I just naturally am what is called a gentle parent, this is just how I am and this is just how I wanted to be treated as a child, and my kid's the same as me in how she views the world, and I get much better results by being "gentle".
I grew up in India. My parents didn't mind hitting kids, and I didn't mind being hit that much. What they did do is ensure they kept the connection. If I misbehaved, it would be a flick or a swot and a scolding, and then it's back to business as usual. Kids were all kinds - i had a cousin who was highly energetic and hard to keep in line, and I was very highly emotional, and my sister was very chill. We all got scolded, all cried, all got in trouble. Kids were just kids.
I'm married to an American and the first thing I notice in my husband's family is they ignore kids so much. Everyone talks about how parents are coddling their kids, but I am yet to see it. Babies and toddlers get so ignored. I see old family videos and there's 2yos just like languishing while all the grownups are talking. Those 2yos are grownups now and I felt so sorry for them I hugged them after we got done watching those videos lol. But then they went on to do the same when they had children. It bothers me so much at Thanksgiving/Christmas, and I take it upon myself to be hanging out with the kids and playing with them.
Where this whole gentle parenting thing comes in is that I see most American grownups only catch their kids being bad. They aren't spending enough time immersed in their children's world, and they let kids be by themselves far too much. I guess some of it is Western culture by itself, where you "give people space" instead of engaging whoever is around you, but it's far too much for me. They only really pay attention to kids when their kids are doing something they ought not to do. So the predominant connection becomes one of antagonism. This is especially true for kids who are naturally high energy or curious or sensitive. Another aspect is a lot of the disciplining techniques tend to presume the child will end up bad if you don't beat or incentivize the bad out of them. Every time a child doesn't comply to an image of a perfect child, the parent thinks there's something wrong with them or with their child and works very hard to stop them being bad. This makes the child identify as a bad child and they lean harder into that label.
I see this in your language here as well, where you say "what if the child is actually bad and wants to hurt other kids". If a child gets there, that's usually the fault of the adults around them that they put the child in so much pain that he wants to pass the pain on to others. No child naturally just starts there.
The folks I grew up around let kids be kids. They are going to be unreasonable, they aren't going to obey, they aren't going to always do what is expected they'll do. That's just the nature of children whose world is so different from ours. So the natural response becomes one of problem-solving, not anger. When I'd be annoyed after a hard day that my kid didn't act as expected, my mom would just laugh and say "she's a child not a doll". What's the point of being angry my kid turns on the lights at night and disrupts my sleep, when in her mind there are giant spiders ready to get us in the dark and she's saving us all. Is it greed to ask for more candy, or is it how ultraprocessed food is made these days that even priests are obese, and the solution is to just not have any in the house.
Children don't want to be bad. They just want to make their parents happy and proud. It's our responsibility to make it easy for them to do so.
Just adopting gentle parenting doesn't help though. A lot of them still see the world as you do that their kids are bad but they ought not yell. It manifests itself in passive aggressive ways of parenting. The words don't match the thoughts and don't match the actions.
And this shit isn't easy. You're not going to be able to gentle-parent while not asking your village for support. The women I know who try to gentle-parent their kids with a husband away working in trucking end up relying on meds to make things happen. Melatonin to get the kids to sleep on time. Ritalin to get kids to comply. SSRIs to prevent themselves from constantly melting down. Coffee to stay active. And with some children who are active or sensitive, you'll end up on all of that anyway no matter your parenting style if you don't have sufficient support.
If you have a village of mature adults who all love your kid, you'll naturally tend towards gentle parenting. The more time everyone spends with the child, the easier it is to see the good in them and not attribute motives that aren't there. And you won't react in anger at normal kid things if you are in a calm state yourself, plus, you won't be modeling anger for your kid to copy.
A big part of seeing "darkness" in kids is hating on parts of your own self. If your parents said you were evil for doing some normal kid things, you'll also say the same when you see those things in your child and try to punish it out of them. I see some of my family members take that attitude with my kid and their own kids, and it gives the worst results. Cognitive behavioral therapy is quite useful when adults see all of humanity that way. Because that kind of view is often projection and not based on reality, and it harms both yourself and your child to take that attitude.
You make such an excellent point of the ignoring of children in the west. It's so so bad. My intuition has screamed at me from day one to never place my children in childcare. Instead, if I need help or a break, we visit family (none live close) or have a mother's helper come help with the kids in the home while I take care of things. My kids also go to the nursery at church or the gym where I am in the building nearby.
Maybe we can't effectively talk about parenting styles while there is such a huge mother-baby disconnect that is bound to bleed into parenting in the early years and then onward.
I also believe that about 95% of parenting has nothing to do with the child or the method, but the inner world of the parent. Doing deep inner work in motherhood has been more impactful than work done in any other period of my life, and when I continue to work on myself, the world around me seems to fall into place.
When I work on myself, meaning at a deep level of the seat of Self, and recognizing ego, and releasing my resentments, samskaras, traumas, my reaction to life seems to be intuitive. It's not led by my own bullshit. I know when my child needs to be nurtured and corrugated, versus when a firm, loud voice needs to be used.
Thanks for this thought process...I may expand this into an article!
Yeah honestly remembering my own childhood and my inner experience of being a child has had more of an impact of me parenting than anything else. Parenting books have been more helpful as they triggered more memories in me and helped me look at them differently.
