In Defense of Gentle Parenting

Gentle parenting has been getting a bad reputation of late. The parenting style associated with the works of Janet Lansbury and Sarah Ockwell-Smith—though neither claim the label—has attracted big followings on social media and been hugely popular. Yet seemingly it has become a victim of its own success, with many parents of toddlers finding it hard to implement, some lambasting it in funny videos on TikTok or Instagram, or, in the case of Abigail Shrier, even calling it harmful. So, what is gentle parenting, and why is it getting such a beating?

Over 3 million people follow Dr Becky Kennedy, and 3.5 million follow “Big Little Feelings,” with Janet Lansbury providing parent coaching to over 600,000 followers on Facebook. But in a Substack promoting her book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, Abigail Shrier argues that the approach sets impossible demands on parents, fuels a vigilant, anxious monitoring of a child’s yen, and exploits GenX’s penchant for a therapeutic approach to life. 

To be honest, her experience of gentle parenting sounds pretty grim—and very unlike our experience with the techniques as the parents of a young child. So it’s small wonder she opted for a “knock it off, shake it off” approach instead.

What’s going wrong here?

For practitioners such as Dr Becky Kennedy or Janet Lansbury, the “gentle” in gentle parenting is to give the “most generous interpretation” as to why your child might act and feel so explosively in the moment. It is a firm, boundary-setting approach to children’s emotional outbursts and testing. 

It has essentially given GenX and Millennial parents an alternative to giving time outs, harsh responses, shaming, smacking, threats, emotional tirades, or passivity, in the face of a child’s emotional development. In other words, gentle parenting provides parents with a different approach to responding to tantrums, outbursts, meltdowns, nagging, hitting, spitting, biting, flailing about, or screaming in the supermarket aisle.

The approach, with its associated mantras, “You’re having big little feelings right now,” or “I cannot let you hit Robbie so I will need to move you to another space,” often gets confused with pampering a child, turning the parent into a shrink, and making far too much work for a parent when a simple “shut up or so help me God!” will do.

Three Things Critics Get Wrong

We stumbled across gentle parenting online in our effort to figure out how best to handle our toddler’s tantrums. As an educator, Allie, is used to going full Hermione Grainger and reading everything under the sun about a teaching approach. So she lapped up the works around gentle parenting and was heroic about implementing the techniques as a stay-at-home mom—and at teaching Chris how to use them, too. Neither of our own upbringings were ideal when it came to a nurture-oriented approach to rearing children, and we wanted to try something different. We certainly have not gotten it all correct, but it has been remarkable to see how our little one has navigated those outbursts, been allowed to feel them, and then “come home” to mommy or daddy. It’s not been the easiest thing to do in the world, but the occasional lapse into an outburst of stern parenting while winning a round, doesn’t seem to lend itself to long-term trust and happiness in the home.

Number 1: The adult is the adult, the child is the child

Gentle parenting recognizes who is the adult and who is the child. The child is developing. Their brains and bodies are getting new software and hardware updates all the time. Their emotions come online before their ability to regulate them. The grown up is meant to be in position to regulate their own emotions, and therefore to be able to help the child with theirs.

The funny parodies online are amusing because they invert the relationship. The mother reasons with her child on the floor of Costco as though the 2-year-old has executive function. More disturbingly, a mother is crying in front of the child pleading with them to perhaps consider not hitting them, explaining that they are so tired and drained. In both instances, the adult has adult-sized expectations of the child’s capacity to respond.

Ironically, tough, “go-to-your-room” style parenting inverts the relationships, too. Often the adult—triggered by their kid’s outburst—can have a tantrum of his or her own, shouting at them. Again, here the parents are expecting a more adult response from their three-year-old child than they are of themselves. 

Number 2: Having feelings doesn't make you soft

Letting a child feel what they are feeling does not create soft, spoiled children. Some can think shaming or scolding the behavior will toughen the kid up. Yet the opposite is likely the case. 

The truth is that the experience of a tantrum or meltdown is as bewildering to the child as it is for the grown-up. All you can do is set some boundaries and combine it with some help to coregulate, providing a bit of verbal affirmation of the feeling while providing limits to any dangerous behavior such as hitting. Essentially, the parent provides the executive function—lets the child feel their waves of feeling and acts as the safe harbor once the disorienting experience is over. 

Affirming their “big little feelings” but putting limits on behavior allows the child to accept their feelings. You accept the feeling, they accept it. It passes. Here, a parent’s job is to model and offer opportunities to build self control, which, counterintuitively, often involves allowing a child to feel their feelings alongside a stable, regulated parent. 

Importantly, a child grows in their capacity to live with uncomfortable feelings: frustration, sadness, annoyance, waiting. Rather than making pampered sissies, gentle parenting helps children become competent in real-life situations: difficult but not life-threatening. In other words, robust kids, not performers.

Number 3: Gentle parenting isn’t another form of helicopter parenting

Third, gentle parenting isn’t about micro-managing your child’s environment, feelings, or curating their life experience. Gentle parenting accepts the limits of what a parent can do. “Ok, you’re having big little feelings, I’m here for you, but there’s not a lot I can do about it right now.” or “Yes, you feel upset, I understand, but as mommy said, you can’t have another cake…Yes, I know,” and then you move on. The child gets used to the sensation of being upset and the parent not swooping in to fix everything. Here, a parent knowing their limits is to be gentle to yourself as a parent. You can’t do it all.

So, What Do Critics Get Right?

Shrier laments the mildly neurotic level of parenting she witnessed amongst other GenXers, and the pressures to be constantly asking how a child is feeling and inviting feedback on a parents’ performance. She’s right to point this out as a massive fail and to move on from it. A parent’s job, as Dr Becky Kennedy putsit, “is not to make our kids happy. Our job is to prepare our kids for the rest of their lives.” Which means building their “frustration tolerance.” Gentle parenting allows children to experience uncomfortable feelings in a way that builds an acceptance of them, not an alarmed response that seeks to punish, remove, medicate, distract from, or feel worried by the presence of boredom, doubt, frustration, anger, sadness, or the monotony of trying to learn something new (like piano scales). 

Parenting is hard and doesn’t need unfair expectations to make it harder still. Unlike poor Abigail Shrier’s experience, gentle parenting is not meant to be a competition with other parents—another set of impossible demands to make on yourself along with ballet class, the right outfits, and getting into the right schools or social clubs. 

As parents, we cannot make everything perfect for our kids. We cannot get the banana cut right, or purchase every candy, or magic away every stressor for a child. Nor should we want to. But we can help our child through the realities of life in a way that has confident momentum.

Gentle parenting has been a godsend to our family. Rather than turning us into professional therapists, it equips us to have a lighter touch approach to helping our kids handle real life. It spares us power struggles. It can contribute toward a home that can handle strife. And for the parents, it can mean the brief tempest can pass… until the next one comes along.

Allie Bullivant is a high school English teacher in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is married to Chris Bullivant, Director of Communications at the Institute for Family Studies. 

Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies.