Gentle Parenting F*cks Me Up
Welcome back to the deep end. I’m your host, Brianna Watson. In today’s episode, I am going to talk about our experience with gentle parenting and how it has changed our lives.
I’m gonna go ahead and say it. Gentle parenting fucks me up. In more ways than one. I have a love hate relationship with this style of parenting because it gets into your psyche and forces you to do some deep, internal soul searching. It also forces you to re-parent yourself which is hard enough in itself and I’ll get into that. However, as challenging as this style of parenting has been for us, I do believe it’s the only way to go – at least for me and my kids. Over the past two years, we have researched and practiced gentle parenting with our son and man is it HARD. The reason I gravitated and resorted to gentle parenting is because 1. Time outs and punishments were not working. They seemed to do more harm than good. And 2. I want my kids to grow up with emotional intelligence and to know that all of their emotions are OK to have. I want them to know how to process their emotions and regulate their emotions in a very healthy way.
So, In this episode, I’m going to get into what exactly gentle parenting is, why it’s such a popular parenting style these days, touch quickly on the science and research behind it, share the personal struggles we’ve had with it, and most importantly, talk about how it has worked wonders for us and our son. I will share many examples of our gentle parenting strategies throughout this episode.
So what WTF is gentle parenting and why does everyone seem to be talking about it these days? According to VeryWellFamily.com, gentle parenting is defined as the following – “an evidence-based approach to raising happy, confident children. This parenting style is composed of four main elements: empathy, respect, understanding, and boundaries. Gentle parenting focuses on fostering the qualities you want in your child by being compassionate and enforcing consistent boundaries. Unlike some more lenient parenting methods, gentle parenting also encourages discipline, but in an age-appropriate way. Discipline methods focus on teaching valuable life lessons rather than focusing on punishments.
So to put it more simply, it’s a way of parenting where we promote willingness, choices, acceptance, and emotion regulation through positivity and patience as opposed to getting what we want them to do through demands, punishments, strict rules, and fear. Gentle parenting allows the child to lead in most situations while the parent creates the boundaries that should not be crossed AND the parent remains cool, calm, and collected when they ARE crossed. Easier said than done, I know.
I will give you some of our real life examples in a bit but I did want to take a moment to briefly review the science behind this parenting style. When you begin to look into gentle styles of parenting, you will hear a lot about the pre-frontal cortex which is the part of the brain that is responsible for reasoning, problem solving, comprehension, impulse control, creativity and perseverance. And get this – the pre-frontal cortex isn’t fully developed for any of us until we are 25 years old. So take your struggling toddler and imagine their little brains – the part that is responsible for regulating their emotions and impulses is basically non-existent. Knowing this always bring me back to one of the most helpful tips when it comes to parenting a small child and write this down. Remember this. They’re not giving you a hard time, they’re having a hard time. Let me repeat that. They’re not giving you a hard time, they’re having a hard time. As much as you may not want to believe that – every time your child is pissing you off or pushing your buttons, they’re not giving you a hard time. They are having a hard time… and usually, the only way they know how to deal with the hard time they are experiencing is by yelling, hitting, lashing out, screaming, crying, running away, and all of the other behaviors you wish they didn’t exhibit. So the next time you are feeling so angry and so upset with something your child did, always go back to the science of brain development and child development. There are reasons they act the way they do and we cannot expect them to behave the same way we adults would in certain situations. However, through gentle parenting, you can teach them so many tools, techniques, and ways to handle and cope with their emotions. The key to doing this is by being patient, loving, understanding and cool, calm and collected as often as you can – even mid tantrum. Another key is to re-visit the difficult situation with your toddler later on in the day once they have cooled down.