It's an empathy thing - how do you react when you recognize your own emotions in your children? My mom had a hardscrabble life. When I was crying because a favorite neighbor was taking a trip for a week, she told me "never get attached to anyone". She is a very sensitive person who gets attached to people a lot too, and this was how she coped. When my own kid was in a similar situation, I just had her videocall with the person she missed, and she felt much happier and isn't maladjusted in that regard like I am. It was mindblowing to see the difference.
I think there's a difference between gentle parenting because you are naturally gentle (as in your case) and "gentle parenting" as an ideology performed by parents who are suppressing their obvious desire to freak out at their kids. If you're naturally a gentle parent, then the words you say will be natural, not forced. But the ideological "gentle" parents often speak in scripts, and it can give kids the impression that their love is fake because their words are.
This is a really great comment -- for other readers, Lila has some really good articles about this on her Substack.
I feel like understanding the underlying mechanism helps be more authentic. Learning from books feels better here. No one faults quantum physics because it's hard to learn it properly from reels.
Lila Krishna, thank you so much for this. I agree with much of what you say.
I am in and of the West, but have long been disturbed by how thoroughly children are ignored in the West. I don't know why I am able to see and feel this so clearly and strongly. (Perhaps from experiencing it myself as a child?).
I mean, this ignores that fact that children are very often boring and annoying and most of not all parents, do not want to spend the precious few hours they get socialising with other adults, spending more time with playing and speaking to their children. It's not ignoring children not to be engaged with them all the time, and children also need freedom from their parents to imaginatively engage with other kids or to play alone.
If you have not been played with as a child, you won't know how to play with your children. You have no mental model for it. I find I resort to remembering the fun memories of engaging with my elders, and try to replicate that for the children I'm around. When my daughter's around my family, everyone wants to play with the new kid. Now there's more little kids, and everything feels so ALIVE as they explore and interact with everyone. Also, adults need to bond with the children in their family. If you only see your nephews and nieces and grandnephews and grandnieces during the holidays, you should spend more time, not less, interacting with them. My kid sees her uncle only occasionally, but LOVES playing cars with him. She packs a little drawstring bag full of toy cars unprompted every time we go to visit family.
Kids under 3 don't need freedom from their parents. They at max parallel play with other children, they don't quite know to initiate conversations. They actually get very stressed when the environment is unstructured AND they don't have an attached adult guiding them around.
Plus, the thing I notice with my husband's family is there's so little intergenerational conversation, unless it's about sports. If we go for a dinner with relatives, all the folks of our generation get quiet. It made me uncomfortable and I didn't understand why they went quiet. I prodded my husband and he said "the grownups are talking". That made sense. Kids are kept out of conversation with the adults for so long because they are assumed to be annoying and childish and interrupting, and they just never learn how to talk to people who aren't their age.
Kids also learn to make good conversation when adults talk to them. I find it so annoying when I go to someone's house and their 10 year old answers the door, and is appalled to find an adult, and just screams for mom, instead of welcoming the guest and offering them a drink or something.
I'm sorry you had a difficult childhood, but Independent play is recognised as completely normal and healthy for kids as young as 2 and enhances a child's creativity, self-reliance and confidence. Refusing to allow it by assuming kids need content adult attention and interaction isn't doing them any favours. Parents also need kid free time. I personally do not want to spend time with parents who insist on including their child in every conversation. Some topics aren't appropriate for kids! What, are parents just not supposed to have an adult conversation until their kid leaves home? You simultaneously seem to have incredibly high and low expectations for children, perceiving them as somehow damaged by not being centred by adults at all times, and then when they express disinterest in YOU by not answering the door to your liking, feeling miffed that despite obsessively including kids at all your social events, they sometimes don't actually want to be included. A 10 year old has no interest in their parents friends and isn't interested in playing host. That is also normal.
Where did I say my childhood was bad? It was very good in a lot of ways and that's what I'm trying to replicate.
What I'm saying is to consider children as adults in training and teach them how to exist. Sometimes kids want to play on their own and just want you to be nearby. Let that happen. Sometimes they want you to play with them. Let that happen too. If your spouse wanted to hang with you, would you say "no, you need to learn to be on your own"? Why not give kids the same courtesy.
In gatherings, kids feel quite disoriented and overstimulated. It's important to show them the structure of the gathering and teach them what to do. Like, no, you're not watching peppa pig at Thanksgiving dinner, that's not what it's for. You gotta go around interacting with everyone. Ask uncle about spaceships, tell auntie about when the cat had kittens, show your little cousin how to put turkey stickers on the windows. If your brother brought a friend over, you wouldn't be ignoring them and trying to have family conversations and be annoyed at their presence, you make them feel included. Do the same with children. Talk to nieces and nephews, get to know them so you can actually give them a non-generic Christmas present, and show yourself as a trusted adult for them to talk to if parents are being annoying in the future.
Kids under 2-3 can't initiate conversations. But they can respond. So adults can talk to the children and engage with them just as they do with other guests.
I used to discuss the Manson murders with my baby when we were breastfeeding and I was listening to a book about that. You can chat around them.
Marilyn, I love this. So much of "gentle parenting" strikes me as gaslighting and fake. I personally have had great outcomes with Honest, Occasionally-Lose-It parenting. It creates resilient, funny teens who are under no illusions that they're angels and can forgive others' trespasses as needed.
Here's a blog post I wrote about it back in 2015, when my kids were small:
Agree totally! I have a friend who has 10 - TEN - kids. She always says that the difference between “occasionally-lose-it parenting” (great phrase) and unhealthy abusive parenting is a chasm, not a crack.
