Raising young children has always been difficult, but evidence suggests it may be getting even more difficult. Isolation due to the pandemic, pressure to conform to strict parenting standards, and a deluge of advice from “experts” on social media have led to a shift away from discipline-heavy methods and “gentle parenting,” which promises happier, healthier parenting. ” is promoting the rise of the industry. children. Despite this popularity, no empirical research has been conducted on what gentle parenting actually means. Does that mean you don’t yell? No punishment? Don’t you say “no”? How is it different from other parenting styles? And is it good for both children and parents?
To find out, psychology professor Annie Pezzara teamed up with Rollins College professor Alice Davidson. They collected data from more than 100 parents across the country with at least one child between the ages of 2 and 7. Their study, published in PLOS One, is the first systematic investigation into what it means to be gentle parenting.
What is kind parenting?
Gentle parenting is a relatively new approach, but it looks different in some ways. Our research on self-identifying as a kind parent shows that it focuses on three main things. Parents control their emotions by always keeping calm. Helping children recognize and manage their emotions. They value both physical and emotional affection.
Where did this approach come from?
Gentle parenting is a reaction to the old traditional hierarchical parenting, which emphasized more discipline: “Because I said so” and “Because I’m your parent.” The gentle parenting movement has taken a 180-degree turn from that, with parents wanting a more democratic style, one in which parents are on equal terms with their children. That’s a big change. My parents said, “I don’t want to be raised that way anymore. I want to be better.” That is evident in the current dataset.
There’s a sense of existential despair among many parents these days. We are facing an economic crisis, a climate crisis, a health crisis, and pandemic isolation where we cannot be with our “tribes”. That sense of hopelessness seems to lead to more permissive parenting. Parents are essentially saying, “If our world is on fire, I’m not going to discipline my kid who throws a tantrum over a toy he can’t get at Target.” . There has been a rise in the rise of “parenting experts” offering guidance on gentle parenting on social media, and these parents are being taught to help their children recognize the emotions that are causing their tantrums and offer them a hug. There is.
Why did you and your colleague at Rollins College, Professor Alice Davidson, choose to study this topic?
We both read a great book by Jonathan Haidt called “The Sweetness of the American Heart.” He talks about how parents seem to overprotect their children from many of the normative events and wounds that occur in growing up. Alice and I wondered if this gentle parenting exercise had something to do with his assessment of how children are being raised today. The gentle parenting movement seemed to be the beginning of this special way of raising children.
Is there a lot of research already done on this style of parenting?
No, not at all. There is a British author, Sarah Oxwell Smith, who coined the term “gentle parenting.” She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology but has no further training. Despite writing more than a dozen books on the subject, she has never systematically studied it or defined it clearly. She calls it “a way of life.” When Alice and I read her work, we realized we needed to understand what gentle parenting actually means. How do self-proclaimed caring parents define and put this approach into practice? Our research shows that they’re not very successful.
Developmental psychology tends to focus on children, but we wanted to know how parents were doing. Kind parenting feels aspirational and wise. These A+ parents are passionate about doing the right thing for their kids, but we fear they’re burning out. There is also no evidence to suggest that it is particularly adaptive in children (we have several longitudinal studies planned with the current sample). Gentle parenting, at least according to their accounts, takes a tremendous amount of effort.
What are the key takeaways from this study?
These kind parents are great in many ways. They are high achievers and score high on parenting perfectionism. They want everything “as is.” They exhibit, at least on paper, the admirable qualities that parenting researchers praise.
There’s Diana Baumrind, a classic parenting researcher at Stanford University. She created a matrix of parenting styles with two axes: discipline and warmth. This produces four categories. Permissive parents, like the “cool moms” in Mean Girls, value warmth but not so much discipline. Neglectful parents are lower on both axes. Strict “tiger mom” parents focus on discipline but lack warmth. Baumrind emphasized that authoritative parents who are good at both discipline and warmth are the best, and our kind parents fit into this category. So, in many ways, I think “Bravo!” you are doing everything right. ”
However, our qualitative data show a different picture. When we ask these parents how they’re doing, we say, “I’m hanging on for dear life,” “I don’t know what I’m doing,” or ” ahhhhhhh!!!” and other heart-wrenching and troubling reactions. Many of them are on the razor’s edge. The main takeaway, as our data shows, is that these parents are doing very well but are at risk of burnout.
Another interesting finding was that these parents frequently mentioned “boundaries” and said that while they showed love to their children, they also “protected boundaries.” But if you ask what it means, it’s completely different. This is something we are researching further. “Boundaries” may seem like a buzzword, but no one sets boundaries uniformly.
If you could give one piece of advice to parents of young children, what would it be?
Please rest assured. I think parents often underestimate their children’s resilience. Parents have many good intentions, but ironically, their extravagant attention and quick-witted talk can be harmful to their children. A gentle parenting approach may be underserving your children and exhausting yourself at the same time.
What’s next for you and Alice after this line of research?
We will continue to collect data, including from overseas. We have been in contact with Australia, New Zealand, India and Canada and people have asked us to help. We want to know if gentle parenting is just an American phenomenon, or if it’s found all over the world. We would also like to collect observation data. So far, we have relied on self-reports from parents, which is a good first step, but we would like to see how parents interact with their children in real life. Masu. We also aim for long-term data. We are currently in wave 2 with last year’s sample. I would also like to hear the opinions of more fathers. We are currently analyzing a diverse sample of fathers, and the results are interesting.
