Woman Tells Gentle Parenting Friend That Her Children Are 'Horribly Behaved' — 'She Told Me Any Other Parenting Is Abusive'
Sounds like neither of them understand what gentle parenting actually is.
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The backlash to new child-rearing approaches like gentle parenting seems to be well underway these days, with many believing it has resulted in kids with no manners, no respect, and a total inability to behave.
For one woman on Reddit, the backlash has led to an outright war between her and a dear friend whose kids are… well, anything but gentle, and it's threatening to destroy their friendship for good.
The woman is fed up with a gentle parenting mom's ill-behaved kids.
For the uninitiated, gentle parenting is an approach to child-rearing that focuses on setting boundaries with kids and upholding them with gentle redirection that takes into account both attachment theory and children's brain development rather than yelling and punishing.
The goal is to teach kids limits while also helping them develop emotionally and mentally, rather than doling out punishments they're too young to understand.
Experts say that a more traditional approach just inculcates kids with fear-based obedience that teaches them not to trust their parents or their own feelings and instincts.
However — and it's a big "however" — many parents seem to have interpreted gentle parenting as a call to throw discipline and boundaries out the window, let their kids do whatever they want, and consider their parenting to have been a success so long as they never raise their voice in response.
That is, of course, not how anything works, and this Redditor's situation is a perfect example of how sideways this approach to parenting can go. “I have a friend who has three kids, all under the age of 6," she wrote in her since-deleted Reddit post.
"All of her kids are horribly behaved, don’t listen to authority figures, have a disregard for anything they are told if they don’t feel like doing it, act like wild animals, and are extremely disrespectful," she continued.
That probably sounds like someone with an entirely too authoritarian approach to child-rearing, kicking up a fuss about kids just being kids. But her friend's children are truly on a whole other level.
When her friend's child hit her in the face on a recent visit, she reached a breaking point.
The woman, a mom herself, shared that she's had issues with this friend's kids for years, including an incident in which her friend's child bit one of her own children when it was just days old and faced no consequences whatsoever.
During a recent visit to the friend's house, things reached a breaking point when her friend's 6-year-old came up to her and asked her to play with her.
"I told her not right now because I was having a conversation with her mom but that I would later," the woman wrote. "The kid smacked me in the face and walked away crying."
As usual, her friend did nothing, and the woman could no longer hold her tongue. "I looked at my friend and said, ‘Are you going to do anything about that?!’" The mom explained that her daughter was too upset for the conversation right then and she'd talk to her later, a response this woman found absurd and inappropriate.
She told her friend that gentle parenting is 'stupid,' and her friend replied that other parenting approaches are 'abusive.'
"I finally blew up and told her the way she gentle parents is ridiculous and has led to her children not respecting authority or other humans in general," the woman wrote, adding that "they have no grasp or understanding of authority, right and wrong, and consequences" and would "end up in jail" because of it.
Predictably, the mom was not receptive — and had a hyperbolic response of her own. "She told me I crossed the line telling her how to parent and that any other form of parenting that is not gentle parenting is abusive," the woman wrote.
The woman admitted that she spanks her kids and that her friend doesn't agree with spanking. "Which is fine, I don’t have an issue with that," the woman wrote. "I do have an issue when someone’s lack of parenting causes their kids to harm other people, including my kids and myself.”
Neither of these women understands what gentle parenting actually is, and experts say theirs are common misconceptions.
"This isn't gentle parenting," one Redditor commented on the woman's post. "This is permissive parenting which is no kind of parenting at all."
"This is the comment I was looking for," another added. "Gentle parenting supports boundaries, including telling the child no, as well as consequences. Kids need and thrive on limits because they help the child feel and be safe."
Experts say this is a very common misunderstanding. Many parents go all-in on the emotional connection and patience involved in the approach but seem to lump discipline and consequences in with things that experts and pediatricians say are damaging or even abusive like yelling, threatening, and spanking.
Anecdotally, it seems to be having very harmful repercussions. Many teachers, for instance, blame these discipline-free misunderstandings of gentle parenting for the widespread behavioral problems in schools these days.
By the same token, however, other teachers say that children who are gentle parented correctly are far more well-behaved than kids who are spanked and punished harshly.
In the end, most experts agree that both extremes of harsh or permissive parenting are damaging in different ways. As with most things, it's probably best to aim somewhere in the middle — and at the very least, hitting grown-ups in the face should be off-limits.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.