Out with the naughty step, in with validated feelings — Francesca Angelina tries a softer approach with her toddlers. Warning: requires (a lot of) patience.
One sunny morning last year I took my two children, Hope and Isaac, to a playgroup at our local park in southeast London. Parents and nannies milled around as their toddlers unleashed themselves on the toys. I sat down on a tiny chair and folded my legs under a table covered in glitter and breadsticks. Isaac was asleep in his pram and I reckoned I had at least eight minutes of uninterrupted me-time to scroll through my phone.
After two of my eight luxurious minutes, Hope reappeared, transformed into some kind of dalmatian mongrel. “I’m a puppy,” she announced, pawing at my leg. I patted her head. Adorable. But already I had a sense of foreboding. To extract a three-year-old from a dog costume was going to be torture — for both of us.
Sure enough, when everyone began singing the hideous “tidy up time” chant, Hope was still 100 per cent dog. “Five more minutes,” I said, “and then it’s time to take it off.” A bark signalled a hard no. She doesn’t yet understand the concept of time, I thought vaguely — yesterday she was convinced a doorknob was a clock because it was round — so I switched to reasoning with her: “Your brother’s hungry, it’s lunch.” She jutted her chin out, a warning.
Then I noticed another defiant doggie. This one was further along in the stand-off, already writhing on the floor. But what really turned my head was her father. He was crouched down on the floor at his daughter’s level, repeating: “I understand you want to keep the dog costume on, you’re having a really nice time, you feel frustrated because you wish you could stay in the dog costume all day. You don’t want to go home. It’s time for lunch now, you need to take it off.”
His unnerving tranquillity sounded familiar and then I twigged. This was a real-life performance of the #gentleparenting videos I’d been looking at minutes earlier. The dad wasn’t shouting, bribing or shaming. No threats were hurled. Instead he was narrating his toddler’s emotions back to her with astonishing calm, thereby affirming her feelings as real and significant. This would, according to the parenting theory behind it all, lead to a stable child who can recognise and control their emotions.
I should have filmed him for TikTok: my “gentle parenting” likes would have gone through the roof. Because, right now, gentle parenting is all the rage. On TikTok, videos containing the term have had more than 2.6 billion views. Open the app and you’ll find thousands of parents posting stylishly curated mini-tutorials of themselves carefully coaxing in return for happier, more emotionally mature offspring. The tenets of gentle parenting are not new, but what makes this latest trend different is that it’s being supercharged by TikTok and its relentless algorithms.
So what exactly does #gentleparenting mean? And how does it work? There are many variations — some call it respectful parenting, others authoritative — but they all blend into the central idea that parents should validate their children’s emotions and look for the reasons behind challenging behaviour rather than punishing it. It’s not to be confused with permissive parenting. There are still boundaries but rewards, bribes, punishments and threats are not advocated. No sticker charts, no naughty steps and no enticing little Rufus into a bath with the promise of a Paw Patrol double bill. And if your drawer of parenting tricks suddenly looks quite empty, effusive praise is also a no-no: you don’t want a child to perform just for the sake of rewards and attention. Options are better than orders and applying “I know best” logic won’t work — forget telling Lizzie she needs to put on her coat because it’s snowing. All that’s required is a complete rewiring of the parenting strategy. Easy.
One of the most respected guides is the incredibly perky clinical psychologist Becky Kennedy. In 2020, mid-pandemic, she began posting practical tips and on-the-hoof videos on how to navigate boundaries with overwhelmed kids. Now the American mother of three has 1.6 million Instagram followers and charges US$28 (about NZ$43) a month for membership to her online platform Good Inside. “We’re raising humans, not animals,” runs her ethos.
Big Little Feelings, an account run by two mothers in Denver peddling the secrets to “taming tantrums”, has 2.8 million followers. Its Winning the Toddler Stage online course costs US$99. Then there’s the gentle parenting guru Destiny Bennett, whose posts of her interactions with her brood of small and gorgeous children on TikTok have garnered 6.3 million likes.
