Gentle parenting, the millennial parenting craze of the moment, emphasizes empathy and compassion, boundaries over punishment, and encourages adults to regulate their own emotions during a child’s meltdown; it promises to be a cycle-breaker, replacing generations-old ways of thinking that say parents are the dominant authoritarian and the kid should get in line, or else.
But do we really know better than our parents? Are we really getting better at mastering the onerous task of raising good, resilient kids with each generation, or is every new style just a pushback on what came before it?
When the shoe hit my head, I certainly didn’t feel like a master of anything. Though I could swear it had been hours, only a few minutes had passed since picking up my four-year-old from kindergarten. My usually chatty, joyful girl was in full rage mode in the backseat, for reasons unknown. Gentle parent that I am, I was narrating and validating emotions, in a failing effort to get my kid to calm down. “I’m feeling frustrated and helpless. You’re upset and angry. It’s okay to feel that –”
And then came the shoe, unlocking a new level of motherhood.
For bonus points, I had my own mom on the car’s speaker phone. She had just called to ask how the school day went, and no one was in the mood to answer. “Maybe not now, grandma,” I said, but my mom, ever the fixer, wanted to solve the problem. Her generation of 80s parenting instilled the idea that kids should be happy, 24/7 – and if they aren’t, time for a time out. “Don’t cry, you’re fine, let’s sing a song!” she repeatedly told her mid-tantrum granddaughter. “All feelings are good feelings!” I tried to interject.
Gentle parenting, I have tried to explain to her, is about sitting with your child in their feelings of discomfort. Grandma thinks this is permissive, letting kids get away with bad behaviour. After the shoe incident, I started to wonder myself.
“Ultimately, branding parenting as one specific ideal can be a disservice,” says Tamara Soles, child psychologist and parenting coach in Montreal, and gentle parenting all of the time can be impossible for parents, expected to use what she calls the “Snow White voice” no matter the situation. “And new science will always arrive by the time children are grown that will show the errors in the way they were raised.”
Instead of focusing on a specific style, “we need to keep developmentally appropriate expectations, and always come back to what research has shown us is most important: being attuned to your specific child.”
After bedtime, long after the tantrum had been exorcized, my phone lit up. Mom friends from across the country were all sending me the same viral, tongue-in-cheek Instagram reel made by influencer Taylor Wolfe, where she tries – and fails – to teach her boomer mom about gentle parenting.
Essentially a comedic version of my life set to the Curb Your Enthusiasm soundtrack, the video, which has more than 27 million views, shows Wolfe schooling her mom at the playground, “We don’t say ‘be careful’ anymore, mom; we say ‘what’s your plan here?’” “You’re not supposed to tell kids you’re proud; we say ‘you should be so proud of yourself!’”
It’s mostly in jest, Wolfe says from her home in rural Oregon, but her video is “a heightened truth” of parenting two young girls while enjoying the help of her mom. “I try my best to gentle parent,” she says. That is, she says, until she turns into her mother and resorts to a “knock-it-off brand of parenting,” a 90s-style of traditional parenting where the parent is the authority figure and the kid obeys, as soon as they hear that tone.
Regardless of her parenting style, Wolfe says that “We’re all doing just fine. As fine as you can be with a four-year-old, which is to say not fine at all.” I silently nod my head – still sore – in agreement.
What is gentle parenting, and is it effective? What to know about the controversial parenting style
Of course, what happened after the shoe was anything but gentle. I snapped – as even the most well-intentioned parents do, sometimes – and yelled at my kid to cut it out, I’m her mother and her behaviour isn’t okay. It worked – she stopped raging, but quietly cried all the way home. I had read enough gentle parenting books and listened to enough podcasts to know that my calm, as they say, should have been contagious. When I got home, I called my mom to vent.
We both agreed raising kids is anything but simple, and children are not a problem with a one-sized-fits all solution. “Parents are far from perfect,” my mom said. To her surprise, I said I probably should have just listened to her, distracted my kid with a song and avoided the escalation. To my surprise, my mom suggested that I apologize and repair – a tenet of gentle parenting – and focus on what comes next, not on what happened.
Though she remains often confused by my gentle parenting strategies, my mom agreed it’s all in an attempt to give our kids the best childhood we can. Listen to our kids, know what they, not some made-up Instagram version of them, actually need from us. Sometimes they’ll need a play-by-play of their feelings, sometimes they’ll just need silence and the space to feel whatever they are feeling. And sometimes they’ll need a distraction before the footwear hits the fan.
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