The gentle parenting bust

Millennials wanted to be better parents. So why are their kids little monsters?

My first exposure to gentle parenting ended in projectile vomiting.

It was 2007, the summer after my junior year of college, and a new babysitting client walked me through the dinner and bedtime routines for her two young children. As we ascended the staircase to an expansive second floor, the younger of the pair — a placid 16-month-old propped on his mother’s hip — locked my gaze and jabbed his index finger into the side of his other hand.

“That’s baby sign language for ‘more,'” his mother explained, acknowledging that her toddler hadn’t mastered the proper mechanics. I should oblige him anyway, she told me. Babies know what they need even if they can’t yet articulate those needs through speech, she said. It was important to honor their choices.

The toddler had just finished eating half a banana. As instructed, I retreated to the kitchen and returned with the other half. He devoured it quickly and repeated the gesture. I returned with another half banana. He gestured again; again, I delivered. Then again. And again. Until it was too much.

Partially digested bananas sprayed everywhere, much to the surprise of his mother. “Oh, my God!” she wailed as she tried, in vain, to contain the gloopy stream with her free hand. “How many bananas did you just give my baby?” she hissed, regurgitated fruit oozing through her fingers. She had watched me feed her baby but hadn’t clocked how many times her son had requested another banana.

I was young, broke, and beholden, which meant I had to swallow my pride. “He — he kept saying ‘more,'” I sputtered.

She employed me for nearly a year. And she was far from the only client who began to emphasize their children’s preferences.

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As an in-demand babysitter for the property-owning intelligentsia of Toronto, I witnessed this gentle-parenting takeover up close. Flimsy collapsible strollers were replaced with unwieldy stretch-cotton contraptions that strapped infants to parents’ bodies and ensured tuned-in and responsive caregivers. Children old enough to unclasp a nursing bra were encouraged to use those fine motor skills until they decided they were ready to chew solid foods. Baby sign language progressed from a type-A-parent novelty to the standard operating procedure. Most striking, multiple clients barred me from issuing a firm “no” in the presence of their preschoolers, let alone to them — it was a soft “no, thank you,” or bust.

Seventeen years later, gentle parenting is now the default among my professional-class millennial peers. Less a rigid doctrine than a guiding set of ideals, the approach has assumed an assortment of labels — intentional parenting, mindful parenting, respectful parenting, and, during my babysitting years, attachment parenting — each with its own jargon and figurehead (Doug Fields, Kristen Race, Janet Lansbury, and Dr. William Sears, respectively). Despite some superficial differences in their particulars, all are designed to swap out the old-fashioned “because I said so” ethos of “authoritarian” child-rearing with one grounded in empathy and negotiation. Gentle parents give their children choices and respect their wants and needs. Instead of punishing unwanted behavior, gentle parents aim to validate their child’s feelings and help them strategize their way out of distress, letting them learn through natural consequences. It is, in short, a very different way of raising children than what most of today’s adults receive from their parents.

Proponents of gentle parenting say it produces securely attached kids who are self-possessed, emotionally attuned, and kind — claims that seem to be supported by developmental-psychology research. However, the parental authority required to make the approach work often flees the scene. Too often, gentle parenting gives way to leniency and overindulgence, creating brittle and self-centered “iPad kids” who are ill-equipped to navigate setbacks — and parents whose servile devotion to their children’s happiness is a headache for those around them. Teachers blame gentle parenting for lousy classroom behavior, which some believe is accelerating an exodus from the profession. New research suggests that the helicopter parenting that often dovetails with gentle parenting gone awry is contributing to the youth mental health crisis.

As a result, “gentle parenting” has become a loaded concept. Increasingly, parents are realizing that the time- and energy-intensive method is producing decidedly ambiguous outcomes, which has caused some to throw in the towel once and for all. As most of us know, the gentle-parenting boom is beginning to look more and more like a bust.

Though many of the practices associated with gentle parenting predate the term’s coinage, the British author Sarah Ockwell-Smith is generally credited with bringing the label into the mainstream. Her 2016 book, “The Gentle Parenting Book,” introduces the method as one that “embraces the needs of parent and child, while being mindful of current science and child psychology.” Ockwell-Smith positions her approach as an “authoritative” parenting style, the conscientious middle ground between a “permissive” style of parenting in which the child is in charge and the authoritarian parenting tactics of the past — both of which researchers have found create long-term problems for kids.

In a 2014 blog post, Ockwell-Smith summed the approach up as “parenting with your child’s feelings in mind as much as possible” and then considering those feelings when deciding how to react. “The key here really is thinking, ‘Would I like it if somebody did this to me?'” she wrote. “If the answer is ‘no,’ then why would you do it to your child?”

For some parents, the guidance adds up to good common sense. Abby, a 38-year-old mom of two in a well-to-do suburb of Milwaukee, said she gravitated toward a gentle-informed parenting approach to correct the rules and expectations that came to bear on her upbringing. Abby, has asked not to publish her real name to protect her children’s privacy, appreciated that the method could be adapted to accommodate different developmental needs — both of her children have autism — and that it didn’t force kids to meet society’s ever-shifting goalposts for success.