For desperate mums and dads, these platforms serve as on-demand, round-the-clock child therapy. Siblings who smack; toddlers refusing to hug Granny; pre-schoolers deliberately defecating in cupboards — all these problems are answered here. One friend told me that adopting the gentle-parenting maxims had transformed her relationship with herself, her children and her husband. Which sounded great.
But with success comes backlash. Many posts are met with derision. This school of parenting produces mollycoddled brats, say its many critics. It places a gagging order on parents’ emotions and it’s impossible to have a job, more than one child and be a gentle parent. Another friend said she’d given up on gentle parenting after three years because she felt it was gaslighting her children and that her own emotions didn’t come into the equation. “I worried that I was raising my kids to have no resilience, or accountability for their actions,” she said. “And the real world’s not like that. Whose boss is going to turn around and ask about your feelings?”
Conflicts over the best way to raise children are of course age old. Tiger moms, helicopter dads, latch-key kids and attachment parents have all had their time. Each generation comes up with its own doctrine, which tends to be radically opposed to whatever came before. “It is the idea that you either repeat or correct how you were parented,” says the child psychologist Angharad Rudkin, author of What’s My Child Thinking? “You either think that was all great, worked for me, I’ll do the same, or you think, I don’t ever want my children to feel how I did growing up, so I will go completely the other way. You get these huge swings between generations.”
Delve a little into gentle parenting on TikTok and it gets very nasty very quickly. Last year a video on the app from Kelly Enos, a 31-year-old mother from York, in which she suggests offering her toddler George options of what to do with his feet instead of just telling him to put his feet on the floor, was picked up by the US talk-show host Whoopi Goldberg — and ridiculed. “Honestly. Is that really a realistic approach when your children are acting up?” Goldberg chuntered. But the award for most-hated gentle parenting mother on TikTok goes to Alice Bender. Her chief crime? To declare that giving a baby a bedtime was “inhumane”. Welcome to the parenting wars 3.0, playing out of social media.
@kellymedinaenos How to change the “no” in your everyday language. ✌🏼✨. Hope this helps, it’s helped us MASSIVELY! 🤍 #gentleparenting #authoratativeparenting #mumssupportingmums
♬ Hip Hop with impressive piano sound(793766) - Dusty Sky
Steering clear of the whole thing would be the sensible thing to do, except … back at the playgroup, Gentle Dad’s daughter had removed her costume and was coming round to the idea of going home. Hope, on the other hand, had run away from me and was trying to gnaw at the leg of a volunteer. My way clearly wasn’t working. Gentle Dad’s was. In that moment, I decided I’d give it a try.
Very early the next morning while their dad, Tom, is downstairs hanging up washing, I start out on my #gentleparentingjourney by scrolling through Big Little Feelings as Isaac snuffles around his cot. Within minutes, I feel a whole lot better about myself and my children. Tantrums, I learn, are normal. In fact, they’re “healthy” — just a child’s way of releasing their energy since their brains aren’t yet able to manage their emotions. “They’re not bad children, I’m not a bad parent,” I think to myself as Hope screams that she wants “Dad, not Mum”, and a now very awake Isaac screams because he wants to hold a Calpol syringe (not a great look). The key to taming those tantrums is not to give in but to “ACCEPT THEM”, reads a post. Capital letters are a big part of gentle parenting. “You’d be SHOCKED by how simply saying, ‘I see you’re feeling mad/sad. That’s tough,’ can be a game-changer in and of itself.”
I’m not convinced Hope will buy that. When I broach this approach with older generations, I am met with a mixture of bafflement and disgust. Cue many “Well, in my day I would have been sent to my room/not given supper/left to rot” responses. Which only convinces me there must be something to it.
At breakfast, Hope is beyond livid that I’ve peeled a banana when she wanted it opened “just a crack”. The old, less gentle — though some would say entirely reasonable — me would have turned around and told her to stop crying: “The banana still tastes the same. Just eat it.” But the TikToker Destiny Bennett says telling a child they have nothing to cry about is “one of the most emotionally invalidating things” you can do to a child, which sounds awful. Instead, the new gentle me acknowledges that I’ve peeled the banana incorrectly and that it must feel incredibly frustrating. I would feel mad too, I tell Hope.
