Kate Emery: Should we praise gentle parenting or bury it?

West Australian

2 days ago

Bluey may have taken home the Logie for best children's program on Sunday but is the country's favourite blue heeler also being measured up for a puppy-sized casket?
This is not a column about the end for Australia's most popular export since cask wine.
It's about whether the last rites are being read for gentle parenting: a controversial parenting style beloved by millennials and embodied by Bluey's idealised canine parents.
The Wall Street Journal has been getting a lot of attention for an article claiming gentle parenting is being replaced by 'f..k around and find out' parenting, with an emphasis on letting kids experience natural consequences.
Meanwhile, one study suggests children who experience 'authoritarian parenting' do better academically in primary school, while a Fox News host interrupted a segment on gentle parenting to urge parents to spank their kids.
On TikTok, a stranger's rant claiming 'we can tell if you gentle parent your kids' has gone viral. She said: 'They throw s..t and then you're like: 'Wow, you're really big on your feelings right now, Sage.' You know what? So was Ted Bundy.''
And, while Bluey has not ended, the show is on hiatus ahead of a planned movie.
All of which adds up to a vibe that the gentle parenting backlash may be further advanced than we think.
Those who would celebrate the end of gentle parenting, with its focus on validating kids' emotions, are probably the same people who erroneously believe gentle parenting is shorthand for letting a kid run amok under the guise of 'expressing themselves'.
If you, as a parent, think Tommy's right to express himself by getting his willy out at his local cafe is more important than my desire to enjoy my morning coffee free from a strange child's genitalia, you are not gentle parenting: you are being an arsehole.
Gentle parenting's reputation is done no favours by an internet full of idiots who insist on misunderstanding the word 'no' as a hate crime. Fall down the wrong Instagram hole and you'll find Instaparents offering tips for resolving conflict that amount to encouraging parents to calmly respond 'Mummy can tell you're not happy right now' while their child repeatedly hits them in the head with a piece of plastic Paw Patrol merch.
You know else is not happy in this scenario? Mummy's neurologist.
The reality is that every generation has a dominant parenting style, which tends to be a reaction to the way that that generation was raised. And while sensible advice and nuance is at the heart of all good parenting, sensible advice and nuance doesn't always get the clicks, the followers and the book sales (not unless your name is Maggie Dent, anyway).
So-called FAFO parenting is all about a backlash to the perceived participation trophy style of parenting: an approach that lets kids fail or fall in the hope they will learn a lesson.
Just as the rise of 'Dr Spock' parenting in the 1950s was blamed for the youth-led counterculture rebellion of the 1960s, so too does 'gentle parenting' get blamed for every perceived failure of generation alpha, from being 'over-diagnosed' with neurodivergence to a weakness for $3 babycinos.
At the heart of every skirmish in the parenting wars is one truth: every generation thinks they can do a better job than their parents.
Unfortunately every generation also seems to believe in the existence of a parenting formula which, if correctly applied, will churn out happy, clever, well-adjusted kids in the same way that Henry Ford's application of the moving assembly line to automobile production in the early 20th century so reliably churned out Model T Fords.
This is a mistake. Because while anyone can be a good parent for seven minutes — the length of a Bluey episode — for the other 23 hours and 53 minutes of the day every parent is just doing their best while, to stretch a metaphor, a series of probably-crucial parts whizz past them on the assembly line.
The idea that a perfect parenting style exists is the greatest myth out there.
The reality? We are all just out here f..king around and finding out.