‘I'm hanging on for dear life.' Gentle parenting isn't always gentle on parents.

Boston Globe

05-02-2025

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'That's when gentle parenting became very overwhelming,' says Fetzer, 38, who now has three children, ages 6, 5, and 1.
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Gentle parenting hasn't been around long enough to judge the long-term effects on children, though research suggests that many of its tenets — skipping spankings, displaying warmth, validating emotions — benefit them. This is good for parents eager to believe their choices can help shape a successful future for their children — but it also may come at a cost.
Last year, a surgeon general's advisory said that 41 percent of American parents say most days they are 'so stressed they cannot function.' The report isn't broken down by parenting style — but it's safe to bet the gentle parents are not OK.
The idea that certain approaches to parenting will yield the happiest, most successful, healthiest children— the best children—is not a new one. Dr. Benjamin Spock published his now-classic book,
in 1946, and it has remained popular since, with more than 50 million copies sold. Twenty years later,
More recent decades have brought attachment parenting, tiger parenting, helicopter parenting, free-range parenting, elephant parenting, lighthouse parenting, and any number of other such philosophies. What distinguishes gentle parenting, however, is that it has come of age in an era of social media saturation.
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The term was coined by
The Gentle Parenting Book,
but it has since taken on a life of its own in the hands of online influencers. In most descriptions, gentle parenting asks parents to address the feelings motivating bad — scratch that,
unwanted
— behaviors rather than punishing kids for them.
When a child pushes his brother, gentle parenting suggests we rein in our frustration, then get down to his eye level, express empathy for his anger, ask him how he thinks his brother feels, and talk about better ways to express 'big feelings.' The philosophy says we shouldn't tell our daughter 'You're fine' or 'Don't cry,' when she falls and bumps her knee — instead we should ask her how she feels and reassure her it is OK to cry.
Ockwell-Smith has said gentle parenting isn't about a rigid set of rules. But that hasn't stopped content creators from populating their feeds with all manner of specifics, including checklists, scripts, and dos and don'ts.
A search for the hashtag on Instagram yields thousands of posts telling parents what to say ('I hear you'), what not to say ('Don't lie to me'), and what questions to ask ('What was the trickiest thing that happened today?'). Tiny details come in for critique, from how loudly you can say 'Ouch' if your child pulls your hair to whether it is acceptable to use the phrase 'Good job' as praise (lest your child becomes a 'praise junkie'). It can, say parents, create an unrelenting pressure to get every word choice precisely right.
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On TikTok, gentle parents post videos of themselves negotiating public tantrums with grace and toddlers cheerfully cleaning up spilled snacks as instructed by tender-toned mothers. Many of these content creators have hundreds of thousands — even millions — of followers.
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Image from Adobe Stock; Globe staff illustration
'You can scroll on your phone at any hour of night and see what you're supposed to be doing,' says parenting researcher
Watching this trend, Davidson and her colleague
'There's tons of research about parents as vehicles for their children's well-being, but we were interested in parents in their own right,' Davidson says.
As they compiled their data from interviews with 100 parents,
But an unexpected theme also emerged: More than a third of the parents who described themselves as gentle also made unsolicited comments about their burnout and exhaustion.
'I'm hanging on for dear life,' wrote one.
'I confess I feel I have no idea what I'm doing much of the time,' reported another.
And among those parents sharing such self-critiques, satisfaction and the sense of self-efficacy were markedly lower.
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'We weren't explicitly asking for stories of trial and tribulation and parenting woes,' Pezalla says. 'We did not anticipate this would touch a nerve for so many people.'
Rachael Farber of Newton, mother to a 3-year-old boy and an infant girl, always intended to be a gentle parent. And she and her husband have incorporated many of the principles into their daily lives. They do their best to remain calm in the face of typical toddler provocations and, when their son is having big feelings, they try to talk him through the moment, rather than snapping or shushing. Along the way, though, she discovered that maintaining a constant veneer of peacefulness can be enormously draining.