@thebennettgang #motherhood #gentleparenting #consciousparenting #intentionalparenting
♬ original sound - destiny Bennett
At which point she flings herself down on the floor and chucks a nearby water bottle at a cupboard. I remember the script — the feelings are OK, the behaviour is not. In the most tranquil voice I can muster, I tell her it’s OK to feel angry but it’s definitely not OK to throw things and so I’m taking the water bottle away to keep her safe. Now she’s even more pissed off and I’m not sure I blame her.
When I go for a walk later on with Isaac in his pram, another guru, Janet Lansbury, is in my ears to assure me I’m actually doing well. The Californian former actress is a follower of Magda Gerber, co-founder in 1978 of Resources for Infant Educarers, which promotes the ethos that children should be treated with respect. Lansbury spreads the word via her podcast Unruffled. Friends recommend it to me in hallowed terms. I like her immediately because she’s big on boundaries, so long as they’re enforced with confidence. When Hope gets out of bed to find me one minute after she’s been put there, she’s intercepted and firmly returned to bed, all thanks to Lansbury. I find myself bingeing on most of the episodes, her West Coast lilt as soothing as a massage.
In Britain, the psychologist Sarah Ockwell-Smith is our answer to Kennedy or Lansbury. A 46-year-old mother of four, Ockwell-Smith coined the term “gentle parenting” in 2016, well before it became a phenomenon. She has sold more than half a million copies of her books on the topic. For Ockwell-Smith, gentle parenting often starts with “breaking the cycle”, overturning the “authoritarian” ideas that label children as naughty and developing the belief that they’re capable of behaving like adults. Again, it’s a generational divide. “Sometimes I say, ‘I open my mouth and my mother comes out,’ " she observes. “That’s the first thing many of us have to overcome.”
When we meet at a café near her home in Essex, I tell her about some of our family’s more challenging behaviour. She doesn’t laugh or make light of it, as I’m prone to do. “It has to start with you as a parent,” she says. “Why would we not respect kids? Why do we treat them so harshly?”
If you look at the research, an awful lot of gentle parenting does make sense. If toddlers’ brains aren’t developed enough to control their impulses, sending them to their rooms has little impact on the underlying behaviour. If you put them on a “time out” for losing it, Ockwell-Smith believes, you’re just conditioning them that it’s bad to have feelings. “They’re not sitting there reflecting on what they’ve done wrong, they’re just there feeling isolated and punished for having emotions. It will have little effect.”
As I persist with the new, gentler way, I manage to stay calm enough to offer empathy and see things from Hope and Isaac’s perspective. A few months in and there’s definitely an improvement — Hope’s tantrums don’t last as long, fewer objects are hurled and I feel better for offering her compassion instead of ignoring her episodes or trying to distract her. But one day, I break.
That fateful morning, Hope decides she doesn’t like the way the seams of her socks feel. But she needs to put them on so I can get her to pre-school and get to work. I’m tired, I don’t have the energy to spend 10 minutes gently parenting her into her freaking socks while Isaac is crying because he’s stuck in the pram. I tell her we’re going to be late and that will make her teacher very sad. Nothing. And then I tell her for each sock she puts on she can have a raisin. “Three raisins,” she says. I cave. Still no socks. I resort to shouting. Still no socks. I am very much failing to emulate TikToker LauraLove’s response to her toddler knocking over her coffee, which is to take “a minute to pause and regulate myself” before calmly mopping up the coffee. Then again, in every TikTok video I’ve come across — and there are thousands to walk you through the sock problem — the child ends up with socks on. Not mine.
