In recent years, the term gentle parenting has been touted in parenting books and across the internet, but what is gentle parenting exactly and how can it benefit your child?
With a wide range of parenting styles to consider, from helicopter parenting to a more free-range approach, figuring out which resonates most with your beliefs, lifestyle, and goals for your child can be challenging.
Did you find yourself empathizing with your best friend as she dealt with her strict, authoritarian parents? Perhaps that guy you had to break up in high school whose permissive parents allowed him to get into all the trouble, drove home the fact that you knew which type of parent you weren’t going to become. So if not those parenting styles, what about gentle parenting? Is this method right for your family?
What is gentle parenting?
Gentle parenting techniques to try with your child
Of the four main parenting styles — authoritative, permissive, authoritarian, and neglectful — psychologists consider authoritative, under which gentle parenting falls, to be the most ideal method of parenting.
Neither neglectful nor permissive parenting meets a child’s social, emotional, and behavioral needs. Authoritarian parenting doesn’t even take into consideration the fact that a child has needs to be met.
If you want to begin to incorporate gentle parenting techniques in your own home, the best way to start is by modeling the behaviors you want your children to emulate. Simply exhibiting appropriate ways to disagree, set boundaries, and show anger can go a lot further than punishing or yelling at a child.
“Sometimes when an adult says, ‘I can try this differently,’ it can break that power struggle down enough for the child to try too,” Melissa Stadler, who offers therapy services for adolescents and adults through GPI, told Mom.com.
When your child is upset, gentle parenting dictates that finding the root cause of the child’s behavior is key. Often recognizing a child’s unmet needs can mitigate a situation before it escalates to a full-blown temper tantrum or meltdown. Is your child hungry, thirsty, or just feeling left out? Try to find out what the outburst is really about.
Recognize that your child is still developing. Their maturity level isn’t on par with your own and they do not have the emotional maturity to work through problems or seemingly minor inconveniences. Their reactions are developmentally appropriate and it’s up to you as the parent to provide a safe and nurturing environment in which they can tune into their emotions without fear of punishment.
When your child does something you deem inappropriate, call out the action rather than labeling your child. For example, if they start bossing a sibling around, rather than telling them that they’re being mean, explain that their sibling probably feels hurt by what they’re doing or saying. You can then offer suggestions to correct the situation.
Gentle parenting is a parenting style based on empathy, respect, trust, growth, and safety and while it’s a trendy topic right now, the concept is one that experts have encouraged for years. The “intuitive parenting” movement of 20 years ago has simply made its way into pop culture — in this age of “when you know better, you do better,” gentle parenting is on the rise.
