Parenting, Ever So Gently

Gentle parenting? Authoritative parenting? I'll take whatever will prevent my child from growing up to be an asshole

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The first time I learned about “gentle parenting” was on TikTok. The video was a clip of a toddler throwing a tantrum in what looked like a Target store and being told, by a calm parent speaking in a measured tone, that they understood that they were sad that they couldn’t get the toy they wanted, and it’s okay to be sad when they don’t get what we want. The child hiccuped through their tears, slowly calming down. 

I found the clip bewildering. I’d never seen a tantrum successfully ended by a parenting intervention. It was like watching somebody land a 747 in a cul-de-sac. 

Since the Target video, the specter of “gentle parenting” has haunted my algorithm like a vaguely smug ghost. Some of it is truly maddening, but some is funny and charming– there’s one rainbow-haired Oklahoma mom in particular who barks out gentle parenting phrases with the cadence of an ebullient drill sergeant. 

@mommacussesYou can give them choices and still direct them into things they need to do. #mommacusses #momlife #gentleparent

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Now, I see gentle parenting everywhere, as both a method of child rearing and a social signifier that the practitioner of gentle parenting is, in fact, a college educated member of the upper middle class who probably earns a living in a creative field. The sort of person who had an “In THIS HOUSE, We believe…” signs in their yards at some point, right next to the sign that announces what home security company is surveiling the property. 

In our stollers n’ dogs-heavy neighborhood in Los Angeles, it seems like everybody is parenting as gently as they possibly can. There’s always a mom with a half sleeve of tattoos in linen overalls or bearded dad in a well-worn M83 tee shirt crouching to eye level with a toddler in our local playground, explaining calmly to Silas or Asher or Persephone that it’s okay to be mad but it’s not okay to throw rocks. Yelling at a child in this neck of the woods would elicit the sort of reaction that Tom gave the Burberry tote on Succession the other week. Authoritative parenting is capricious. It is gauche. It’s like letting your child play with a lawn dart, or giving a teething baby whisky. We’re not doing that anymore. We are gentle parenting, you utter cavemen. 

I’ve also found that witnessing other parents who are “gentle parenting” can be a little infuriating, especially when their gently parented child is being a non-gentle asshole. The other day, I brought my daughter to one of those indoor playgrounds for babies and an older girl ran up to her and snatched a toy from her hands and pushed her down, right in front of both me and her mother. Juniper started crying. The other kid’s mother picked her daughter up and cuddled her and took what felt like way too long to extract the toy from her daughter’s hand and give it back to my kid with nary an apology or acknowledgement that her child had done something that had a negative impact on another, smaller child.

I didn’t say anything as the situation played out; nobody was physically hurt and it’s not my job to parent other people’s children. Instead, I calmed myself down thinking about how I’ve never seen my daughter do anything like that to another kid and in fact Juniper’s first instinct with food and toys is to share with others, and ergo my kid was quite possibly better than her little jerkling, at least in that moment. By then, Juniper had stopped crying and we moved on with our day. 

But gentle parenting is more than simply “not yelling at your kids” or “acting performatively calm in the face of public shitheadery,” as I’ve learned from venturing beyond social media parenting influencers. While the most succinct working definition I was able to find for it was, to paraphrase, understanding childhood behavior as emotional expressions of whether their needs are or are not being met, and working to shape that behavior by understanding their emotions and meeting those needs instead of responding to undesired behaviors with punishment. In practice– so far, at least– it’s been a mixed bag. 

I can’t say I wasn’t warned that it would be a tricky road. Child development experts have pointed out that “gentle parenting” might not be the right approach to kids with certain behavioral health challenges, like ADHD. And back in 2022, The New Yorker’s Jessice Winter critiqued “gentle parenting” by pointing out that it doesn’t always work for all kids, and all parents. In fact, it seems to work suboptimally for many parents, especially given the purity demanded by prominent gentle parenting voices on podcasts, parenting forums, and parenting books. Winter writes, 

Still, across the parenting boards and the group texts, one can detect a certain restlessness. A fatigue is setting in: about the deference to a child’s every mood, the strict maintenance of emotional affect, the notion that trying to keep to a schedule could be “authoritarian.” Sometimes, the people are saying, a tantrum isn’t worthy of being placed upon a pedestal. Sometimes, they plead, their voices rising past a gentle threshold, you just need to put your freaking shoes on.

Later, Winter points out that some of the unease that she and other parents felt came from the fact that some of the most public and vocal practitioners of “gentle parenting” are advocating a sort of erasure of the self on the part of the parent, a home environment where the most volatile child’s emotions matter more than anything else. 