This is a great way of putting it and a great reminder for the days when you do lose your shit and worry you've permanently scarred your kid. “Gentle parenting" has had such a stranglehold on millenial parents and the judgement we put on ourselves because of it is unhealthy.
I am so happy to see someone mention gaslighting. I do actually do my best to parent as gently as possible (though I don't identify as a gentle parent - I raise my voice too often to stake that claim) but sometimes find myself leaving interactions with my kids wondering if, by over explaining why I got angry, I am gaslighting them into thinking that me snapping is their fault, when actually on the days I'm snappy it's usually because I slept badly, skipped breakfast and ran out of teabags (something they did will have tipped me over the edge, but still, saying "mummy got angry because there was too much noise" can feel like a thinly veiled "you were too loud so me being mean was your fault" even when I genuinely am sorry for losing my cool.). I've never seen anyone else raise this concern though, so thank you for making me feel seen 😂
Marilyn, As a parent and a psychiatrist, I think you are right on. I end up treating these kids when they are in their early 20s and they are a mess. Those “bad” qualities which the “gentle” parents deny—cruelty, aggression, selfishness—are exactly what beset their children later in life. Freud called this “the return of the repressed.”
Yes, a labor of love, not a popularity contest. “Gentle parenting” is very often merely an abdication of parental responsibility. It seems to be practiced by parents who are terrified of losing their child’s love. Using their superior intellect, these parents trick their children into empathizing and complying with their agenda. It’s performative, manipulative and weaponizes an innocent child’s natural trust. The fake nice tone you described is like fingernails on a blackboard to me.
I coach responsible parents who are unafraid to raise responsible children by exercising appropriate authority, firmly and kindly. Children feel safe when adults are trustworthy. Thank you for such an eloquent essay on a parenting trend that is detrimental to a child’s soul.
This is an extremely interesting take on gentle parenting - I don’t agree with the whole piece, I believe it should be about “performative gentle parenting” not gentle parenting in general, but there are some interesting points that should be discussed more in depth.
Gentle parenting is often cruel because parents in general are often cruel: it’s not getting rid of gentle parenting that is going to help us get rid of cruelty.. but looking into ourselves with honesty and compassion and bring that honesty and compassion to kids can go a long way.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that simply reciting formulas with a set tone of voice steals authenticity to the relationship many parents build with their kids, hence to the relationship that these kids build with themselves.
I also agree that being able to acknowledge that evil exists within us, that we sometimes want to hurt other people, is important.
However, it is crucial to be honest about this: more often than not parents are the first not to acknowledge that the pleasure they derive from being cruel to their kids guides (at least partially) their actions.
To be a gentle parent is certainly a good thing, as long as you are doing work on yourself to shed light on the dark corners of your own soul. This - however- is a lifetime’s work: and not everyone is equipped to undertake it.
Performative gentle parenting buries the need for this work and - in doing so - generates the kind of shallowness that comes from hypocrisy.
Are these people HIGH? Children are completely self centered, and have no way to put themselves in somebody else’s shoes until they are mmm….7? Age of reason? That doesn’t mean they are bad or good—it’s just a developmental fact. Just like you don’t expect your infant to sleep through the night or eat solids, you can’t expect your toddler to have any ability to see a situation from any perspective other than their own. If you expect a child to perform at a level above their level of development it creates anxiety in the child—they think there is something wrong with them.
If your preschooler hits another kid with a plastic toy, you take away the toy and remove the child, and the verbal message has to be really simple—e.g.”We don’t hit other people.” Or “Hitting is not OK.” Kids are way less verbal at that age than adults think they are.
A parent needs to provide curbs and sidewalks and then keep a child on the sidewalk. Effective discipline keeps children safe…safe from physical hazards of course, but also safe from getting too carried away with their own emotions/agendas. The message need not be punitive—but it needs to assure the child “I will not let you get in over your head.”
I disagree with this so strongly. Our approach to parenting cannot consist only of reactions to other parenting philosophies we disagree with, which is what this is. This also smacks of excuses for indulging in anger and not being sorry about it. All of this will drive children away from the faith and from you. (And no, I don't agree with the lady you quote who is wishy-washy on what Jesus did for us.) For anyone reading this wondering why it doesn't sound like a Christian way of parenting, it's because it's not. Details here: https://marthahepler.substack.com/p/three-links-and-a-rant
"Simon seems to think that if we can make children disgusted enough at their own badness, they won’t grow up to be villains. This is a classic parenting-made-simple scam: the believe that if you do it right, they will turn out the way you want."
Aren't you taking this a little bit to the extremes? it doesn't seem to me that Marilyn Simon is espousing the opposite of gentle parenting (what that would even be? "rough parenting?")
I don't know about Marilyn, but my personal view is that raising kids escapes theories, because what's good for one kid might be wrong for another. And I doubt that Marilyn's idea of education is to model her daughters. And neither is mine.
What I want to achieve for my daughters is:
1) that they become good people in the fellowship of Jesus (and I say this in the least ideological way you can imagine)
2) that they learn to know themselves, especially their weaknesses and faults, because that's the path to fulfillment and happiness
3) thay they become resilient face to the unavoidable setbacks and failures they will experience.
I’ve recently come to see gentle parenting as nothing more than a status signifier. It’s so tiresome and my fellow parents who practice it are the most disempowered people in their house. Their toddlers are the most empowered.
