The harsh truth about gentle parenting
February 7, 2025
When new parents arrive home with their newborn and little more than a hospital lesson about swaddling, feeding, and back sleeping, it can feel overwhelming, even terrifying. Parents want to do their best to raise these little people they love. Many millennials, however, are looking away from traditional sources of wisdom to the internet to learn how to raise their kids.
A current trend called “Gentle Parenting” is an internet phenom. It asks parents to supply endless empathy, boundaries, and one tone of voice: think, the calmest, kindest kindergarten teacher. Parents who embrace this parenting style emphasize being positive and affirming their kids’ desires with the expectation that they’ll be confident and emotionally intelligent. In practice, though, the “gentle parents” at the grocery store seem worn out with all their never correcting, always negotiating, and vainly trying to end temper tantrums with manipulative phrases like, “you’re making Mommy sad.” Meanwhile, their children are demanding, disagreeable, and often sullen. With these results, why is gentle parenting so popular?
