Gentle parenting is an evidence-based peaceful and positive style of parenting that focuses on a collaborative relationship between parents and their child. This parenting style is based on four key components: empathy, respect, understanding, and boundaries. Parents use consistency and compassion to encourage their child to become more self-aware and express themselves in socially appropriate ways.
What Is Gentle Parenting?
Gentle parenting is an evidence-based approach founded by Sarah Ockwell-Smith in the early 2000s. Gentle parenting focuses on parenting children without shame, blame, and punishment. This style of parenting centers around collaboration between parents and children.
The main principles behind this parenting style are empathy, respect, understanding, and boundaries. Parents are compassionate as they consistently set boundaries for their children as they navigate the world around them.1
Key elements of gentle parenting include:
Empathy
Empathy is crucial to the development of children; it supports the autonomy, socio-emotional, cognitive, and physical growth in children.2 Parents provide a critical example by modeling compassion in everyday interactions. As children watch their parents show empathy to them, they learn empathy themselves by copying their parents’ behaviors.
Offering empathy builds a child’s self esteem by respecting and validating their feelings and experiences. Further, parenting with empathy helps a child learn to regulate their own emotions from their parents’ example.
Understanding
When gentle parenting remains open and understanding, it allows the space for children to become aware and comprehend their behaviors. For example, if a child throws things when upset, parents create a safe space for the child to explore his reasonings. This shows that the parents are patient and understanding of the time and child’s learning process and limitations due to their level of maturity.
Healthy Boundaries
Gentle parenting stresses the importance of setting healthy boundaries as it creates expectations for children. Further, it creates parameters that support consistency. For example, if a boundary set by a parent is “no throwing things at others,” both parents and children are on the same page regarding the expectation.
Further, if this expectation is not met, exploration can occur to see what made it hard to respect the boundary. Some examples of healthy boundaries set by parents can be taking away an object that a child has used to hurt someone or that a child has threatened to hurt someone with, while also explaining why it was taken away and helping the child calm down.
Respect
Respect is important in any relationship; in the parent-child relationship, respect is part of building a safe connection between parent and child. Gentle parenting focuses on the importance of respecting your child’s feelings in order to teach empathy and reciprocation.
Since children learn from their surroundings, modeling respectful behaviors is important, such as speaking kindly and politely to your child and others. This creates the expectation that respect is a priority in a relationship, and as children grow they will be able to engage in respectful relationships with others. 3
Benefits of Gentle Parenting
The gentle parenting style is beneficial in creating a bond that is positive in many ways. More importantly, gentle parenting provides the space for children to see how their behaviors impact others, how others react, and how they can react.
This approach benefits both parents and children as it supports working and growing together. As children grow, they will be able to consider how their behaviors might affect others and what outcomes can come from the situations.
Possible benefits of gentle parenting include:
Reduced Childhood Anxiety
Gentle parenting helps reduce the likelihood of a child experiencing childhood anxiety. This occurs as the parenting style provides a supportive and encouraging home environment. Being able to have a supportive and encouraging environment consistently allows the child to know what to expect from parents. Moreover, this helps children in reducing social anxiety, and research has made this correlation.4
Improved Parent-Child Bond
Gentle parenting helps parents build a strong bond with their child, as they are attuned to what is happening with their children and support them. Creating this positive bond can further help children develop healthy relationships in the future. They would have the experience of what a healthy relationship looks like and engage in these, or know to walk away from relationships that are not healthy.
Reduced Childhood Anger
Gentle parenting creates a family environment without shame, blame, and punishment. Anger often covers up more vulnerable emotions such as shame, fear, and low self-worth. Using a parenting style that honors these emotions can help reduce anger in children. In gentle parenting, if a child were to get angry, parents would try to understand what was happening to cause that emotion and support the child.
Positive Social Skills
Learning empathy, respect for others, boundaries and understanding is essential for young children. Young children learn how to maneuver socially and develop these skills when supported in a safe way. For example, this environment can help a child learn to share and regulate themselves in socially challenging situations.
Use As a Motivational Tool
Parents can utilize these skills to motivate their children to handle matters differently. If a child is having trouble with anger, gentle parenting can help parents focus on better understanding what and why this is happening. Further, you would want to support your child in handling emotions differently.
Increase Emotional Vocabulary
Children expand their emotional vocabulary as they grow, and parental awareness of this process is essential for positive child development. At a young age, children learn basic emotions such as happy, sad, and mad. Gentle parenting provides the space to explore other emotions and how these affect others. As children grow, more emotions will come into their vocabulary all the way into adulthood.
