I have a lot to say about gentle parenting in general, and this book in particular. Firstly, the things it gets right: Developing a close, considerate, caring relationship with your child based on mutual respect is probably the primary indicator of whether you will have a successful outcome. Desire for parental attention is frequently the cause of negative behavior. Spending one-on-one time with your child on a regular basis can prevent much of that negative behavior. Children should be treated with respect and not as adversaries. Their behaviors should get the most generous interpretation and least aggressive correction. I’ve read all the parenting books. Literally -- it’s my hobby. There are plenty of people who have great outcomes using more authoritarian methods. And it’s because they aren’t just feeding and clothing their kids and putting them into time out. They genuinely care about their kids, inside and out, and work with them to help them grow into their potential. They are just stricter about boundaries and less indulgent of emotions. If you truly care about your kids they will notice, they will like you, they are more likely to care about what you care about. This book does have some great content. I don’t hate all of it. And there are plenty of other parenting methods (RIE, modern Montessori, Love and Logic) that have super-weird aspects to them, some of which are counterproductive. When you read a parenting book, you are reading someone’s deeply biased opinions, and you need to bring your brain and a shaker of salt. Gentle parenting starts with the assumption that you need to develop a deep connection with your kid, and that you should give them the respect and benefit of the doubt that you’d give yourself or other adults. Try to understand why they are behaving poorly, so you can address the root cause, rather than just reacting to and managing the behavior itself. I want to take a moment and talk about what happens when clinical psychologists write parenting books. Thomas Boyce posits the theory that most kids are dandelions and will do well no matter where they grow. But some kids are orchids. If they don’t get hothouse attention, they will have terrible outcomes.
So far so good.
However, it shortly dives off the deep end, making the parent completely responsible for the emotional world of their children.
Here’s the thing about clinical psychologists like Dr Becky – they only see the orchids. Most of the universe has managed to parent reasonably well for millennia without Gentle Parenting methods. But there are always kids who need a bit more, and those kids – or at least, the ones from middle-class families – are the ones who end up in the psychologist’s office. And those are the kids and families upon whom Dr Becky and her ilk base their theories.
What am I saying? There are definitely kids who may benefit from this kind of intensive parenting. But they are the minority. So take a deep breath. You’re probably doing fine.
Okay, now let’s move on to what Dr Becky and Co definitely get wrong.
Gentle Parenting is the azimuth of helicopter parenting. Helicopter parents micromanage what their kids eat, how they study, who they hang out with, and what they do in their spare time. The goal is to optimize the outcome for your child. But GP takes it one step further and says the parent can also optimize the emotional landscape of the child.
The rationale behind this is pseudoscientific babble. Kids cannot regulate their emotions well (fact). Therefore, you need to help them (okay). And if you don’t do it the right way, the kid will grow up emotionally unhealthy and be unable to have functional adult relationships (whaaaat…?!).
I’m not making it up, she says this on pages 45, 76, 92, and 99 and more. It’s coercive pseudoscience to frighten parents into following her. Everyone who is alive is a little bit messed up and everyone can blame their parents for it if they choose. So it’s not a huge jump to believe that if you can do better than your parents you can have perfectly well-adjusted kids. Unfortunately, this is just not true. Humans are flawed. Existence is flawed. Life is imperfect. Parenting your child's emotions may benefit the child in some areas, but will create different, unanticipated imperfections elsewhere.
Let’s look at the most wackadoodle example Dr Becky gives. She says that if your child observes anything that you think is a Big Deal, you should verbalize it to reinforce that it happened. For example, if you argue with your spouse, and your kid overhears, you should say “Mommy and Daddy used loud voices.” You don’t need to reassure them or interpret. You just need to confirm what they heard. If you don’t do this, she says, your child will doubt what they saw, grow up unable to trust their own interpretations of reality, and therefore be unable to stand up to peers and do what’s right (p99).
K people. First off, I would love to see the studies on who stands up to their peers. I’m sure they exist. However, I will wager that not a single one of the people who excel at resisting peer pressure had parents who clarified the obvious to them. Why? Because it’s a weirdo thing to do and nobody would do it unless Dr Becky told them to.
Which brings us to the most conceited point of all. Gentle Parenting gurus say that you need to do this stuff so your child grows up to be emotionally healthy. None of this stuff is intuitive, and it has no track record outside their highly specific clinical experience. Just think about it a minute: they’re saying that none of the trillion or so humans who have existed on planet earth thus far have been emotionally healthy. However, starting NOW, there will be emotionally healthy people, if you follow this book. Pretty amazing, isn’t it? After 10,000 years of human existence, God finally sent a prophet to teach us how to raise kids right, and that prophet is Dr Becky.
I could give examples all day of where Dr Becky and her colleagues push practices that will surely backfire. But I’m going to pick just one because this is a GoodReads review, not a substack essay.
Dr Becky gives the example of a kid who is reluctant to go in to a birthday party.
The traditional parenting way is to push the kid in while saying “It’s fine! It’s a birthday party! You’ll have fun! See you in an hour,” and leave.
If you do this, Dr Becky says, your child will doubt their emotional reactions. They will grow up unable to trust their intuition about danger. And they will surely end up in bad relationships, being abused, because they don’t trust themselves to assess situations.
