Imagine your teenager comes in well after curfew. She apologizes, but says she was having fun.
What do you do?
Many parents would yell at their child about how worried they had been and that they didn’t know whether the teen was alright or not. Then they would ground the child.
However, a parent using the technique of gentle parenting (sometimes called respectful parenting, mindful parenting and intentional parenting), would keep their cool and say, “I’m so sad that you missed curfew. It’s too bad you won’t be going out for two weeks.”
The teenager might get upset and sulk, but if the parents don’t react to it, the anger will burn itself out quicker than if they had argued with the teen.
The idea of gentle parenting is not new. While traditional parenting focuses on punishment and reward, gentle parenting centers around making children realize for themselves what they did wrong and understanding the consequences of their behavior. The technique has been around since people have been parents.
“When parents approach challenges with kindness, but still allow bad behavior to have consequences, gentle parenting can be fabulous,” says Charleston parenting coach Christine Donavan. “Letting actions not have consequences or be corrected can be a problem.”
A lot of gentle parenting involves removing the negative emotions from the confrontations with children; first, with the parents and then, hopefully, as children learn from their parents.
“Yelling and arguing allows the child to turn those emotions back on the parents, and you don’t want that,” says Donavan.
Gentle parenting relies on four core tenets, according to betterhelp.com:
-Empathy—Parents are encouraged to keep their children’s feelings in mind as they apply consequence to action. If they can better understand what the child is feeling and thinking, more appropriate consequences can be set.
-Respect—Respect is a two-way street. A parent should give it to their children as well as expect to receive it from them. According to betterhelp.com, “A simple way to incorporate respect in a parent-child relationship might be to listen to a child when they speak, and to ask questions first, then react.”
-Understanding—If children feel like their parents understand them, it is more likely they will come to their parents with their problems. This can be challenging for a parent because they need to consider not how they necessarily feel about something but how a child at X age would feel about it.
-Boundaries—Boundaries need to be set, not only to guide the child, but in some cases, to protect the child.
Gentle parenting done properly still has consequences, but those consequences are applied in such a way that the child understands why he or she is being punished.
Donavan compares gentle parenting to how we teach a baby to walk. “When a baby walks and falls, we don’t yell at them. We encourage them, but we do move them away from stairs.” The stairs are the boundaries we set.
Traditional parenting that is focused on punishment and reward can work, but only in the short term. It attempts to train a child, much like a pet is trained. A child acts to get a reward, such as a treat, and avoid a punishment, such as a timeout. They don’t learn to think about the why of what is happening to them and understand their behavior.
“Kids don’t always understand that what they’re doing is wrong. They just stop their behavior because they’re afraid,” pediatrician Karen Estrella explains in an article for the Cleveland Clinic. “They don’t really understand why they should stop that behavior unless you explain why.”
Depending on how the parent was raised, it may take some time to learn to show empathy and respect for how your child is feeling and not react when he or she tries to get a rise out of you, but it pays off.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, “By remaining calm, you’re also giving your child the space to recognize how you respond to conflict and giving them the opportunity to turn their behavior around.”
Children are generally quick to respond to this new parenting, especially as they start to realize their role in the consequences they receive.
“Things will be calmer in the home when a child doesn’t have anyone to fight with,” says Donavan. “Harsh parents break a child. Gentle parents build relations.”
The biggest problem with gentle parenting is that it gets misapplied. The parent might focus too much on empathizing with the child and forget to apply the consequences, or the parent might not hold firm to the boundaries set.
When this happens, a parent might think that gentle parenting isn’t working and give up because the child is learning the wrong lessons.
While nothing is going to guarantee a perfectly behaved child, gentle parenting should improve relations between the parent and child.
By James Rada, Jr.
