When lockdown hit, mum Kelly Medina Enos, found herself struggling to deal with her son’s behaviour.
“He was starting to hit me and have real outbursts,” she says. “I felt very lost before coming across the idea of gentle parenting on TikTok”.
Unlike traditional parenting where a child is punished for not following adult rules, gentle parenting, focuses on a more balanced approach that pairs boundaries with emotional warmth.
Instead of using words such as “no”, “stop” or “don’t” the focus is on what the child should do, rather than asking them not to do something. For example, “feet on the floor” instead of “stop climbing”.
It’s treating children the way you wish adults had treated you when you were young, explains Sarah Ockwell-Smith, who writes about the psychology and science of parenting.
“Gentle parenting doesn’t mean giving your child all of the chocolate and ice cream in the shop,” she says.
“It’s focused on treating children with respect and kindness and not punishing them in ways that make them feel excessively bad.”
Kelly, a certfied parenting coach, decided to try it.
“I didn’t know that there were any other ways of parenting a child other than authoritarian, but I loved it and it really sat with everything I wanted to do,” she says.
She says the approach is often misunderstood.
“Social media has run with the narrative that gentle parenting is speaking gently to your child, and that there’s no discipline, there’s no boundaries. There’s plenty of that within gentle parenting.”