So, let’s take hitting as an example. Our son can get REALLY mad and frustrated for a number of different reasons – his block tower fell down, I poured his syrup on his waffles when he wasn’t looking, his sister grabbed a toy out of his hand. Because their little brains cannot process situations and emotions the way ours can, they WILL hit as a result. It’s bound to happen. Your child is going to hit someone at some point during his or her childhood. So, before gentle parenting and when he was a tiny bit younger, his tower would fall, he would flip out, maybe hit us, and we would put him in the time out corner and scold him. This resulted in him screaming, yelling and crying and trying to hit us even more. Imagine being a small child and having this large adult drag you into a corner and scold you to your face when you can’t even process how you’re feeling and why. It took us a few times to mess up like this before we realized that the way we were managing his behaviors wasn’t working. And to be honest, we made even more mistakes after that and we continue to make mistakes. Gentle parenting is not easy. We lose our cool sometimes but we are quickly able to get back on track afterward. So let’s continue with the hitting scenario so I can paint a picture of what gentle parenting looks like for us:
Our son’s tower falls. He screams and yells and tries to hit whoever is closest to him. The first thing I do is physically get down to his level so we are eye to eye. I make sure I have a look of empathy on my face that shows him that I understand he is having a hard time. I make sure my voice sounds calm and cool and I say the following, “Your tower fell and that made you so upset. It’s OK to feel mad and upset when your tower falls down. it’s not OK to hit people.” After saying that maybe he would continue to hit. Depending on how hard he was hitting or how much it hurt, I would either hold his hands down and say, “Your tower fell and that made you so upset. It’s OK to feel mad right now but it’s not OK to hit people. I am going to hold your hands down now so no one gets hurt.” Sometimes, I continue to repeat this script over and over until the behavior stops. Now, the behavior stops fairly quickly since we have been practicing this for a while but there was a time where it was really really hard to get him to stop doing certain things.
The next and probably most important thing I do is let him cool down, let him experience his emotions and then once he’s totally and completely calmed down from that situation, I would sit with him and re-visit it. I would say, “Remember earlier when your tower fell down? And he’ll say “ya…” and I’ll say, “that made you feel mad and frustrated, didn’t it?” and he’ll say “Ya…” and I’ll say, “It’s OK to feel mad and frustrated at times but it’s not OK to hit people when you are feeling that way. What do you think you could do next time you get so mad that you feel like hitting?” And he will say, “I could punch a pillow or stomp my feet or yell, “I’m mad!” He will list the different coping mechanisms we have talked about. He hasn’t hit us the way he used to in a long time. When he is having a really hard time and he decides not to hit, I will praise him later on and say, “Remember earlier when you got so mad that your tower fell down? I noticed that you didn’t hit mom or dad and you decided to punch a pillow instead. Thank you for doing that.” Now, when he gets mad he will even say, “See, mom? I got mad and didn’t hit.” And again I will praise him. This progress DID NOT happen overnight and I don’t want any of you to get that impression. This takes tons and tons of practice and tons and tons of work and tons and tons of repetition and tons and tons of patience. It also takes tons of mistakes and learning from your mistakes. This is where you need to be easy on yourself as a parent and tell yourself that you are trying your best. Your child is not going to respond positively to gentle parenting right away. You have to keep trying so they keep hearing you say the same things over and over again.
Let’s take another one of our real life situations.
Back when he used to take naps, there were days where he didn’t want to take one even though he desperately needed it. He would refuse and sometimes cry about it. If I threatened him during this time or forced him to take a nap without validating his emotions, it wouldn’t have ended well. So this is how that situation looked instead…
I would set a timer for 5 minutes and say, when this timer goes off, it’s time to head up for a nap. I would let him push the start button for the timer. We would play until it went off. When it went off, I would then ask him which one of his toys he wanted to bring up to bed. Giving him some control in this situation was key. When we got upstairs, I would give him a little more control and say, do you want to wear your dino jammies or your paw patrol jammies? He would usually make a quick decision. Once he was lying in his bed, I would ask him what he wanted to do when his nap was over and I would usually give him choices like, we can go to the park or go play on the swingset. After he would make a choice, I would say, I can’t wait to do that with you after your nap. Have a good sleep. I’ll see you when you wake up. He would tuck in his little stuffed elephant and I would tuck him in and he would go to sleep. When he woke up, I would make sure we did the activity he said he wanted to do before he went down for his nap.
If he kicked and screamed and stalled and pouted and refused to nap, I would say something like, “It’s nap time and that’s making you upset because you want to keep playing. It’s ok to feel upset about that. We’re going up for your nap now. What would you like to do with mom when you wake up? In these situations, I validate his emotions and keep the boundary. No matter how he reacted, he was not getting out of nap time.