To prevent this, you should reflect and validate their emotions until they feel ready to go in. And if they never do? Well, that’s fine. That means they have self-confidence and won’t grow up to blindly follow their friends and do whatever everyone else is doing (page 99).
K, well I’m a parent of three. Here’s how this would go down with my fearful middle kid. He doesn’t want to go in to the birthday party. I validate and reflect his emotions. Now he is convinced that it's scary, since I’m not providing guidance that it’s not. He continues to refuse to go in.
I had plans to run errands, so I end up taking him along. As soon as he has enough distance to see the situation objectively, he is full of regrets and has a meltdown. Instead of running my errands, I’m now once again validating and reflecting and sitting with him in his big feelings.
I’m feeling frustrated, but Dr Becky says I should do self-care. She doesn’t mean bundle him along sobbing in the supermarket wagon, because that would be minimizing his feelings which are Big and Valid. She means I should take deep breaths and validate to myself that this is hard but worth doing, as I watch my entire Sunday get screwed up (p108).
However, if I do have a meltdown myself, I should regroup with my child later. We need to debrief the birthday thing, and then do a Repair ceremony where I apologize for being upset. We have now spent at least 90 minutes of the day just hashing over our emotions related to this birthday party, plus the emotional residue of all the unpleasantness has tainted the entire day.
I suspect this method is going to produce kids who spend way too much time analyzing their inner world, and who expect the outer world to revolve around their findings. (Edit: there is now preliminary evidence that kids taught to navel-gaze like this become more anxious and *less* functional.)
Here’s how it would go if we did it the traditional way: My child is scared of this new situation. He looks to me, the adult, for guidance on how to handle it. I tell him it’s a birthday party. It’s safe. He will have fun. *Maybe* I validate that new situations are frightening. But feelings don’t always match reality.
He is still reluctant. Maybe I offer him the choice to stay or go. But with adult prescience, I probably give him a hug and leave. He is resentful at first, but ends up enjoying himself. He learns that while fear is Real and Big, it is not always Valid. He learns that fear can hold you back from opportunities. Moreover, he learns that his parent can and will provide solid guidance. I get my errands done. He has fun. Everyone has a good day. My child is now slightly more resilient.
Do you know what's *really* interesting? When it comes to daycare drop-off, Dr Becky does it my way. The parent is supposed to briefly reassure, promise to return, and then GO. Suddenly we aren't worried about bodily autonomy, consent, and contradicting their reality. We don't worry about them having to process their emotions without us. I find it interesting that daycare drop-off is a boundary that no GP guru violates. (Janet Lansbury is equally cool about leaving your kid screaming in the classroom.)
Here's another example. Not of something that I think is necessarily wrong, but something that is different, with repercussions. Dr Becky rails against sticker charts multiple times in her book. I find it odd, because sticker charts are for “start behaviors” (things you want your kid to do) while most of her book addresses “stop behaviors” (things you want your kid to stop doing). (This terminology is from "1-2-3 Magic.")
If your child has no intrinsic motivation to complete something, you can either bully them (authoritarian parenting), or you can provide extrinsic motivation (authoritative parenting), or you let them skip it (permissive parenting).
The sticker chart is the easiest form of extrinsic motivation that a parent can provide. It is promoted by parenting methods that value the parents' time and mental well-being.
The GP method is, of course, much more labor intensive. A gentle parent must jolly the kid along, making it fun with games and songs (which need to change regularly as they become old and boring). In the GP method, the parent is both the sticker and the prize. This is cohesive with the view that everything needs to be about relationship-building. It also reflects the belief that your children cannot handle anything emotionally difficult without help. They are simply not expected to grit their teeth and power through on their own.
Gentle Parenting is not completely new. "How to Talk So Kids Will Listen" was published in 1999 and suggests treating kids with respect and consideration. (I think it's a great book -- highly recommend). "Kids, Parents, Power Struggles" by Kurcinka was published in 2001. However, the primary thrust of Kurcinka was to develop a close relationship with your child, NOT that you are responsible for managing their emotions.
Kurcinka, for example, says if your kid doesn’t want to set the table, you do a song-and-dance about it. (Notably, in her example the song-and-dance didn’t help anyway and the kid ran to her room. So not only did the parent have to set the table, they didn’t get to prep the food either because they spent 15 minutes on a futile bonding exercise.) However, Kurcinka doesn't suggest that you follow your child to their room (lest they, God forbid, be "alone in their feelings") or debrief later to analyze their feelings.
To be fair, I do think the parent should debrief this situation with the kid and talk about how to avoid it in the future, preferably with less effort from the parent. This is for the parent's benefit. However, I also think the debrief should include pointing out to the child that their behavior affected other people. This little detail is blatantly missing from the pages of all Gentle Parenting books. Dr Becky seems to believe that placing value on how others are affected by your behavior will turn your child into a doormat. While it's important for kids to have boundaries, it's also important to consider other people. That's necessary for our crowded society to function.
"The Whole Brain Child" and "Good Inside" add a peculiar emotional effort to the parental burden. I am not convinced that children will really appreciate this, long-term, or that it will create children who are socially aware. It will be very interesting to see what kind of parenting books get written by the kids who are raised with Dr Becky’s method.