What is bewildering about some tenets of gentle parenting is their presentation of a validated child as a solitary child, and a mother as only Mother. When Lansbury counsels the mother of a child who hits, there is no acknowledgment of the little sister’s experience being hit, even though she may also feel “attacked”; there is no expectation of her mother “being really curious about what’s going on” inside the girl after she’s been hit, no recognition that the girl may wonder why her brother hitting her should not be “judged,” no thought given to the social consequences of being known as a hitter or of how those consequences might adversely shape a child’s self-perception. The housework that Einzig says to put off is a synecdoche for everything that the gentle parent—and, perhaps, the gently parented child’s invisible siblings—must push aside in order to complete a transformation into a self-renouncing, perpetually present humanoid who has nothing but time and who is programmed for nothing but calm.

The gist of a lot of “gentle parenting” forums and resources seems to be “do it perfectly, or don’t even bother doing it at all.” I can’t get aboard that train. I’ve never done anything perfectly in my life; why would parenting– which is one of the hardest and most impossible to control experiences a human being can have– be the first time? It would be like a baby deer on ice skates landing a triple axel. 

But, even given the gatekeeping and orthodoxy and impracticality of some of it, I still am trying my hand at “gentle parenting,” to the extent that it is effective for us. 

My parents dealt with my siblings behaving poorly the way that most parents dealt with “bad” kid behavior back then– by ignoring their screaming children, threatening to leave them behind, pointing out that everybody was looking at them, yelling at them, TURNING THIS CAR RIGHT AROUND, grounding them, giving them a time out, or, as a last resort, physically lifting and carrying them wordlessly away as they thrashed. Sometimes if we were really bad, we’d get kicked out of the car and left by the side of the road for a few minutes, cows in the fields behind us chewing their cud bemusedly. 

There are all kinds of reasons Boomer parents parented the way they did. They had children at younger ages than my peers and I are having kids. Most of them didn’t, won’t, and/or can’t go to therapy. We didn’t have nearly as much information about child development. Our parents were doing the best they could with the knowledge and resources they had. I’m also trying to do the best I can with the information and resources I have. 

Even before I had Juniper, I knew I didn’t want to yell at my own kid or use any physical coercion or force with her, unless she was in danger and the yelling or pushing were necessary to remove her physically from harm’s way. I didn’t want my kid to think that she was responsible for regulating adults’ emotions. I don’t want her to feel like she will get in trouble for telling me the truth or for having negative feelings like anger or jealousy (I don’t want to teach her that those emotions are great things to have; I would rather her work through them by acknowledging them first rather than pretending they don’t exist in order to be told by her parent that she is “good”). I don’t want to show my child that I’m angry with her; I want to be the adult in control of my emotions rather than being the emotionally disregulated party in an interaction with a child. 

“Gentle parenting” seemed like a viable way to achieve those things, with plenty of resources available for people like me who might be figuring it out as they’re going along. Plus, like I mentioned before, my algorithm was already rotten with it. 

So far, I’ve done a passable job of not yelling at my kid except for once when we were in the car and she was doing her Bored Cry very loudly and I said “AAAAAAHHHHH!” thinking that maybe me screaming from the front seat would distract her (didn’t work). I’ve also never used physical punishment with her; I have firmly grabbed her wrist to pull her hand away from a lit candle in an un-baby-proofed relative’s house and an unprotected electrical outlet in a hotel. But that was for safety, not punishment.

I don’t think she’s old enough to understand “punishment” yet, so I don’t punish her. Sometimes, when my daughter is doing something I’d prefer she’d not do, like attempting to throw her plate of food onto the floor, I’ll tell her that I’m taking the food away because food doesn’t belong on the floor. I’ve impressed myself at my ability to remain externally calm after she makes a giant fucking mess. 

The other stuff is hard. One thing “gentle parenting” preaches is that you’re not supposed to use phrases like “no,” and “good job” or “we don’t throw our food.” Do you know how hard it is not to say “no” or “good job” to a semi-verbal child? She can’t process complicated sentences. 

Best I can do is a reflexive “good job!” followed by a recap of what she did (ie: “You were trying really hard to climb up those stairs and you did it!”) Sometimes instead of “good job,” I say “wow.” I don’t know if “good job” is going to mess my kid up. Sorry in advance, Juniper. 

I tried to eliminate “no” from my parenting vocabulary except in emergencies, but that’s also had mixed results. I started doing this over-the-top theatrical gesture where I wag my finger back and forth and say in progressively higher tones “ah, ah, ah!” like a high school language teacher that’s about to tell one of her students to repeat the sentence, but en español. But my daughter just thinks this is funny. She does things like run to the bin where we keep the dog’s food and throw the lid open, looking at me expectingly, a goofy grin on her face. “AH AH AH!!!” she’ll chirp, before I have a chance to. And then she’ll start laughing.

Sometimes I’ll hear her yelling “AH AH AH!” followed by laughter from another room and realize that she is tattling on herself, that she wants me to rush in there and make the funny face and do the funny voice and pick her up and take her away. 

I’ve also tried to incorporate “uh-oh!” where I’d normally say “no,” but, again, that’s led to her doing things she’s not supposed to and yelling UH OH! afterwards. I may need to resort to “no.” 

I hope this doesn’t get me excommunicated from the playground.