Editor’s Note: This is a part of YourTango’s Opinion section where individual authors can provide varying perspectives for wide-ranging political, social, and personal commentary on issues.
I scan the comments on an article about gentle parenting. The insults fly: “You’re making them pansies.” “They need a good whuppin”, or “I wouldn’t have been able to sit down for a week if I acted like these kids!”
Going by their profile pictures, if I had to estimate, I’d say they were all above 50 years old. Grandpas and Grandmas loudly and angrily advocate for spanking kids to mold their behavior, not to mention personally insulting anyone who disagrees. This isn’t just relegated to social media; however, most will have no problem telling you to your face that you should spank your kid — and our children are watching.
Some preschool and elementary teachers are beginning to sound the alarm that we are ruining the children of Gen Alpha.
They don’t listen. They don’t obey. They are non-compliant, spoiled, and rude. They have no concept of respect for authority. In short, people are saying they are brats. Teachers are in tears in videos on social media, vowing not to return to the classroom after their contracts expire.
Naturally, people are looking to the parents, to find a way to place blame on them: those who raised infants and toddlers during an unprecedented global pandemic and quarantine period of varying intensity and length.
According to research, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing vulnerabilities, contributed to uncertainty and financial instability for many, and triggered pervasive parental stress, anxiety, and depression for some parents. Many parents were required to juggle employment, childcare, homeschooling, and housework with no advance notice and without the regular support of teachers, school programming, mental health professionals, medical providers, friends, family, and colleagues, further increasing the burden on parents.
That period of isolation made the underlying mental health issues that were simmering in America come exploding to the surface. When people stopped “the grind”, the “hustle,” and were forced to stay home away from their social circles, they came face to face — with themselves. We collectively did not like what we found.
On one hand, this has caused a surge in mental health diagnoses that the world has never seen. This could be seen as a troubling sign. I take it as a mark of a healing society; since admitting it is the first step to healing, we are all admitting it, talking about it, and fixing it —and part of what we’re fixing is our parenting.
Many of us were raised with some form of physical discipline. Whether outright abuse or an occasional swat on the butt, it was completely normalized as we grew up. Not so much, now. As we have begun to heal ourselves, we find ourselves realizing with horror that if we parented like we were parented, we’d be locked up. Not only that, once we were in the role of parent, hitting our kids felt abusive and wrong.
As a result, we collectively began seeking better ways of parenting — primarily methods that leaned away from harsh authoritarianism and physical discipline. This movement, in its huge range and breadth, became known as “Gentle Parenting”.
If you didn’t spank or verbally humiliate the child, you were “gentle parenting.” If you allowed your child autonomy, as in picking out clothes, you were “gentle parenting.”
None of us knew what we were doing, but gentle parenting felt better than what was done to us, so we felt pretty confident in leaning into this — but it turns out, that some of us leaned a bit too far.
The fringe of gentle parenting is most definitely well into “permissive” territory. “Permissive parenting” is a truly hands-off approach where we allow the child to free-range life; with no teaching of boundaries, consent, respect, and empathy, the child’s wants and needs are the center of the universe. Saying “no” to a child makes a permissive parent feel so guilty they will avoid saying it at all costs, even when saying “no” is most certainly what’s best for the child (and/or those around them).
True gentle parenting is mastering the art of setting, teaching, and keeping boundaries. You’re teaching them boundaries with their body by setting boundaries with yours (“No, you cannot climb on Mom like that. You are hurting my body.”).
You’re teaching them boundaries with certain behaviors by modeling those behaviors (apologizing, taking ownership, moderating your words and reactions). You’re teaching them consent by modeling consent (backing your child up when they don’t want to hug/kiss a relative, for example). Permissive parenting is not gentle parenting.
I think the pendulum swung too far with some parents who were probably raised in very authoritarian households and knew they didn’t want to replicate that but they were grasping in the dark, really, for a better parenting method. In our earnest quest to not become the worst of our parents, some of us went too far in the other direction and inadvertently became permissive.
Research from Oklahoma State University suggests that gentle parenting strategies alone may not be effective for every situation and every child. Specifically, researchers have found that gentle parenting techniques are not as effective for more serious, challenging behavior, such as aggression, or for children that are more oppositional or harder to manage.
