Our Kids Like Gentle Parenting: We Older Folks Should Support Them

The gentle parenting approach has been around for close to a decade. It revolves around meaningful praise, respect for feelings, open communication, and a non-authoritarian viewpoint rather than using shame, blame, yelling or corporal punishment.

But plenty of grandparents confuse gentle parenting with permissive parenting, even though the differences are vast. 

Gentle parenting is designed for raising confident children through empathetic rather than dictatorial parenting. Compassion, respect and setting healthy boundaries are part of the method. Permissive parenting is quite the opposite — this approach has almost no boundaries and few consequences for unacceptable behavior.

Not all grandparents are on board with the gentle approach and feel it undermines the concept of tough love. Friends who have engaged in heated debates with their adult children over what they consider a lack of discipline in child-rearing have also risked isolation from their grandchildren.

While I understand their desire to interfere, I disagree with them.

Like many of my peers, I grew up with authoritarian parents who used corporal punishment as a means of discipline. All this accomplished was leaving me feeling diminished as a person and it contributed to years of anxiety over not measuring up to my parents’ expectations.

By the time I had my own children, corporal punishment was a thing of the past — the preferred method of discipline was “time-out” or grounding. Our generation was at the early stages of discovering the importance of communication and respect for children's feelings. But we still had a lot to learn.

I realized this the first time I saw my eight-year-old granddaughter ignore repeated orders to clean her room. My first instinct was to snap at her and throw her toys into the trash because of her behavior, but I held my tongue and let the parents handle the situation.

On another occasion, when my toddler grandchild pinched me, I was tempted to pinch back as a lesson. Instead, I stepped back, thinking this knee-jerk response was antiquated since many toddlers cannot express their emotions verbally. Again, I trusted the parents to guide their child's behavior toward a respectful way of earning attention.

While it's true that parents who practice gentle parenting have the best intentions for their children, some drift unknowingly into the permissive parenting lane when the boundaries become blurred. Unfortunately, this is when many grandparents interfere by sharing unwanted advice, such as comparing old parenting philosophies with today's techniques and accusing adult parents of being too soft.