't. But I will do everything in my power not to because I dont want my kids to grow up traumatised by me. I try so hard with what I say to them also.

Sorry that went a bit longer than I expected.