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The Impossible Rules of ‘Gentle Parenting’
Parents are pushing back on their authoritarian upbringings. Now they talk about big feelings and gentle hands.
By Julie Jargon, WSJ
Dec. 23, 2024 9:00 pm ET
Owen says it helps strengthen the parent-child relationship. Photo: Jill York, Olivia Owen
I consider myself a pretty empathetic parent. I rarely raise my voice with my three kids. But by the rules of “gentle parenting,” I’m practically a monster.
If you have kids, and have gone within 10 feet of Instagram or TikTok, you’ve been served at least a couple videos explaining how to be a gentle parent—and you’ve probably felt your fair share of mom or dad guilt.
You aren’t supposed to lose your cool around your kids, even when they are having tantrums. (Sorry, they are now called “big feelings.”)
You’re supposed to get down on their level when they are emotional, make eye contact and validate their concerns. Don’t tell kids not to hit—we say “use gentle hands.” And definitely don’t count to three to get them moving.
And no matter what, never, ever reward or punish the kids. We’re supposed to discipline them…gently.
Got it?
The internet has always offered a sloppy, head-spinning stew of parenting advice and judgment, from tiger moms to attachment parents. Gentle parenting is enjoying new dominance. As adults confront their own mental health and childhood trauma and share it all on social media, the parents among them are trying to find ways to avoid scarring their own kids. And like other online movements, gentle parenting has spawned its fair share of performative posting.
On TikTok, about 183,000 videos with the #gentleparenting hashtag have been viewed cumulatively more than three billion times in the past three years.
So what is it, exactly? Some posts show a permissive, child-led style of parenting. Others prescribe setting firm boundaries minus yelling, threats or punishment.
Whatever the definition, parents, particularly moms, feel pressured.
“A lot of moms I speak to are anxious about all the content and worried they’re not doing the right thing,” says Kori Dyer Mastroieni, a 36-year-old mother of three in Philadelphia. She is a proponent of gentle parenting, within reason. “I take what I want and leave the rest,” she says.
As the author of 2016’s “The Gentle Parenting Book,” Ockwell-Smith is often credited with creating the movement, though she says the approach existed long before it had a name.
Gentle parenting has four tenets: empathy, understanding, respect and boundaries, or “treating your kids the way you wish your parents had treated you,” she says.
The distorted version of gentle parenting Ockwell-Smith sees on social media is a different animal.
“It frustrates me when people imply gentle parenting is soft,” she says. “It’s absolutely key that you have boundaries and discipline and that you say no a lot.”
Gentle doesn’t mean permissive, she notes. It’s actually authoritative, with the parent lovingly in charge.
Olivia Owen, a 29-year-old mom of seven near Salt Lake City, gets it.
On TikTok, where she has more than 900,000 followers, she posts about techniques for handling meltdowns and conflicts. In one video, she maintains eye contact with her crying toddler while calmly telling him he can play with his toys after he finishes his food. In another video, when the same child resists a nap, she holds his hand and explains the perks, such as a warm blanket and his choice of night-light character.
“You’re understanding of your child’s emotions, but there are still boundaries,” she says.
Owen’s TikTok page is full of satirical takes on gentle parenting taken to extremes. In one such video, she’s lying on the floor of a store with a child having a (fake) tantrum, offering her support whenever he is ready to get up.
In reality, she says, an in-store tantrum would result in her picking up the child and getting out of there.
“I never tell them we’re on their time or allow them to dictate my schedule,” she says.
‘No Timmy, don’t do that’
The desire to raise kids in a kinder way is a backlash against the harsh parenting that many Gen X and millennial parents received as youth. The days of spanking, timeouts and forcing kids to hug relatives are over.
“We’re all trying not to replicate the mistakes our parents made,” says Katie Ward, a 39-year-old mom of two in Queens, N.Y. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, she says, “things like bullying and emotions were treated very differently than they are now.”
Gentle parenting has taught her how to help her 4- and 7-year-olds regulate their emotions. “Me yelling at them to stop crying isn’t going to get them to stop, but me taking them away from the situation that’s making them cry and me being stable gets to the solution faster,” she says.
Many moms who say they practice gentle parenting swear by Dr. Becky, a clinical psychologist with three million Instagram and 235,000 TikTok followers. But Becky Kennedy says not to call her “Good Inside” strategies gentle parenting—she prefers the term “sturdy parenting.”
Kennedy says she doesn’t care what parenting style people follow, so long as they go deep into the research, and try to avoid the cacophony of social media. “Getting snippets from 30 different people is confusion,” she says.
She distinguishes between making requests of children—which requires their action—and establishing actual boundaries—which only requires parental enforcement. Telling a child to stop jumping on a couch next to a glass table is a request, she says; setting a boundary is saying, “If you’re not off the couch, I will pick you up and put you on the ground and show you a safer place to jump.”
Jill York, a 48-year-old mom of seven in Tampa, Fla., says gentle parenting creates fragile, entitled kids. “I’ve seen it become toxic, where there’s that kid kicking the back of the plane seat and the mom just saying, ‘No Timmy, don’t do that’ for 45 minutes.”
Ockwell-Smith would prefer there to be no label for the parenting style she helped popularize. “I would much rather it just be called parenting, and I would much rather all parenting be kinder.”
Write to Julie Jargon at Julie.Jargon@wsj.com
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