Obsessing over your kids is a status signifier. We put our kids in a private school during COVID because of the public school closures, and the *obsession* so many mothers had with every detail of their kids’ lives - and the lives of the other children! - was literally insane.
It wasn’t even a ritzy private school - just our parish Catholic school - but in upper Fairfield County in Connecticut Catholic School is basically like a discounted LV handbag - it’s an affordable luxury item for the petty Nouveau Riche.
The social environment literally put me and my kids in therapy; it was such an overwrought hothouse from all the stay at home moms who had literally nothing to do but obsess about their own and other people’s kids all day, but to them it was a status symbol, and not obsessing over your kids got you shunned.
We were so relieved to get back to public school and just be “normal: again.
Children know when their parents give a damn enough to tell them off for being selfish or mean, usually because they're being lazy and mean spirited, grouchy or just destructive: they also know when their parents don't care enough to notice, or to risk confrontation if they do, and they might like being confronted with their failings initially - in fact it's the nature of confrontation that it's uncomfortable, and often noisy and disruptive - but, in my experience of two late teenagers, they do regularly say, once they've calmed down (perhaps because you can only feel contrite after you've been challenged to confront YOURSELF?!) that they appreciate that someone has bothered to confront them, even their parents. My hunch is that your hunch is correct I mean, based upon my experience as a child and now as a parent. They don't hold back either, so you do end up creating people who aren't scared of pointing out your own failings eventually - which is er bracing, to say the least. And glorious!
We also had day 1 of Christmas break outburst (an angry 11 year old took it out on her 8 year old brother). What followed was a day of restriction for us all from her presence. Her actions may have been out of frustration, but agency demanded we punish the choice she made. Hopefully tomorrow goes better, as we reflect on loving God and loving others….but we know we will fail again, we will celebrate the birth of the One who never fails.
Thanks for your words and how they resonated today as we navigate punishment, grace, and forgiveness.
As a parent of some particularly challenging children I loved this whole piece. “A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it.” - reminds me of Bonhoeffer’s “It was grace because it was costly, and it was costly because it was grace.”
The combination of gentle parenting with laziness has really put many kids at a disadvantage as they go out into the world. Gentle parenting gives way to “cool parenting” as they get older and fuels the chase of material goods and the right experiences to post on line. Nothing ever demanded of the kids sets them up for the victim narrative so many adopt and universities foster. They end up with a warped view of the way the world works and their place in it. Temper tantrums on TikTok ensue.
So true! I have friends in their 20s that are doing gentle parenting, and it fails to cultivate a sense of morality in the children, and tends to make them more egocentric - the world has to stop so we can all process their emotion. I am all for making children feel seen, heard, and most of all loved - but sometimes children also need to realise that the world doesn't revolve around them. They are part of a family, part of a community - part of something bigger than themselves!
Whilst this is absolutely true and valid, it's also developmental and so might not yet be appropriate for the children in your example to yet comprehend, in the same way it's not reasonable to expect a six month old to be walking. Appropriateness of parenting approaches is all about context, which is going to be unique to each child.
I must admit that I'm softer on my two daughters (11 and 13) than I should be. I console myself thinking that if I had a boy, I would shovel him against the wall every other day, so I can't be accused of being wobbly. But I'm not so sure I'd do that. My wife plays the bad cop much more often than me, but she's also much more of a perfectionist. However, none of us refrain from a good lecture when they deserve it.
And a couple of times I gave them a good spanking. For instance, when they climbed the bookcase in the living room (a very dangerous thing to do).
Because gentle parenting can be dangerous. A friend of us who's into gentle parenting is basically her toddler's slave, even when the little hurricane decides he wants to run in the middle of a public road. "Tommi dear, this is dangerous, those cars might hurt you, please stop" she coos, panting after him, to little effect since the little monster thinks she's playing tag and runs even faster.
After she finally catches him, instead of putting the fear of God into him, she talks softly to him about vehicle-induced accidents.
To the objections of her terrorized husband, she replies unfazed: "you know, you can really talk to him, he's really beginning to understand, now" (real story from this summer)
We were once at a restaurant when our then three year old was having an epic temper tantrum so my husband took her out to the parking lot. She broke away and ran right towards the road. He grabbed her and gave her a single whack on the butt.
10 minutes later a cop walked into the restaurant and took him out back.
Someone had called and reported child abuse.
Luckily the cop was cool and told my husband to take a kid into the bathroom next time.
This was in Dexter, MI, about 5 minutes outside of Ann Arbor, and I’m sure it came from some progressive, over educated, “let me dominate you with my KINDNESS” cat-lady type.
It made us very defensive, nervous parents, which really screwed up our family life and our kids for a long time.
We finally got our confidence back, but man was it rattling.
I'm so sorry for your experience. I know no parent who never ever lost it with their kids. And, in extreme situations, there's no other way to communicate effectively your distress than doing it physically. (I'm not talking about actual violence, of course. It should go without saying but the internet being what it is...)
Signalling distress it's very important because kids communicate more emotionally than verbally, and they need to internalize that something is very wrong as soon as they do it.
I just naturally am what is called a gentle parent, this is just how I am and this is just how I wanted to be treated as a child, and my kid's the same as me in how she views the world, and I get much better results by being "gentle".
I grew up in India. My parents didn't mind hitting kids, and I didn't mind being hit that much. What they did do is ensure they kept the connection. If I misbehaved, it would be a flick or a swot and a scolding, and then it's back to business as usual. Kids were all kinds - i had a cousin who was highly energetic and hard to keep in line, and I was very highly emotional, and my sister was very chill. We all got scolded, all cried, all got in trouble. Kids were just kids.
