Parenting

Is it good for kids? Equally important: Is it good for parents?

In my opinion, the well-being of one's children, who one brought into this world without their consent, will always come first. I'm not saying parents' needs aren't important, but they're not equally important.

They are often not so gentle with themselves. They were frequently exhausted, uncertain, hard on themselves and lonely.

Probably in part affected by a lack of social and systemic support. No one should feel like they're raising a child on their own, but at the same time considering the potential for abuse when entrusting one's child to any third party, I understand why parents might feel that they're alone.

We wonder: Will the kids of gentle parents show the same sort of emotional restraint as their parents? Or will these children only build in the emotional control they wield over their parents?

But hasn't there been ample research to show that a compassionate approach is beneficial? I'm not sure this speculation is well founded. It sounds like the same sorts of things people said when we first recognized the harmful effects of corporal punishment on children.

Go easy on yourselves. Also, go ahead and take that nap.

With this I can agree!

Disclaimer: I am not a parent, just the weird uncle.

Having to do the work to learn healthy techniques to healthily regulate one's own emotions so that one can coregulate small humans who are just learning how to do the alive thing and then actually putting into place what one has learned is a challenge vs not doing any of this? You don't say. /s

These preliminary findings, which will be submitted soon for publication, should be interpreted with caution since the diversity of our sample was limited.

The authors polled 100ish parents across the country; just 100ish parents. Are any of you all family studies scholars? Is this really something which would be published with this kind of study design simply due to the inclusion of the "should be interpreted with caution" caveat? Like, in a reputable peer-reviewed journal, published? My background has me completely flabbergasted that something of this nature would come to be and I need reassurance that it is okay in its field.

a 36-year-old mother of two children under 5 reflected that she often feels like she “has nothing to give” and gets “easily overstimulated and overwhelmed all day every day.” She ended her reflections with the simple confession: “I often feel out of control.”

Oh lovely woman, you've skipped a few grades in Gentle Parenting. The first steps are to learn effective and healthy techniques to regulate one's own emotions. You, my darling lovely woman with two under five, have not. You are burned out, overstimulated, and overwhelmed because you haven't. One cannot pour from an empty teacup and no teacher was ever deemed effective who taught from the textbook without having a deep understanding of the material.

I fear that situations like the above will lead to mass impressions on the youth that respectful, emotionally intelligent parenting is useless simply because children are not unaware of burned out, tapped out, stressed out, touched out, and overstimulated parents. They are more attuned than we know.

It took me twenty years, a lot of therapy, several post graduate degrees, and twenty one children raised from bottles to backpacks as the AIC (adult in charge) during weekday daytime hours as a nanny to dial in my ability to healthily regulate my own emotions and sensory needs without disadvantaging any children who came into my area of effect. Save the Duggars, I don't think any actual parents (note, gentle reader, I am also an actual parent of a darling son) will have the opportunity to go through 20+ children as part of their learning curve. I think that Gentle Parenting is a fabulous and delightful ideal to aim for, but perhaps more realistic is Good Enough Parenting where you sometimes let them be angry without having to tell them that they are angry (footnote), while you go sip your tea in another room while it is still hot.

(footnote) Telling someone the name of their emotion in the moment without, you know, helping them with what to do with it, is unhelpful but it makes for great Instagram reels. Imagine yourself, very, very, very, very thirsty and unable to get a drink. Along comes someone who can provide you with a drink. Instead, they turn to you and say, "You are thirsty." And then they sit with you in your thirst. Rather than, you know, getting you a drink or anything. You'd gain a vocabulary word, but no skills. Same here with naming emotions. Magda Gerber was on the right track but she didn't get to the station, if you follow my analogy. And "Good Inside" can be summarized on a fortune cookie as: "They aren't giving you a hard time, they are having a hard time. Your experience is accidental." This, too, isn't the station.

Is it good for kids? Equally important: Is it good for parents? In my opinion, the well-being of one’s children, who one brought into this world without their consent, will always come first.

One interesting thing in this space is that parental well being often leads to better child outcomes, so it's important not to ignore the impact on parents.

Though the article does have pretty loose definitions on "gentle parenting" (since they asked participants for their definitions), so hard to say where the line is.

And a bit of a tangent but the research also wasn't trying to look into whether gentle parenting is hard on parents (they said it was information given un-prompted), so there isn't a comparison against the alternative. Maybe all parenting is hard on parents?

I feel like having kids should be banned for like the next 200 years.

Edit: obviously this post is 100% serious.