And now the pendulum will settle in the middle, and the generation after Gen Alpha will be much more balanced parents as a whole. But where does that leave us now?
Do we want to create fragile feelings or fragile egos?
The fragile egos that are battling away in the comments of social media, hurling childish insults and name-calling, are obnoxious and hurtful people. They hurt because they were hurt. Children who have been raised with “gentle parenting,” however, tend to have more balanced egos but sometimes fragile feelings.
When they are raised in a household where they are respected, heard, seen, and validated as a matter of routine, being faced with a mean bully in a rough-and-tumble public school seems daunting, right? Nobody cares about your feelings on the schoolyard at recess. We have to have some thick skin.
On the other side of it, permissive parenting creates children with ginormous egos. They believe they are the center of the universe because their parent(s) made them believe that they are. Given no constraints on behavior for the first 4–5 years of life, they completely melt down when confronted with a boundary.
Of course, these Gen Alpha classrooms are dysfunctional. You have 20 five-year-olds who either believe the world revolves around them or are consistently getting their feelings hurt by those kids (not to mention being taught by an exhausted teacher working a second job to make ends meet). Would we rather return to the days of yore, the days when children were quiet, submissive, and tame because of the pervasive and consistent threat of physical discipline if they stepped out of line?
It’s almost like the structure of public education isn’t about serving children who are being allowed to be children but rather those scared into submission. Now that the kids no longer fit that description, the entire structure is faltering. Most of us have chosen gentle parenting in part to help our children create healthy Egos, but we’ve also allowed and encouraged their critical thinking, examination, and questioning, which are all traits that can chafe with the industrialized public education system sometimes.
The thing is a lot of people who grew up in those “idyllic” times, where children were seen and not heard and silently obeyed in school [due, again, to the pervasive threat of physical discipline] now have exceptionally fragile egos, are experiencing estrangement from their children in record numbers, and refuse to think or discuss critically any information that varies from their perceived reality.
So these adults yell and argue about it, insisting that banning books, eliminating a “woke agenda” or giving parents vouchers to opt out entirely must be the solution. Because adults want solutions, and we want them yesterday. So we bicker and shout, in school board meetings, PTA meetings, and online — and all along, our children are watching.
What is the solution to the gentle parenting epidemic?
Listen, there are people up there at Harvard and in Washington, think tanks and specialists, committees and task forces that have to figure this out. I can’t, and I don’t need to (not a stressor I’m gonna bring on myself). And, like all of us, all I can directly impact is what’s in my control, and that is my parenting of my children.
I adore our preschooler, and I’m glad that we’ve chosen to raise her without harsh punishments. She’s a confident, happy-go-lucky kid who feels comfortable with us. But I’ve also been taken to task by an elderly neighbor and friend who also adores our daughter but is happy to provide some observations from an outside perspective (and advice when she’s being a handful).
I genuinely believe it takes a village, and I’m glad I’ve done enough work on myself that I can step my Ego aside to listen and learn from her and allow her to play a role in being a meaningful, caring adult in our daughter’s life. She can ‘holler’ at my daughter if she’s running towards the street; she can correct her, and she always does it in love.
Sometimes, my daughter cries. That’s okay. She was corrected in love, she was not harmed, and she is learning that she is not the center of the world.
We’re all learning, but I do think that we’re one of the first civilizations to collectively see childhood as a unique and vulnerable time, wherein children should not be harmed, forced into labor, sold/traded, or just treated as these disposable beings with no feelings or thoughts of their own. That is an enormous social evolution step. It’s like when they said that true civilization began when skeletons showed signs of healed bones. It meant that instead of just being left to die, the group cared for the person until their bone healed.
I believe studying childhood and collectively insisting on a safer, more humane childhood for children, throughout almost all cultures worldwide, is another significant evolutionary step for humankind.
So we don’t know what we’re doing, but we are doing what a lot of people before us didn’t do for children: we’re learning, we’re changing, and we’re adapting. And you know what? Our children are watching that, too.
Melissa Corrigan (she/her) is a writer, mom, adoptee, veteran, friend, advocate, and ally living in coastal Virginia. Her online work can be found at The Examiner, Navy Times, Medium, UniteWomen, and more, as well as a newly released guided journal on Amazon.