I'm married to an American and the first thing I notice in my husband's family is they ignore kids so much. Everyone talks about how parents are coddling their kids, but I am yet to see it. Babies and toddlers get so ignored. I see old family videos and there's 2yos just like languishing while all the grownups are talking. Those 2yos are grownups now and I felt so sorry for them I hugged them after we got done watching those videos lol. But then they went on to do the same when they had children. It bothers me so much at Thanksgiving/Christmas, and I take it upon myself to be hanging out with the kids and playing with them.
Where this whole gentle parenting thing comes in is that I see most American grownups only catch their kids being bad. They aren't spending enough time immersed in their children's world, and they let kids be by themselves far too much. I guess some of it is Western culture by itself, where you "give people space" instead of engaging whoever is around you, but it's far too much for me. They only really pay attention to kids when their kids are doing something they ought not to do. So the predominant connection becomes one of antagonism. This is especially true for kids who are naturally high energy or curious or sensitive. Another aspect is a lot of the disciplining techniques tend to presume the child will end up bad if you don't beat or incentivize the bad out of them. Every time a child doesn't comply to an image of a perfect child, the parent thinks there's something wrong with them or with their child and works very hard to stop them being bad. This makes the child identify as a bad child and they lean harder into that label.
I see this in your language here as well, where you say "what if the child is actually bad and wants to hurt other kids". If a child gets there, that's usually the fault of the adults around them that they put the child in so much pain that he wants to pass the pain on to others. No child naturally just starts there.
The folks I grew up around let kids be kids. They are going to be unreasonable, they aren't going to obey, they aren't going to always do what is expected they'll do. That's just the nature of children whose world is so different from ours. So the natural response becomes one of problem-solving, not anger. When I'd be annoyed after a hard day that my kid didn't act as expected, my mom would just laugh and say "she's a child not a doll". What's the point of being angry my kid turns on the lights at night and disrupts my sleep, when in her mind there are giant spiders ready to get us in the dark and she's saving us all. Is it greed to ask for more candy, or is it how ultraprocessed food is made these days that even priests are obese, and the solution is to just not have any in the house.
Children don't want to be bad. They just want to make their parents happy and proud. It's our responsibility to make it easy for them to do so.
Just adopting gentle parenting doesn't help though. A lot of them still see the world as you do that their kids are bad but they ought not yell. It manifests itself in passive aggressive ways of parenting. The words don't match the thoughts and don't match the actions.
And this shit isn't easy. You're not going to be able to gentle-parent while not asking your village for support. The women I know who try to gentle-parent their kids with a husband away working in trucking end up relying on meds to make things happen. Melatonin to get the kids to sleep on time. Ritalin to get kids to comply. SSRIs to prevent themselves from constantly melting down. Coffee to stay active. And with some children who are active or sensitive, you'll end up on all of that anyway no matter your parenting style if you don't have sufficient support.
If you have a village of mature adults who all love your kid, you'll naturally tend towards gentle parenting. The more time everyone spends with the child, the easier it is to see the good in them and not attribute motives that aren't there. And you won't react in anger at normal kid things if you are in a calm state yourself, plus, you won't be modeling anger for your kid to copy.
A big part of seeing "darkness" in kids is hating on parts of your own self. If your parents said you were evil for doing some normal kid things, you'll also say the same when you see those things in your child and try to punish it out of them. I see some of my family members take that attitude with my kid and their own kids, and it gives the worst results. Cognitive behavioral therapy is quite useful when adults see all of humanity that way. Because that kind of view is often projection and not based on reality, and it harms both yourself and your child to take that attitude.
You make such an excellent point of the ignoring of children in the west. It's so so bad. My intuition has screamed at me from day one to never place my children in childcare. Instead, if I need help or a break, we visit family (none live close) or have a mother's helper come help with the kids in the home while I take care of things. My kids also go to the nursery at church or the gym where I am in the building nearby.
Maybe we can't effectively talk about parenting styles while there is such a huge mother-baby disconnect that is bound to bleed into parenting in the early years and then onward.
I also believe that about 95% of parenting has nothing to do with the child or the method, but the inner world of the parent. Doing deep inner work in motherhood has been more impactful than work done in any other period of my life, and when I continue to work on myself, the world around me seems to fall into place.
When I work on myself, meaning at a deep level of the seat of Self, and recognizing ego, and releasing my resentments, samskaras, traumas, my reaction to life seems to be intuitive. It's not led by my own bullshit. I know when my child needs to be nurtured and corrugated, versus when a firm, loud voice needs to be used.
Thanks for this thought process...I may expand this into an article!
You might like this essay of mine about the dark history of parenting books in the West and how it's disrupted our natural instincts -- https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-dangers-of-reading-too-much-part-df8
Yeah honestly remembering my own childhood and my inner experience of being a child has had more of an impact of me parenting than anything else. Parenting books have been more helpful as they triggered more memories in me and helped me look at them differently.
It's an empathy thing - how do you react when you recognize your own emotions in your children? My mom had a hardscrabble life. When I was crying because a favorite neighbor was taking a trip for a week, she told me "never get attached to anyone". She is a very sensitive person who gets attached to people a lot too, and this was how she coped. When my own kid was in a similar situation, I just had her videocall with the person she missed, and she felt much happier and isn't maladjusted in that regard like I am. It was mindblowing to see the difference.
