The Good, the Challenging, and the Dangerous of Gentle Parenting
Gentle parenting is a lightning rod topic. It seems that the conversation features either those who swear by it or those who find without any merit whatsoever.
But, from a Catholic anthropological perspective, it’s not so straightforward. In gentle parenting there’s some good, some challenging, and some dangerous. Let’s look at all three together, beginning with three fundamental principles of gentle parenting that are insightful and unequivocally good.
The Good
A gentle parent dedicates themselves to learning how to empathize and validate the emotional experience of their children. As Fred Rogers once said, “listening is the beginning of love” and oftentimes the first step in fostering healthy communication with anyone, let alone your child, is helping them feel heard.
.A gentle parent learns to look at themselves first and lead by example. If you want your children to be kind, understanding, virtuous, emotionally healthy individuals, then you better find a way to become kind, understanding, virtuous and emotionally healthy. In other words, in parenting, actions often speak louder than words.
The gentle parent is taught how to intentionally prepare a child for new experiences. For example, if a child is going to the dentist for the first time, the gentle parent gets an age-appropriate book about the experience, reads through it several times, talks through each step of the process, shares what to expect, and talks through some of the emotions the child might experience through the process. This can be freeing for a child and allow them to enter into new experiences with curiosity.
And when we look at the life and teaching of Jesus, each of these approaches checks out. Jesus is an amazing listener (sometimes too good, if you know what I mean!). Jesus led by example. And Jesus spent years preparing his friends for his death and resurrection, literally walking them through everything that would happen to them.
Now to the challenging. Gentle parenting is often idealistic in principle and challenging in practice.
The Challenging
On principle, a gentle parent is told to trade commands for an invitation to work together. For example, let’s say you’re trying to get out the door and your child needs to get his shoes on. Gentle parenting tells you to trade a command for a question that encourages a collaboration between you and the child. So, instead of saying, “Put your shoes on now so we can get to school on time,” you say, “Should we put our shoes on so we don’t miss anything at school?”
This is where things get challenging. Anyone who has parented a child knows that sometimes they will say no to you. It’s not necessarily out of defiance but as a way to test boundaries in a safe environment. So what happens when your child doesn’t do what you invite them to?
Developing a partnership with your child is ideal but sometimes, your child doesn’t want to be your partner. They want what they want and they are willing to cause a scene to get it. And therein lies an almost daily challenge to the gentle parent. What do you do when your child doesn’t want to cooperate? In those moments, does your child always need a persistent partner who tirelessly seeks a way to internally motivate toward the desired action? Or do they need a parent who challenges them to do what they don’t want to do because it’s good for them?
Those practicing gentle parenting are often at a loss in moments like these and, practically speaking, I totally understand why.
This scenario leads us to what can be dangerous about the gentle parent approach.
The Dangerous
The stated goal of gentle parenting is to raise confident, independent and happy children through empathy, respect, understanding, and setting healthy boundaries. To do that, gentle parenting guru’s ask parents to see their role as a partner or coach who guides the child through the emotions and experiences of life.
But, a parent isn’t merely a coach. To a child, a parent is love personified. To understand the role of a parent is to understand love. And love is more than empathy, respect, and understanding.
Love validates who you are and how you feel right now but love also challenges you to become who you could be. Love is empathetic but love is also demanding. Love finds a way to say yes, even when it’s hard, and love finds a way to say no even when it causes temporary pain. Love wants to instill empathy and understanding but love also wants to encourage inner strength, self-discipline, and selflessness.
Jesus was gentle sometimes. But not always. Because sometimes loving someone means challenging them and pushing them to break free from self-destructive patterns and discover who they truly are. I mean, how gentle was Jesus when he called the pharisees a brood of vipers?
Now, let’s make this concrete through an example.
It’s dinner time and you’re at your parents house for a celebration of their 40th wedding anniversary. Your whole family is there. You told your four-year-old child that the meal was going to include pasta but something happened and the pasta was never made. Seeing the rest of the meal, the child starts throwing a tantrum. She doesn’t want any of the food that’s there. She doesn’t even want to be at the dinner table to begin with. So she starts yelling and kicking her feet demanding to be fed pasta or set down from the table.
What do you do?
Gentle parenting would tell you to find a way to calm the child down, help them name and process how they feel and then partner with her toward a mutually agreed upon solution. The parent isn’t to scold the child for their poor behavior, they aren’t meant to apologize to the rest of the family for taking away from the moment and there shouldn’t be any consequences for the outburst.
That’s what a gentle parent does, but that’s not what love does. Love cannot tolerate such a display of inconsiderate selfishness. And make no mistake about it, tt was selfish of the child to expect the meal to revolve around her preferences, it was selfish to cause a scene when the day was not about her, it was selfish to offer an ultimatum and it was selfish to express her feelings by yelling and kicking instead of speaking. And the child needs to learn that, not for the sake of the parents, but for the sake of the child! Parental love is unidirectional. It’s about doing what is best for the child, not responding out of the parents own weakness or woundedness. In other words, a loving parent cannot tolerate such behavior from their child, not because it’s embarrassing for the parent. But because it’s bad for the child to tolerate selfish behavior within themselves. And they will never learn that unless the parent has the courage to teach it to them.
So, a loving parent will remove the child from the situation, validate her emotions, but then lay down the law. In moments like that, the child doesn’t need someone coaching them toward a solution, they need a parent to demand they rise to a level of behavior that is selfless, considerate and kind. Or face the consequences. Because let’s be real, there are real consequences for selfishness in this life and the next.
Now, what I am suggesting here is really hard. You’re not going to be perfect at this. As a parent of young children, I know I’m not great at it yet. I don’t always know when I’m making it about me instead of the child. And I’ve had to learn how to go from empathizing to challenging and demanding more from them. The goal, instead of immediate perfection, is to try and get better over time. Try to get healthier individually. Try to truly know your child. And try to grow in your ability to set boundaries and stick to them.
To not do this. To refuse to be anything other than a partner. To allow your child to grow up thinking the world revolves around them. And to deny them the gift of learning how to delay gratification would be to set your child on a path to becoming a self-conscious, self-centered, interiorly weak, and uncertain adult who cannot say no to themselves or what is bad for them. Sure they might be able to name their emotions or empathize with someone else’s pain, but the child won’t have any idea how to rise to an occasion piled high with difficulty. And that would be nothing short of tragic.
Gentle parenting, as a strategy, has some good, some challenging and some truly dangerous elements to it. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water, but don’t buy it wholesale either.
