Is gentle parenting too rough on parents? There’s growing backlash to this popular approach

It’s highly likely that, at every point in time, in some corner of the world, a child has lost his ever-loving mind in the cereal aisle of a grocery store.

But how a parent reacts to that tantruming child is more likely to differ by generation. In the 1950s and ’60s, for instance, a parent might have spanked them. In the ’80s and ’90s, a parent might have been more likely to ground them or give them a time out. 

Today, you’re likely to find a parent crouched right there on the floor beside them, telling their child they see their frustration that they’re not getting Lucky Charms, that their feelings are valid but we do not scream in stores, and to choose between Cheerios or Mini Wheats.

This modern parenting style —  whether you call it gentle parenting, positive parenting or respectful parenting — centres on acknowledging a child’s feelings and the motivations behind challenging behaviours. 

Steered by big-name parenting influencers like Big Little Feelings, Dr. Becky and Janet Lansbury, many parents today aim to be more respectful and less reactive than their own authoritarian parents. But recently there’s been a shift as exhausted moms, dads, guardians and experts question if a gentle parenting style is actually too rough — on them. 

“No matter what we do, it feels like we’re getting it wrong,” Christine Organ wrote last week about the approach on parenting news website Motherly.

“It does bring undue pressure on parents to get it right every time and that’s just not feasible,” a contributor was quoted saying on the parenting site What To Expect.

Miora Randrianasolo, 34, who lives in Ottawa, says she was initially drawn to the idea of gentle parenting because it was different to how children were raised in her Madagascan culture. She thought it was the best way for her daughters, who are four and seven, to avoid trauma, Randrianasolo told CBC News.

“However, I felt like I was so overwhelmed because I have strong-willed children and convincing them or saying ‘no’ gently would take hours. I was drained at the end of the day,” she said.

“I asked myself why I would do this to myself and how would I be a great parent if I lose my sanity in the long run.” 

Too much pressure

In August, in a new public health advisory, the U.S. surgeon general warned that today’s parents are feeling burned out and “perpetually behind” from comparing themselves — and their parenting strategies — to what they see online. 

And gentle parenting is everywhere. The toddler experts account Big Little Feelings has 3.5 million followers on Instagram, where they guide parents on how to model calm for their children Widely-shared memes encourage “time ins” instead of “time outs.”

And influencers share videos about helping toddlers regulate emotions using the hashtag #gentleparenting, which has almost a million posts on Instagram, 170,000 posts on TikTok, and is a trending term among Pinterest users in Canada.

Meanwhile, a peer-reviewed study recently published in the journal PLoS ONE found that a third of the parents they surveyed who identified as “gentle parents” reported feelings of burnout and parent uncertainty. The qualitative analysis didn’t compare those specific feelings to non-gentle parents, but the authors did note that the gentle parents would offer these self-critiques unprompted.

For instance, one mother who identified as a gentle parent in the study wrote, “I’m hanging on for dear life.” 

“The pressures to fulfil exacting parenting standards, coupled with the information overload on social media about the right or wrong ways to care for children, has left many parents questioning their moment-to-moment interactions with their family,” the authors wrote in the study, published in July.

That study only sampled 100 U.S. parents of children age two to seven and isn’t representative of all parents, but the authors note it’s the first study to systematically investigate what gentle parenting entails.

They identified three over-arching themes: “regulating one’s own emotions, assisting children in regulating their emotions, and showing emotional and physical affection to children.”

That’s all great in theory, says Dr. Ashley Miller, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia who is also a child and adolescent psychiatrist. Many of the concepts that are borne out of gentle parenting and attachment science are beneficial to child development, she added.

But there’s a misconception with certain parenting approaches that they must be all or nothing, Miller said, and that puts too much pressure on parents, doesn’t actually help children, and is also impractical.

“Sometimes you don’t have time for feelings because you have to get out the door, and that’s fine,” she said. 

How do you interpret gentle?

That misconception, as Miller calls it, is evident in much of the online discourse about gentle parenting, where critics of the approach often poke fun of what they see as overly permissive millennial parents who never say no or raise their voices.

“You are special, you are perfect, you are safe!” influencer Olivia Owen repeats as a mantra in a spoof video about millennial parenting with 2.6 million views where her child has a meltdown in Ikea and she asks for consent to hug him.

A lot of people misinterpret what “gentle” really means, said Julie Romanowski, a parenting coach and consultant based in Vancouver. Limits and appropriate discipline are actually central to the approach, she added, but parents may think they just need to be “gentle” in every single situation.

“The pressure to be a gentle parent already sets parents up for failure because they’re not even sure how to achieve it,” Romanowski said. 

The swing in mainstream parenting from one, single completely authoritarian style to several, different more permissive styles has left a lot of parents “lost and confused,” she added. 

“There are so many experts out there, we’re all generally saying the same thing, but no one guiding light is telling us ‘this is what you say, this is what you do.'”

‘Kids feelings should not be holding us hostage’

The answer lies somewhere in the middle, both Romanowski and Miller agree. You can’t just validate emotions — it doesn’t work on its own, and it’s exhausting. 

“Parents need to be the bad guy sometimes. In fact, a lot of times,” Miller said. “Kids feelings should not be holding us hostage.”

It’s also not good for the kids, she added, explaining that children need to have those moments of disconnect from their parents, learn to argue in their relationships, and find solutions together — a process called “rupture and repair.”

Even clinical psychologist Rebecca Kennedy, a.k.a. the “millennial parenting whisperer” Dr. Becky herself, recently told Forbes that parents are struggling to hold boundaries after constantly being told to empathize with their kids. She has  repeatedly emphasized that her new model of parenting is “sturdy,” not gentle.

“I’m not gentle, I’m not harsh, I’m sturdy,” she told Forbes last week.

Randrianasolo says she’s trying to find that middle ground with her daughters, saying it was just too much to try to be a gentle parent 100 per cent of the time. Now, she says she tries to select her moments.

“I also include the aspect of parenting in my culture that I found successful and mix them all in hope that my kids would be trauma free but not allowed to step all over us.”