I think there's a difference between gentle parenting because you are naturally gentle (as in your case) and "gentle parenting" as an ideology performed by parents who are suppressing their obvious desire to freak out at their kids. If you're naturally a gentle parent, then the words you say will be natural, not forced. But the ideological "gentle" parents often speak in scripts, and it can give kids the impression that their love is fake because their words are.
This is a really great comment -- for other readers, Lila has some really good articles about this on her Substack.
I feel like understanding the underlying mechanism helps be more authentic. Learning from books feels better here. No one faults quantum physics because it's hard to learn it properly from reels.
Yes, I agree! I thought your comment on this article was great and adds important nuance.
Wow this is perfect thank you! ♥️
This is very well put. Thank you.
Lila Krishna, thank you so much for this. I agree with much of what you say.
I am in and of the West, but have long been disturbed by how thoroughly children are ignored in the West. I don't know why I am able to see and feel this so clearly and strongly. (Perhaps from experiencing it myself as a child?).
Thanks, Lila. You have important things to say, and you write clearly.
Thank you for writing this.
I mean, this ignores that fact that children are very often boring and annoying and most of not all parents, do not want to spend the precious few hours they get socialising with other adults, spending more time with playing and speaking to their children. It's not ignoring children not to be engaged with them all the time, and children also need freedom from their parents to imaginatively engage with other kids or to play alone.
If you have not been played with as a child, you won't know how to play with your children. You have no mental model for it. I find I resort to remembering the fun memories of engaging with my elders, and try to replicate that for the children I'm around. When my daughter's around my family, everyone wants to play with the new kid. Now there's more little kids, and everything feels so ALIVE as they explore and interact with everyone. Also, adults need to bond with the children in their family. If you only see your nephews and nieces and grandnephews and grandnieces during the holidays, you should spend more time, not less, interacting with them. My kid sees her uncle only occasionally, but LOVES playing cars with him. She packs a little drawstring bag full of toy cars unprompted every time we go to visit family.
Kids under 3 don't need freedom from their parents. They at max parallel play with other children, they don't quite know to initiate conversations. They actually get very stressed when the environment is unstructured AND they don't have an attached adult guiding them around.
Plus, the thing I notice with my husband's family is there's so little intergenerational conversation, unless it's about sports. If we go for a dinner with relatives, all the folks of our generation get quiet. It made me uncomfortable and I didn't understand why they went quiet. I prodded my husband and he said "the grownups are talking". That made sense. Kids are kept out of conversation with the adults for so long because they are assumed to be annoying and childish and interrupting, and they just never learn how to talk to people who aren't their age.
Kids also learn to make good conversation when adults talk to them. I find it so annoying when I go to someone's house and their 10 year old answers the door, and is appalled to find an adult, and just screams for mom, instead of welcoming the guest and offering them a drink or something.
I'm sorry you had a difficult childhood, but Independent play is recognised as completely normal and healthy for kids as young as 2 and enhances a child's creativity, self-reliance and confidence. Refusing to allow it by assuming kids need content adult attention and interaction isn't doing them any favours. Parents also need kid free time. I personally do not want to spend time with parents who insist on including their child in every conversation. Some topics aren't appropriate for kids! What, are parents just not supposed to have an adult conversation until their kid leaves home? You simultaneously seem to have incredibly high and low expectations for children, perceiving them as somehow damaged by not being centred by adults at all times, and then when they express disinterest in YOU by not answering the door to your liking, feeling miffed that despite obsessively including kids at all your social events, they sometimes don't actually want to be included. A 10 year old has no interest in their parents friends and isn't interested in playing host. That is also normal.
Where did I say my childhood was bad? It was very good in a lot of ways and that's what I'm trying to replicate.
What I'm saying is to consider children as adults in training and teach them how to exist. Sometimes kids want to play on their own and just want you to be nearby. Let that happen. Sometimes they want you to play with them. Let that happen too. If your spouse wanted to hang with you, would you say "no, you need to learn to be on your own"? Why not give kids the same courtesy.
In gatherings, kids feel quite disoriented and overstimulated. It's important to show them the structure of the gathering and teach them what to do. Like, no, you're not watching peppa pig at Thanksgiving dinner, that's not what it's for. You gotta go around interacting with everyone. Ask uncle about spaceships, tell auntie about when the cat had kittens, show your little cousin how to put turkey stickers on the windows. If your brother brought a friend over, you wouldn't be ignoring them and trying to have family conversations and be annoyed at their presence, you make them feel included. Do the same with children. Talk to nieces and nephews, get to know them so you can actually give them a non-generic Christmas present, and show yourself as a trusted adult for them to talk to if parents are being annoying in the future.
Kids under 2-3 can't initiate conversations. But they can respond. So adults can talk to the children and engage with them just as they do with other guests.
I used to discuss the Manson murders with my baby when we were breastfeeding and I was listening to a book about that. You can chat around them.
Marilyn, I love this. So much of "gentle parenting" strikes me as gaslighting and fake. I personally have had great outcomes with Honest, Occasionally-Lose-It parenting. It creates resilient, funny teens who are under no illusions that they're angels and can forgive others' trespasses as needed.
Here's a blog post I wrote about it back in 2015, when my kids were small:
https://covertcreatives.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-dark-side.html
Agree totally! I have a friend who has 10 - TEN - kids. She always says that the difference between “occasionally-lose-it parenting” (great phrase) and unhealthy abusive parenting is a chasm, not a crack.
