Gentle Parenting Shouldn't Mean No Boundaries or Consequences
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses how gentle parenting has been misinterpreted to mean no discipline at all, and why children still need clear boundaries.
Key Takeaways
- Gentle doesn't mean permissive - Gentle parenting at its best includes firm, loving boundaries — not the absence of consequences
- Children need structure - Kids thrive with clear expectations and consistent follow-through, even within a gentle approach
- Extreme reactions help no one - Neither harsh authoritarianism nor total permissiveness serves children well
Transcript
Is gentle parenting behind the epidemic of bad behavior we're seeing in schools?
I hear a lot of people talking about gentle parenting and talking about the negatives that they experienced as kids and wanting to do better as parents.
So I think in a lot of ways, gentle parenting is a positive reaction to a negative experience.
And I totally understand people wanting to give their kids a better experience than they had as kids.
But I think part of what's happening with gentle parenting, which like who even knows exactly what that means, a lot of things fall under the banner of quote-unquote, gentle parenting.
But I think in a lot of cases what people are doing is just the extreme opposite of what they experienced as kids.
Like, if you never had much as a kid, buying your kid everything they could possibly want.
If you were not allowed on the internet as a kid, giving your kid complete, unrestricted, unsupervised access to the internet.
And I think when it comes to boundaries and consequences in particular...
People who maybe perceive their parents as too strict or even kind of abusive might overreact to that experience as kids by treating their kids...
in the extreme opposite way with like no boundaries, no consequences at all.
So I don't know if this is what you're seeing, if this is your sense of how people are interpreting that idea of gentle parenting.
Like certainly we want kids to get better and better experiences generationally, right?
Like we want to get better at parenting as a species, but I don't think we do that with these giant pendulum swings.
Like in education, we have pendulum swings all the time, whether it's zero tolerance or what we're having now, whether it's no child left behind or, you know, new math, like we have lots of pendulum swings, but I think there are pendulum swings in parenting too.
And those can be just as dangerous if instead of looking for something healthy, we just try to do the opposite of what was unhealthy because often the extreme opposite of something unhealthy is also something unhealthy.
And if you think about the people that you know who are like, often if you, if you want to do better than you experienced personally as a kid, don't just do the opposite of what your parents did if you don't like what your parents did look at someone who had a happy childhood like a healthy childhood where they don't have a lot of baggage from it how were they parented i think that is going to hold better clues to how you can treat your own kids how you can raise your own kids so that they don't have just the opposite problems that you know that that we had in you know previous generations i i had a very Healthy and balanced and you know, I have absolutely no complaints about my childhood love my parents and if you have different feelings about your childhood, it can be very difficult to understand kind of where to settle on things.
So I totally understand the impulse to do the extreme opposite, but I think we've got to find a balance because the gentle parenting thing, if it means my kid gets to do whatever they want, my kid gets to hit me, my kid gets to hit their teacher, my kid gets to be totally out of control and I'm never going to do anything about it, that can't work.
Let me know what you think about gentle parenting.