Let’s Chat: Gentle Parenting

Gentle Parenting has been a hot topic, not just amongst parents but society in general! It’s also largely misunderstood and receives a lot of unjustified hate. Gentle Parenting isn’t never telling your child no, never having punishments, and trying to be a friend instead of a parent (though my mom is one of my best friends). Those choices fall under Permissive Parenting, and sometimes straight up neglect.

What fascinates me is that when I ask many of these parents to describe their parenting style, it sounds something like this: “well, I don’t spank, but I don’t think it’s abuse, and you HAVE to have rules and consequences, otherwise they’ll walk all over you and struggle as adults!” …okay, but was there something that fundamentally disagree with?

Gentle Parenting is pretty normal parenting by most standards. We have rules/boundaries, but we discuss the reasons behind them. We give consequences, we just prefer them to directly relate to the behavior when possible (putting toys away if they are misused, learning that it hurts your knees to jump off the couch by letting them experience it). We try not to just see the behaviors in need of correction but also the feelings or triggers behind the behavior. We model the behaviors and habits we want to see, because littles are learning through repetition. And yes, we have removed physical punishment, manipulation and screaming at our kids from our parenting toolbox, because we’re teaching them not to solve their own problems in those ways.

Do we always do it perfectly? Of course not. I spanked my oldest out of panic when he ran out on a road once (which didn’t prevent it from happening again), and I felt like ish about it. I grew up in a yelling house, and it’s hard for me to not fall back on that when I get overstimulated and my kids are out of bed for the 15th time, and def not being Gentle Children 🥴 Sometimes I fail. I’m human. But when I let my emotions get the best of me, I own it, apologize, and try to do better.

My kids are 16, 5 and almost 4, and I’m proud of the sweet, funny, sometimes feral humans they’re growing into! When it comes down to it, we’re all trying to raise our kids to be happy, respectful and successful, and we each have things we brought into our parenting from how we were raised. We should all be continuing to grow and evolve in our parenting, and we can learn so much from each other 🤍

What’s one piece of parenting advice you think all parents should hear?

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