@lauralove5514 Reply to @mairenicadhla As requested, here is the whole video & how I responded 😳🤣 #gentleparenting #foryou #fyp #PassTheBIC #viral #toddlermom #momlife #parenting #positivediscipline
♬ original sound - LauraLove
My main gripe is that the expectation and level of hands-on parenting this approach requires isn’t always realistic. The real world isn’t a cutesy 60-second video. Ockwell-Smith thinks TikTok has a lot to answer for here. Certainly, it makes the techniques look eminently viable. “I disagree with about 90 per cent of the TikToks — they’ve taken a whole movement and made it superficial,” she argues. “If I was a young mum looking at parenting on TikTok, I’d be terrified. It’s people looking perfect. I just see acting.”
No one can be a perfect gentle parent all the time, she says. “I always say, I do shout, yell, mess up — it’s important to mess up and then to repair.” I admit to her, feeling a bit like I’m at confession, that last night (in fact most nights) the only way I got Hope to come upstairs was with the promise of an iPad. Sometimes, Ockwell-Smith says reassuringly, you have to use bribes. “If I need to get somewhere on time, I’ll do it. I just don’t do it all the time.”
Gentle parenting isn’t a quick fix. It’s not going to produce instantly calm and happy children. “You’re working at the speed of a child developing,” she says. “However you parent, babies aren’t going to sleep through the night, toddlers will tantrum, three-year-olds will whine, five-year-olds will answer back, teenagers will be rude, because that’s normal behaviour for that age.”
And there’s a lot to like about the approach. Treating a child with compassion and empathy feels a good way to foster emotional intelligence. Understanding that they are acting up not out of defiance but because that’s all they’re capable of makes me feel a whole lot calmer. The question is whether it actually works in the long run. “There is very limited evidence,” says the child psychologist Angharad Rudkin. “But there is always limited evidence for all parenting things.”
Getting children to recognise their emotions is great, she says, but they still need boundaries to feel secure and happy. And that’s where the concise TikTok videos aren’t necessarily helpful. “They reinforce the belief that if you’re a gentle, responsive parent, you will have these glorious happy kids.”
Rudkin’s concern is that gentle parenting requires “a leap of faith” that just because you’ve taught your child that they’re feeling angry they’re going to know how to regulate that anger as they get older. “It almost expects too much of our children to be able to intuitively and naturally come up with solutions when they can’t. We have to lay upon them expectations for how they behave in the world.”
At playgroup, it’s still torture to leave and Hope has just now learnt she likes spitting. Isaac is beginning to get his own big emotions. I try not to bribe or manipulate or swear. But sometimes that just isn’t possible. So I stick with gentleish, good-enough parenting. Who knows how the kids will turn out?
Which TikTok mum are you?
The crunchy mum
So called because you make your own granola. You birthed in a river (#herstory) and for Christmas gave your one-year-old, Gaia, a necklace strung with pearls made with your breast milk, which you know she’ll treasure for ever #gratitude. Microplastics are banned from your home, obviously, and toys are fashioned exclusively from sustainable recycled wood or wool. Gaia doesn’t wear shoes but does decide if, when and where she would like to sleep. So you average two hours a night and that is wonderful because it means you get to be present, to cherish and to post about every #cuddle at 1am, 2am, 3am, 4am, 4.15am …
The silky mum
The opposite of crunchy — you couldn’t get your epidural fast enough and immediately invested in a £2000 Snoo. Fourteen weeks seemed about right for sleep training via the Ferber method, or whatever Gina calls it, and now your son Jonas knows that under no circumstances will he be removed from his cot before the Groclock lights up at 7am. Jonas is on first-name terms with your Amazon man, who every day delivers a fresh and loud Fisher-Price item of choice.
The scrunchy mum
Part silky, part crunchy, you breastfed for a bit, just enough to get the midwives off your back, but soon discovered formula. Hipp seemed the best because it says it’s “organic”. Ten months later you fell for Organix biscuits for the same reason. You are (on social media, at least) very into Greta and co but you can’t be doing with cloth nappies. On some nights, Eva and Frank get to sleep in the “big bed”, other nights they are firmly told to go back to their beds. So sometimes they seem a little confused.
Written by: Francesca Angelini
© The Times of London
