If you’ve been anywhere near social media, you’ve heard of gentle parenting
From videos slamming the parenting style to others showing it in action, you can’t escape it. So why is it trending?
Overall, gentle parenting has very few drawbacks and rarely has a negative impact on children’s mental health, but how can you add it to your repertoire?
What is gentle parenting?
Put very simply, it’s parenting without blame, shame or punishment.
It focuses on fostering the qualities you want in your child by being compassionate and enforcing consistent boundaries.
Unlike other lenient methods, gentle parenting encourages age-appropriate discipline that teaches valuable life lessons.
On the Neurodiverging Podcast, host Danielle Sullivan describes the practice as, a “style of parenting where you do not compel children to behave by means of punishment or control, but rather use connection, communication, and other democratic methods to make decisions together as a family.”
Those who practice gentle parenting try to encourage working together as a family to teach their children to express their feelings in a socially acceptable, age-appropriate manner.
The benefits of gentle parenting
As a whole, the method focuses on a child’s cognitive state to establish certain guidelines and boundaries that are age-appropriate and beneficial to their development.
The goal is to foster positive traits in your child and one of the best ways to do this is to make an example of yourself, displaying the behaviour you wish to see from your kids.
As you can imagine, this can have numerous benefits for your children including:
- Reduced anxiety: Research suggests that gentle parenting may reduce the risk for anxiety. One study found that this approach “may promote regulated responses in social contexts” in shy little ones.
- Improved parent-child bond: Another study found that gentle parenting may improve the relationship between parents and children.
- Positive social skills: Children, especially babies and toddlers, copy what they see. Since gentle parenting is rooted in empathy and respect, children see that and are more likely to adopt these traits themselves.
How to practice gentle parenting
If you want to adopt this method, there are techniques you can try out for a range of situations.
Remember these things take time and learning isn’t instantaneous so don’t be too hard on yourself if it takes a while to get to grips with things.
Babies and toddlers can be trying, with their inability to regulate their emotions making it seemingly impossible to create any structure.
By recognising why they are behaving a certain way, you can tailor your response to your child accordingly, remembering their level of ability to understand your reaction.
For example, comforting your crying baby rather than getting upset with them may seem obvious, but in terms of gentle parenting, it also means you’re teaching your child empathy from an early age.
You don’t have to let your child away with everything, as previously mentioned, creating boundaries is a key part of this style of parenting.
By establishing clear guidelines about what is and is not appropriate, children have the consistent structure they require.
This means a child will feel safe to explore new environments while also knowing they’re being protected, encouraging confidence in them.
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