Gentle Parenting isn't the problem.... or is it?

Why I'm thinking about ditching Gentle Parenting.... even if I don't change the way I parent.

I’ve been asked the same question more times than I remember…

“Is what you’re teaching gentle parenting?”

Everyone seems to want to know and I don’t know how to respond. Depending on who the question is coming from, my answer is totally different.

It’s on my mind this week not only because I’ve been asked three times but also because I’ve seen mounting criticism of Gentle Parenting. Yesterday on the Tamron Hall show, a daytime talkshow I was on earlier this year to promote my book Punishment-Free Parenting, Tamron interviewed guests who unapologetically criticized gentle parenting for being the source of disrespect in kids today.

And I don’t even know if I agree or disagree with them.

A lot of the reason is because I’m convinced that it’s currently impossible to define gentle parenting.

What really is Gentle Parenting?

Gentle Parenting is a term that seems to many to have come out of nowhere. One day Tiktok was full of goofy dance videos and short form humor and the next every third video was about Gentle Parenting.

Google search trends validate that experience. Searches for the term have gone from nonexistent to one of the most popular parenting search terms in the last decade.

The term, based on my limited research, seems to come from a book published in 2016 by Sarah Ockwell-Smith titled “The Gentle Parenting Book”. I confess, though I read dozens of parenting books in the years and months leading up to publishing my book Punishment-Free Parenting, Ockwell-Smith’s was not one of them. I cannot tell you whether the information in the book is good or bad; evidence-based or pseudoscientific nonsense. That said, however she defines it in her book doesn’t seem relevant to how it is being used now.

The term she introduced to the world what has become one of the most highly polarizing and misunderstood terms in the world of child rearing.

Over the last three years, I have found that Gentle Parenting is most often used either a synonym for authoritative parenting or permissive parenting; both terms that come from the work of UC Berkley psychologist, Diana Baumrind in the 1960’s.

According to Baumrind, parents typically fall into one of four parenting styles represented as a quadrant with emotional attunement (called responsiveness) and parental expectations (called demandingness) as the axes.

They types are as follows:

• Authoritarian Parenting: The most common. “Command and demand” or “old school” parenting. High expectations (demands) but low emotional attunement (responsiveness).

• Permissive Parenting: The opposite. Low expectations (demands) but high attunement (responsiveness)

• Authoritative Parenting: According to Baumrind, the Gold Standard. High attunement (responsiveness) and high expectations (demands).

• Neglectful Parenting: Absent. Not present (physically, emotionally, mentally, or all of the above). Low demands and low responsiveness.

Neither Baumrind, nor those who expanded on her work until very recently, ever used the term Gentle Parenting to describe any of the styles. As I said it’s less than a decade old but largely people have either conflated it with authoritative or permissive parenting.

And so you see the conundrum.

If the person asking if I’m promoting Gentle Parenting is using the term to mean Authoritative Parenting, than the answer is “yes.” If they are using the term to mean Permissive Parenting, than the answer is “no.”

The word means, in effect, totally contradictory things. For skeptics and advocates for more hierarchical, punitive, authoritarian parenting, so-called “Gentle Parenting” is a straw-man. Meanwhile, for many social media influencers and those who follow them, the term is synonymous with good evidence-based parenting which considers the emotional needs and development of their children.

As far as I can tell, there are as many people who believe the one as the other which means, even if, for example, I am on a podcast being interviewed by someone who I know means authoritative when they use the term “gentle,” I have no idea what definition those listening might have for the term.

It’s for this reason that you’ll rarely hear the top experts in the field of parenting research, people like Dr. Aliza Pressman, Dr. Dan Siegel, or Dr. Tina Payne Bryson use the term at all. As Tina said during my 2024 interview with her, “No one knows what gentle parenting is because it’s a made up thing that’s basically kind of glumping a bunch of stuff together.”

Tina, for her part, is in the group who believes it’s usually used as a synonym for permissive parenting, while other experts I’ve had on my podcast (like KJ Althoff) continue to define the term as authoritative; evidence that even among the most educated, well-respected experts, there is no harmony.

Why this matters…

I am writing this today because what I am seeing in a lot of the dialogues lately is actually third way of using the term.

I have generally stayed out of the discussions around the term because, if given the choice between a parent being permissive or authoritarian, I would almost always choose permissive.

For the sake of clarity I should reiterate that I, like Baumrind, Bryson, Pressman, and the rest, believe authoritative, high demands and high responsiveness, is far and away the best… but if a parent were to have to choose between high demand or high responsiveness, I choose the latter.

On the hierarchy of parenting styles, authoritative is the best but after that, permissiveness is preferable to the emotionally absent control of authoritarian parenting.

The problem is, what I’m now seeing described as gentle parenting is no longer just permissiveness but the infamous fourth quadrant….

The true opposite to authoritative parenting— neglect.

These are parents who not only have no expectations or boundaries for their kids, they also do not emotionally attune.

These parents spend almost no time with their kids and when they do, emotions and dysregulation (on the part of the parent or child) are managed with sweets and screens rather than empathy and co-regulation.

These kids are not victims of “not having boundaries” they are victims of, in effect, not having parents.

These are the kids who are most susceptible to online predators or destructive online communities. These are the kids who are at greatest risk of radicalization.

If that is what is meant today by gentle parenting, I am unequivocally against it.

Today, the greatest risk to children is not bad parenting but rather absent parenting. If we let social media, Chat GPT, and youtube raise our kids (whether or not we punish them), we’re all in serious trouble.

And so I think I’m officially abandoning the term at this point. I may still occasionally use it to signal to self-proclaimed gentle *(that is to say authoritative) parents that the Whole Parent Way does not rely on punitive measures and authoritarian control but outside of that, the harm seems to out weigh the good.

What do you think? Do you identify as a gentle parent?