One of the most difficult things about gentle parenting is allowing your child to express themselves and then listening to the screaming, yelling, or crying. As a parent, you will quickly begin to realize what irks you and gets under your skin. Maybe you can’t stand how loud they scream when it’s time to leave the park. Maybe you can’t stand the way they talk back to you. Maybe you can’t stand it when they’re being too hyper. There are so many triggers and each parent will react differently to certain behaviors based on what triggers the individual parent. For example, my husband is really triggered by the high energy and the noise when the kids get super hyper whereas that isn’t really a trigger for me. I get triggered when the emotions are HUGE and there’s an outburst about something I think should not be a big deal. That doesn’t bother my husband as much.
And this is where it gets juicy and tricky but the secret sauce lies within the next thing I’m about to say…
What I have learned through gentle parenting and by recognizing my triggers is that the reason gentle parenting is SO HARD is because while you are trying to effectively parent your child, you are also trying to re-parent yourself. What? Let’s face it. No one’s parents are perfect and you and I are not going to be perfect parents. Parents mess up all the time and we are going to mess up a lot without even realizing it. Up until the last 10 years or so, the most popular forms of parenting consisted of time-outs, punishments, and scolding children when their emotions and behaviors seemed unacceptable. Up until recently, the expectations of children were SO HIGH – sit still, be polite, stop crying, stop wiggling in your seat, eat everything on your plate, do what I tell you, if you do that again I’ll wash your mouth out with soap or spank you, go to your room, be quiet.
Because of these old school parenting styles, you might be someone who grew up in a house where your emotions, feelings and behaviors were not validated or accepted. Maybe you were scolded when you yelled, cried or acted out. Maybe your parents didn’t realize that you weren’t giving them a hard time, you were having a hard time. Maybe no one ever hugged you and said, “It’s ok to be mad, I still love you even when you’re upset with me.” And we can’t blame our parents either. They were hopefully doing the best they could with what they had. But their parents might have screwed up somewhere along the way too. What our parents and their parents didn’t have was the evidence, science, and knowledge people have now around child development and parenting styles. And now that that evidence is out there, we can’t ignore it.
We can’t ignore the fact that children deserve to have gentle parents who allow them to feel every single emotion that goes through their little bodies. They deserve to have parents who will empathize with them as often as possible even during the craziest of tantrums. And they deserve to have parents who are going to do the internal work on themselves in order to be the best parents they can possibly be.
So the next time you are feeling extremely mad or upset at your kid or they are really getting on your nerves, take the time to do some deep soul searching in order to figure out why this specific behavior seems to get on your nerves so much. Most likely, it’s a trigger for you due to a past trauma or due to a need that was never met for you as a child. You might end up finding yourself saying something like, “I can’t stand it when they don’t sit still and eat everything on their plates. If I ever did that as a kid, I’d get slapped.” This triggers you because you weren’t allowed to wiggle at the dinner table and you couldn’t leave the table until every morsel was gone – which FYI never taught you how to effectively pay attention to your own body in order to decide whether your belly was full or not. Taking the time to understand your own triggers in order to re-parent yourself will be a game changer for you when it comes to gentle parenting.
Also, just know and understand that this is shit is hard. Parenting is going to be one of the hardest things you will ever do in your life. But, if you don’t put in the work on yourself and learn how to be a gentle parent, parenting is going to be a lot harder for you. Yelling at your kids all the time and telling them to “stop,” “don’t do that,” “listen to me,” won’t get you anywhere and it’s going to cause more frustration in the long run.
At first, gentle parenting might make you feel like a softy, or a wuss or a pushover or might make you feel like you’re making your kid soft in a hard world and that they won’t be prepared for how harsh the world can be. But gentle parenting does the exact opposite – it teaches them how to exist in this world in the healthiest way possible. It teaches them how to know and understand themselves and their own emotions. It teaches them love, respect, patience, empathy and so much more. It teaches them how to not take it personally when the world or people around them are having big, difficult emotions. Trust me when I say gentle parenting works. And when it starts to work, it’s like magic. But again, the results won’t happen overnight. It takes research, practice, and patience. Once this style of parenting has become a habit (for you AND your spouse because you both need to be on the same page with this), your child is going to understand what the rules are now. Of course they’re still going to be kids and they’re still going to have big emotions and undesirable behaviors but they will get easier to manage, tantrums won’t last as long, and you will start to feel more confident in your role as a mother, father, or guardian.
