I am all for gentle parenting. It builds a relationship between parents and children through mutual respect, empathy, independence and patience. The keyword here. Patience. 

It can be easy to snap at any given moment and react negatively. I saw this often in my parents, mainly my father and stepmother, as I was a difficult child with a lot of energy. He was quick to anger. There were many occasions when I was spanked or grabbed in public and in the privacy of our home. This gave me an unhealthy perception of what a reasonable punishment for children is. I have considered this more as I get to the age of thinking about children of my own and often find myself torn between the style of parenting. 

Often when I see a child misbehaving, my first thought is to say “wow, that child needs to be beaten, that child needs to be taught a lesson.” Whenever this pops into my mind, I always stop myself and think about what good being beat did for me. After a while, I was very well behaved. Of course, it was not necessarily for the sake of being good, but out of fear of being hit. 

My dad and stepmother ruled our house with iron fists. Hitting as a punishment was how they were raised and they came to be successful, functioning adults, so obviously, that is a perfectly fine way to raise a kid. 

On the other hand, my mother never hit me. She was never one for punishment. Out of my two parents, she was closer to gentle parenting. However, her very lenient “buddy” style of parenting left me without structure. I could do whatever I wanted at her house – I was the boss. That is a problem I see with a lot of gentle parents. In an attempt to encourage independence in their children and teach them to voice what they need or want, parents are failing to retain a backbone of authority. This opens the door for their children to walk all over them like a doormat. Parents need to be the authority figures in their children’s lives. They need to be tough, but not in a way that borders on physical abuse. 

Gentle parents need to be a firm guiding force for their children. Parents and children need boundaries, mutual respect and clear communication. A large part of this is parents knowing how to manage their own emotions in a mature manner before interacting with their kids. 

Something commonly said to me was “if you want to cry, I’ll give you something to cry about.” This was frequently invalidating to the emotions I had as a sensitive kid and did a lot of emotional harm. A gentle parent would have said something along the lines of “it is okay to cry, it happens to everybody,” and then an effort to try understanding why the child feels that way would be made. There would be no lashing out. 

There needs to be a middle ground between the “tough” parenting style and gentle parenting. Too often there are extremes on either end of the spectrum and neither supports a healthy relationship between parents and their kids or healthy development as the child ages.

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