'Emotionally, the more that you have to stay calm and be gentle,' Farber says, 'the less you have energy to do other things.'
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Image from Adobe Stock; Globe staff illustration
Sometimes sacrifices are made. Cara Leonardo of Needham, mother of two boys, had always planned to go back to work in finance after she had kids. Then she started developing a parenting style influenced by the principles of gentle parenting and other child-centric approaches. She soon realized that raising her kids according to these precepts is a job in itself, and decided to become a stay-at-home parent. 'It was too hard to be the mom I wanted to be and the employee I wanted to be,' she says. 'There's just not enough hours in the day.'
The pressure and challenges are not the whole story: Gentle parenting can be a lot of work, but it can also be satisfying and even empowering, say some parents. The key is to let go of the 'gentle parenting' label — and all the rules social media places on it — and focus on the underlying principles, says Weston-based parenting coach Emily Barker.
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'Some people can get so caught up on the term, but it's just about teaching kids these valuable lifelong skills and how you should treat other people,' says Barker, who does not label her style 'gentle parenting' but does emphasize empathy and communication in her teachings.
She suggests parents shift their perspective on moments that an online checklist might define as failure — a raised voice, a poorly chosen word — seeing them instead as opportunities for both parent and child to grow. Letting kids see you making — and owning up to — mistakes can model for them that no one is, or should be, perfect, she notes.
'Yelling is going to happen,' she says. 'It's about progress, not perfection.'
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Adobe Stock/Globe Staff Illustration
Marta Melo, a Somerville mom of a 2-year-old, finds gratification in gentle parenting's recommendation to apologize to children when appropriate, a stark contrast to the 'because I said so' mind-set of previous parenting generations.
Recently, working from home, dealing with a family COVID outbreak, and aggravated by her daughter's requests for attention, Melo pushed her chair back in frustration, frightening the toddler. After spending a few moments in the bathroom to regroup, Melo returned and told her daughter she was sorry for her reaction.
'I could see that I scared her,' she says. 'The biggest part for me is the idea of repairing what you've done.'
Dr. Eliza Humphreys, a pediatrician and parenting coach based in Wenham, also doesn't use the term 'gentle parenting' for her work because it is often misunderstood, she says, but does embrace many of its core values. Much of her work is about giving clients a chance to understand the intergenerational patterns in their parenting.
Working to change these patterns is a process that can make parents better at connecting with their children and, in the best cases, can also improve their own mental well-being.
Natalie Bowers, 50, a client of Humphreys who also lives in Wenham, says the process of rooting out embedded parenting instincts and replacing them with kinder and more connected approaches has been transformative. As her twins, now 13, went through their tween years, Bowers found herself balancing between a desire to micromanage their lives and feeling rejected when they pushed back. So she has been learning to look beyond her children's behavior and determine the emotional needs driving it, rather than reacting instinctively to her own sense of hurt — a key component of gentle parenting philosophy.
'Honestly, it is an exercise in humility and loss of ego,' she says. 'It is quite possibly one of the hardest, most rewarding objectives I have undertaken in my life. Out of the love we have for our children, we are given the opportunity to be our best selves.'
As for Fetzer, she's still not immune to waves of guilt when she struggles to get her kids to bed, only to see an influencer gentle parent their way to a peacefully sleeping child. 'In the script, your child is like, 'That makes a lot of sense.' But my kids, they just never really went along with the script.' And sometimes she just needs to get out the door without interrogating the emotional ramifications of wearing mittens. But she has found herself a middle ground approach to child-rearing that is informed by the gentle parenting principles she first learned about years ago, yet accommodates her real life as a mother of three.
'Social media makes it really hard sometimes,' Fetzer says, 'but I definitely feel at peace with what we have picked for our family that works.'
Sarah Shemkus is a frequent contributor to the Globe Magazine. Send comments to [e-mail].