Others are drawn to the philosophy’s emphasis on cultivating independence and self-confidence instead of obedience or external validation. For Anna Monette Chilstedt, a 36-year-old marketing director in Boulder, Colorado, this means adopting the Lansbury-approved “RIE” method — an infant-parenting pedagogy that encourages “sensitive observation” — to raise her 6-month-old daughter. “I want her to have a lot of self-confidence and -assurance that she knows how to keep her body safe, knows her limits, and feels confident that she will be cared for,” Chilstedt said. “From there, she’ll be equipped to handle whatever life throws at her.”

Mary Benedetti, a Toronto social worker and psychotherapist who works with children and families, said that there’s a lot to appreciate about gentle-parenting guidance. “Parenting advice based on attachment research, trauma research, and neuroscience is extremely valuable to children,” she told me. Ample research links an authoritative parenting style — such as gentle parenting — with the most favorable psychosocial outcomes in children.

Where some parents run into trouble is in the method’s implementation. “Clear, kind, but firm limits are needed,” Benedetti told me. Gentle parenting works only when there are ground rules in place for what constitutes acceptable behavior and caregivers who consistently uphold consequences when those lines are crossed. But the open-ended guidelines laid out by gentle-parenting authors and influencers don’t always make hard behavioral limits easy to outline or enforce. A crowded arena of parenting experts and influencers — such as Instagram’s “Dr. Becky” Kennedy and an endless supply of TikTokers — bring their own strategies and buzzwords into the mix, which can exacerbate confusion.
If a child is meant to feel empowered to make their own choices about how to engage with the world, when should the adult step in and say that the child’s choices were wrong — to declare, “Actually, you’ve had enough bananas,” regardless of whether the child agrees? And if a parent’s job is to help their child process their big and messy feelings, does that mean every negative emotion needs to become a conversation? These are among the questions that gentle parents must contend with, often on the fly. Without meaning to, some of these parents may drift into permissiveness, ending up with kids who feel empowered to do everything but respect others.

When gentle parenting veers off course, it can be detrimental. Research recently published in The Journal of Pediatrics found that a decadeslong trend toward high parental involvement — and, specifically, the diminished childhood independence that can result from it — neatly tracked with rising rates of depression and anxiety in children and teens, which have reached a record high. Separate research links permissive parentingwith “high levels of aggressiveness, antisocial behavior problems, and lack of self-discipline.” These attributes are not only unpleasant to be around but also risk a child’s ability to form meaningful relationships — a key predictor of lifelong physical and psychological well-being.
Anna Lussenburg, a Calgary, Alberta, child-behavior interventionist known professionally as “Annie the Nanny,” has seen the gentle-parenting pitfalls firsthand. Many of her clients, she said, are “former gentle parents” who are now contending with kids who put holes into walls, bite, and throw tantrums at the slightest provocation. From where she stands, there’s no mystery as to why.

“With gentle parenting, there is this constant hyperfocus on helping your kids deal with ‘big feelings,'” Lussenburg said. “But who says they’re big? The adult is the one that’s saying they’re big. Feelings are feelings; we have all sorts of feelings all day. When we hyperfocus on the negative ones, we start feeling worse rather than better.”

Emphasizing a child’s feelings can magnify minor problems and effectively puts the child in the driver’s seat when what they really need is adult guidance. “When you stop doing whatever it is you are doing and you let your day be dictated by their behavior, you stop leading, which makes children very uncomfortable,” Lussenburg said. “You’re looking to them to tell you things are OK, instead of them looking to you.”

While the dynamics between parents and children are generally a private matter, their implications are not. When a child’s immediate desires become the lens through which they’re expected to treat others, and vice versa, that framework becomes everybody’s business. When gentle parenting goes wrong, everyone takes note.

Often, the debate over what constitutes “correct” gentle parenting comes down to social values. Should a child’s feelings take precedence over how others experience that child’s actions? Who should be held accountable for a disturbance in the peace? Where is the line between a child who feels empowered to self-advocate and one who’s simply entitled? The research indicates that firm rules and consequences are needed. But when it comes to the thorny particulars of how to parent a child day-to-day, the debate becomes more about respect.

There are certainly plenty of sensible, developmentally appropriate reasons kids act out. Maybe they’re hungry or tired, or they’re distressed by the perfectly legitimate frustrations of being a small person navigating a big world without the benefit of a fully formed prefrontal cortex. Different kids come equipped with different neurodevelopmental tool kits or material circumstances that may make it easier or harder to emotionally self-regulate or modulate their behavior. They also misbehave because, yes, misbehaving is a normal part of growing up. Learning boundaries, testing them, and being an occasional pest are all part of the game.

But there’s a difference between legitimizing a child’s feelings and letting those feelings run the show. What people want isn’t always what they need. Sometimes the child asking for his third banana just needs to be told “no.”