Possible Cons of Gentle Parenting
Like any parenting technique, there may be potential drawbacks to gentle parenting down the line. Factors that parents should consider before adopting this parenting style include having the patience, persistence, and time to practice the skills. Further, parents must consider family issues such as separated parents or other dynamics that may create difficulties.
Possible drawbacks of gentle parenting include:
- It can be time-consuming: Gentle parenting requires parents to be active and present to support their children. Parents may have many responsibilities that can decrease the amount of time they have to focus on parenting consistently.
- Setting boundaries can be challenging: Setting boundaries can be difficult for some parents if this is not their norm. Setting boundaries takes practice and constant evaluation, which can feel like too much work.
- Breaking parental patterns can be hard: Most parents learn parenting styles from their own upbringing, and breaking these patterns can be hard to do. Parents have to evaluate and process their own experience and from that determine what they want to do. This process can be a long journey and parents might not be ready to do this, or have the support.
- This style can seem too unstructured: Collaborating with your own child can change the dynamic in the family, such as kids and parents being partners. This can create a feeling of no structure or discipline for some families.
- Parents need patience to make it work: This style of parenting asks for parents to have patience, and at times, this is hard to do consistently. This can create some frustration and a lack of motivation.
6 Tips for Practicing Gentle Parenting
In adopting gentle parenting techniques, consistency and patience is essential. Parents should be ready to be calm in their own reactions and reset their focus in this style of parenting if frustrations come up. Further, there may be situations where safety can be involved, and at that point, child safety or the safety of others becomes the top priority. For example, if a child runs into the street, a parent should ensure the safety of the child and then attempt to understand the reasoning for that reaction.
The last thing to keep in mind is your own culture and daily dynamics and how these may affect your practice of gentle parenting. For example, if sharing emotions is not a common practice in your family, this is an issue to be worked through.
Here are 6 tips for practicing gentle parenting:
1. Stay Calm
With gentle parenting, staying calm is important for parents, especially in times of high stress. As this parenting style is a collaborative one, children will feed off a parent’s reaction. Staying calm as a parent provides that space to think and recommit to your style of parenting. Staying calm also helps a parent listen attentively and better understand their children’s behaviors.
2. Be Consistent
Consistency is important in any type of parenting style. In gentle parenting, being consistent with the key elements of respect, understanding, healthy boundaries and empathy can help the collaborative process feeling more manageable. For example, setting boundaries and consistently meeting them is crucial to the success of the collaborative process.
Consistency also entails partners making sure that both are on the same page about expectations and boundaries. This will support the child’s understanding that the collaborative process includes everyone in the family.
3. Plan for Negative Situations
Thinking about potential negative situations ahead of time can help you feel more prepared and avoid predictable problems. For some, it might feel wrong to plan for negative situations, but having possible solutions helps you stay calm and parent with a gentle parenting focus.
4. Set Expectations
Being clear with family, friends, and others your family might interact with can help you use gentle parenting skills with confidence. Further, it can help to have others support you by utilizing the skills as well so that children can have the same interaction with others. Having others be aware of what to expect from you as a parent. This can also reduce stressful situations, such as others giving suggestions while problems are happening, or people trying to help but making matters worse because they are not using the same skills.
5. Remain Positive
Remaining positive while parenting can help you stay motivated to continue to practice the skills as well as reflect on where there is room for improvement. Remaining positive is also a great way to model for children that even when matters might not work as expected, remaining positive helps you continue to try again and again.
6. Work Together
With any parenting style, working together creates a sense of support that is helpful for a parent. Gentle parenting stresses the importance of a collaborative approach, and working together embodies this in everyday practice. Further, the support that others can bring while learning a new way of parenting can be helpful in discussing what is difficult and potentially brainstorming ways that can be helpful.
Is Gentle Parenting Right for My Family?
Gentle parenting may not be a good fit for everyone, but parents can try to incorporate elements of it into their approach if they find it useful. Being able to explore what works for your family and what doesn’t is helpful. Exploring parenting options can be stressful; it is important for parents to get support if needed.
Therapy can be beneficial when determining a good parenting style that fits your own values and beliefs. Many parents find online therapy options to be a good choice for fitting therapy into a busy schedule. Being a parent can make individuals feel on the edge about their parenting techniques, so finding the right therapist to help them through their issues can be an important step.
Final Thoughts
Being a parent can bring forth many emotions and thoughts. Practicing parenting techniques that work well for the uniqueness of your family is important. Parenting is not the same for everyone, so families should find suitable tactics for their own needs. Gentle parenting is a peaceful and positive style of parenting that focuses on the relationship a parent is building with their child through collaboration.
Gentle Parenting Infographics