This is a great way of putting it and a great reminder for the days when you do lose your shit and worry you've permanently scarred your kid. “Gentle parenting" has had such a stranglehold on millenial parents and the judgement we put on ourselves because of it is unhealthy.
Great article, thank you!
That sentence is fantastic. It's such a marvellous way to look at it.
I am so happy to see someone mention gaslighting. I do actually do my best to parent as gently as possible (though I don't identify as a gentle parent - I raise my voice too often to stake that claim) but sometimes find myself leaving interactions with my kids wondering if, by over explaining why I got angry, I am gaslighting them into thinking that me snapping is their fault, when actually on the days I'm snappy it's usually because I slept badly, skipped breakfast and ran out of teabags (something they did will have tipped me over the edge, but still, saying "mummy got angry because there was too much noise" can feel like a thinly veiled "you were too loud so me being mean was your fault" even when I genuinely am sorry for losing my cool.). I've never seen anyone else raise this concern though, so thank you for making me feel seen 😂
Marilyn, As a parent and a psychiatrist, I think you are right on. I end up treating these kids when they are in their early 20s and they are a mess. Those “bad” qualities which the “gentle” parents deny—cruelty, aggression, selfishness—are exactly what beset their children later in life. Freud called this “the return of the repressed.”
Yes, a labor of love, not a popularity contest. “Gentle parenting” is very often merely an abdication of parental responsibility. It seems to be practiced by parents who are terrified of losing their child’s love. Using their superior intellect, these parents trick their children into empathizing and complying with their agenda. It’s performative, manipulative and weaponizes an innocent child’s natural trust. The fake nice tone you described is like fingernails on a blackboard to me.
I coach responsible parents who are unafraid to raise responsible children by exercising appropriate authority, firmly and kindly. Children feel safe when adults are trustworthy. Thank you for such an eloquent essay on a parenting trend that is detrimental to a child’s soul.
This is an extremely interesting take on gentle parenting - I don’t agree with the whole piece, I believe it should be about “performative gentle parenting” not gentle parenting in general, but there are some interesting points that should be discussed more in depth.
Gentle parenting is often cruel because parents in general are often cruel: it’s not getting rid of gentle parenting that is going to help us get rid of cruelty.. but looking into ourselves with honesty and compassion and bring that honesty and compassion to kids can go a long way.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that simply reciting formulas with a set tone of voice steals authenticity to the relationship many parents build with their kids, hence to the relationship that these kids build with themselves.
I also agree that being able to acknowledge that evil exists within us, that we sometimes want to hurt other people, is important.
However, it is crucial to be honest about this: more often than not parents are the first not to acknowledge that the pleasure they derive from being cruel to their kids guides (at least partially) their actions.
To be a gentle parent is certainly a good thing, as long as you are doing work on yourself to shed light on the dark corners of your own soul. This - however- is a lifetime’s work: and not everyone is equipped to undertake it.
Performative gentle parenting buries the need for this work and - in doing so - generates the kind of shallowness that comes from hypocrisy.
Are these people HIGH? Children are completely self centered, and have no way to put themselves in somebody else’s shoes until they are mmm….7? Age of reason? That doesn’t mean they are bad or good—it’s just a developmental fact. Just like you don’t expect your infant to sleep through the night or eat solids, you can’t expect your toddler to have any ability to see a situation from any perspective other than their own. If you expect a child to perform at a level above their level of development it creates anxiety in the child—they think there is something wrong with them.
If your preschooler hits another kid with a plastic toy, you take away the toy and remove the child, and the verbal message has to be really simple—e.g.”We don’t hit other people.” Or “Hitting is not OK.” Kids are way less verbal at that age than adults think they are.
A parent needs to provide curbs and sidewalks and then keep a child on the sidewalk. Effective discipline keeps children safe…safe from physical hazards of course, but also safe from getting too carried away with their own emotions/agendas. The message need not be punitive—but it needs to assure the child “I will not let you get in over your head.”
I disagree with this so strongly. Our approach to parenting cannot consist only of reactions to other parenting philosophies we disagree with, which is what this is. This also smacks of excuses for indulging in anger and not being sorry about it. All of this will drive children away from the faith and from you. (And no, I don't agree with the lady you quote who is wishy-washy on what Jesus did for us.) For anyone reading this wondering why it doesn't sound like a Christian way of parenting, it's because it's not. Details here: https://marthahepler.substack.com/p/three-links-and-a-rant
"Simon seems to think that if we can make children disgusted enough at their own badness, they won’t grow up to be villains. This is a classic parenting-made-simple scam: the believe that if you do it right, they will turn out the way you want."
Aren't you taking this a little bit to the extremes? it doesn't seem to me that Marilyn Simon is espousing the opposite of gentle parenting (what that would even be? "rough parenting?")
I don't know about Marilyn, but my personal view is that raising kids escapes theories, because what's good for one kid might be wrong for another. And I doubt that Marilyn's idea of education is to model her daughters. And neither is mine.
What I want to achieve for my daughters is:
1) that they become good people in the fellowship of Jesus (and I say this in the least ideological way you can imagine)
2) that they learn to know themselves, especially their weaknesses and faults, because that's the path to fulfillment and happiness
3) thay they become resilient face to the unavoidable setbacks and failures they will experience.
You disagree with what part exactly?
Please read my piece about it, linked above. (It’s not the first thing I talk about, so scroll down.) it’s not long.