Let’s go over one more real life example before I wrap this up and leave you with the best advice I can give you:
Let’s take a look at the end of the day for us. I don’t care who you are or who your kids are – the end of the day is SO HARD. Kids are overtired, over stimulated, hungry, bored, want attention, are feeling super hyper, and cannot regulate their emotions as effectively as they can during the day. The end of the day is when we have to try our hardest at gentle parenting because we are all tired, we’ve all lost our patience and we are all ready for the day to quiet down and come to an end. SO, here’s the scene:
We come in from playing outside and my son is WIRED. He’s overtired and hungry and cannot communicate that to me in the most effective way because most of the time, he’s not even aware that he’s feeling that way. So, what I see is a hyperactive kid who is running around the downstairs, grabbing stuff off of the counters trying to get attention and is super moody because he’s starting to get hangry. In the past, I would say, “Stop acting like this. You’re being way too hyper right now. You need to calm down.” And of course, that didn’t help whatsoever. If anything, it was giving him the attention he was looking for. When they want attention, they don’t care if it’s negative attention or positive attention. Any attention is good in their eyes. So I would get angry, impatient, and short with him. Sometimes I would even try to ignore the behavior and ignoring can be just as harmful as yelling.
So now, this is what the end of the day might look like for us (and again – I’m not always the best at staying cool calm and collected but I have come a long way). So now, I will say,
“It’s the end of the day and you’re feeling tired and hungry. It’s OK to be hyper and have a lot of energy. It’s not OK to grab stuff off the counter tops and run around the house being destructive. You can either play with your kinetic sand or read some books. You get to pick. Most of the time he will make a decision and the times he says he doesn’t want to do either thing, then I ask him what he would rather do instead. If he doesn’t pick something, I go back to the two options I offered him and I say those are your two options right now. Once he makes a decision, I will set him up with his activity and say, “Thank you for choosing an activity. I am going to cook dinner now and I can’t wait to play with you again when we’re done eating.”
Then, later on when I am putting him to bed, I will say, remember earlier when we came in from outside and you were feeling super hyper? He’ll say ya…. Then I will say, let’s talk about some things you could do the next time you are feeling that way. It is important to pay attention to your body and how it feels so if you are feeling hungry you can ask mom for something to eat. If you are bored, you can ask mom to set up a game. If you want attention, you can say mom, can you pay attention to me please. You can also just stop and take a big deep breath until you start to feel calm again.
Again, these scripts and the things I say to him all day every day have to be repeated over and over again and they have to be repeated every time you’re trying to manage a behavior.
So before I leave you, let me review some of the key takeaways that have helped us tremendously and then I will direct you to resaources that have also been a game changer for us:
1. The way they are acting and behaving is most likely developmentally appropriate. There’s nothing wrong with your child.
2. Yelling at them and threatening them is not effective and will only cause harm in the long run.
3. Validate their feelings and accept their feelings and emotions but put up strong barriers when it comes to their behaviors. How you feel is OK, how you’re behaving is not ok.
4. Stay cool, calm and collected
5. Be consistent
6. Be on the same page with your spouse and parent together in this way
7. Give your child options and control
8. Teaching moments should not occur mid tantrum
9. Praise them for their good behavior and for their efforts
10. You are going to make so many mistakes but be sure to learn from each one and promise yourself you’ll do better next time.
Some of the most helpful resources and tools for us have been Big Little Feelings gentle parenting program along with their Instagram, gentle parenting tik tok accounts, and other gentle parenting accounts on Instagram. Although gentle parenting is somewhat of a new concept, there are so many books, accounts, resources and tools to learn from. All you need to do is make the commitment to better yourself and your parenting style while being easy on yourself and loving your child unconditionally. I know it’s all easier said than done but putting in the work both internally and with your child when it comes to gentle parenting will change your life.
Thank you for listening if you’ve made it this far. Please leave me a rating and a review and also pass this episode along to your family and friends. Don’t forget to follow me on Facebook and Instagram - info is linked below and I’ll see you guys next week.