I’ve recently come to see gentle parenting as nothing more than a status signifier. It’s so tiresome and my fellow parents who practice it are the most disempowered people in their house. Their toddlers are the most empowered.
Obsessing over your kids is a status signifier. We put our kids in a private school during COVID because of the public school closures, and the *obsession* so many mothers had with every detail of their kids’ lives - and the lives of the other children! - was literally insane.
It wasn’t even a ritzy private school - just our parish Catholic school - but in upper Fairfield County in Connecticut Catholic School is basically like a discounted LV handbag - it’s an affordable luxury item for the petty Nouveau Riche.
The social environment literally put me and my kids in therapy; it was such an overwrought hothouse from all the stay at home moms who had literally nothing to do but obsess about their own and other people’s kids all day, but to them it was a status symbol, and not obsessing over your kids got you shunned.
We were so relieved to get back to public school and just be “normal: again.
Children know when their parents give a damn enough to tell them off for being selfish or mean, usually because they're being lazy and mean spirited, grouchy or just destructive: they also know when their parents don't care enough to notice, or to risk confrontation if they do, and they might like being confronted with their failings initially - in fact it's the nature of confrontation that it's uncomfortable, and often noisy and disruptive - but, in my experience of two late teenagers, they do regularly say, once they've calmed down (perhaps because you can only feel contrite after you've been challenged to confront YOURSELF?!) that they appreciate that someone has bothered to confront them, even their parents. My hunch is that your hunch is correct I mean, based upon my experience as a child and now as a parent. They don't hold back either, so you do end up creating people who aren't scared of pointing out your own failings eventually - which is er bracing, to say the least. And glorious!
We also had day 1 of Christmas break outburst (an angry 11 year old took it out on her 8 year old brother). What followed was a day of restriction for us all from her presence. Her actions may have been out of frustration, but agency demanded we punish the choice she made. Hopefully tomorrow goes better, as we reflect on loving God and loving others….but we know we will fail again, we will celebrate the birth of the One who never fails.
Thanks for your words and how they resonated today as we navigate punishment, grace, and forgiveness.
Unfortunately, these methods have spread to training your dog.
As a parent of some particularly challenging children I loved this whole piece. “A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it.” - reminds me of Bonhoeffer’s “It was grace because it was costly, and it was costly because it was grace.”
The combination of gentle parenting with laziness has really put many kids at a disadvantage as they go out into the world. Gentle parenting gives way to “cool parenting” as they get older and fuels the chase of material goods and the right experiences to post on line. Nothing ever demanded of the kids sets them up for the victim narrative so many adopt and universities foster. They end up with a warped view of the way the world works and their place in it. Temper tantrums on TikTok ensue.
So true! I have friends in their 20s that are doing gentle parenting, and it fails to cultivate a sense of morality in the children, and tends to make them more egocentric - the world has to stop so we can all process their emotion. I am all for making children feel seen, heard, and most of all loved - but sometimes children also need to realise that the world doesn't revolve around them. They are part of a family, part of a community - part of something bigger than themselves!
Whilst this is absolutely true and valid, it's also developmental and so might not yet be appropriate for the children in your example to yet comprehend, in the same way it's not reasonable to expect a six month old to be walking. Appropriateness of parenting approaches is all about context, which is going to be unique to each child.
I must admit that I'm softer on my two daughters (11 and 13) than I should be. I console myself thinking that if I had a boy, I would shovel him against the wall every other day, so I can't be accused of being wobbly. But I'm not so sure I'd do that. My wife plays the bad cop much more often than me, but she's also much more of a perfectionist. However, none of us refrain from a good lecture when they deserve it.
And a couple of times I gave them a good spanking. For instance, when they climbed the bookcase in the living room (a very dangerous thing to do).
Because gentle parenting can be dangerous. A friend of us who's into gentle parenting is basically her toddler's slave, even when the little hurricane decides he wants to run in the middle of a public road. "Tommi dear, this is dangerous, those cars might hurt you, please stop" she coos, panting after him, to little effect since the little monster thinks she's playing tag and runs even faster.
After she finally catches him, instead of putting the fear of God into him, she talks softly to him about vehicle-induced accidents.
To the objections of her terrorized husband, she replies unfazed: "you know, you can really talk to him, he's really beginning to understand, now" (real story from this summer)
We were once at a restaurant when our then three year old was having an epic temper tantrum so my husband took her out to the parking lot. She broke away and ran right towards the road. He grabbed her and gave her a single whack on the butt.
10 minutes later a cop walked into the restaurant and took him out back.
Someone had called and reported child abuse.
Luckily the cop was cool and told my husband to take a kid into the bathroom next time.
This was in Dexter, MI, about 5 minutes outside of Ann Arbor, and I’m sure it came from some progressive, over educated, “let me dominate you with my KINDNESS” cat-lady type.
It made us very defensive, nervous parents, which really screwed up our family life and our kids for a long time.
We finally got our confidence back, but man was it rattling.
I'm so sorry for your experience. I know no parent who never ever lost it with their kids. And, in extreme situations, there's no other way to communicate effectively your distress than doing it physically. (I'm not talking about actual violence, of course. It should go without saying but the internet being what it is...)
Signalling distress it's very important because kids communicate more emotionally than verbally, and they need to internalize that something is very wrong as soon as they do it.
For progressives, the government is the only father figure you’re allowed.
I have never encountered your work before today but Substack suggested it yo me and this piece is GREAT! Immediately subscribed!