A parenting expert has taken to TikTok to defend gentle parenting – and his argument is pretty compelling.
Gabriel Hannans, author of This is Parenting: Demystifying Parenthood, has responded to someone on the app who suggested “gentle parenting is for gentle kids”.
Hannans, whose TikTok username is @the_indomitable_blackman, said he’s been slapped, spat on and bitten by children in his time working with them in schools, but he still uses gentle parenting “for everything”.
“I promise gentle parenting works,” he said in the video, which has been viewed more than 1.9 million times. So why is that?
Gentle parenting is composed of four main elements, according to Verywell Family, these include: empathy, respect, understanding, and boundaries. This parenting style focuses on being compassionate while also enforcing consistent boundaries.
It’s sometimes confused with permissive parenting. These parents are more lenient in their approach and take on more of a friend role than a parent role.
“I use it [gentle parenting] differently than a lot of people. I’m trying to tell you it’s not the old ‘oh little Billy, stop. Don’t do that.’ No, that’s not what it is,” said Hannans.
Instead, he gave an example of what he’d say to a child who was misbehaving using the gentle parenting approach: “Hey, now I already told you like two times that that’s not what we’re doing. So we’re doing this now. This is off limits, you’re not doing that no more. Come sit your butt over here.”
He explained: “It’s not about acting gentle ... it’s recognising that you have boundaries and you can be respectful with talking with somebody; but you’re also effectively communicating, you’re effectively establishing boundaries, you’re not letting kids cross that boundary.”
He said gentle parenting is teaching children why they shouldn’t do the things that they want to “impulsively do” and concluded that he’s used it with more than 30 children and it’s worked every time.
Lots of people in the comments agreed that gentle parenting is worth it. “Gentle parenting creates gentle kids. It’s work just like every other aspect of parenting. You gotta put in the work,” said one user.
Others were keen to convey that gentle parenting doesn’t mean passive or permissive parenting, either.
One commenter wrote: “Gentle parenting is not permissive parenting. It’s just treating kids with respect, and like a tiny human – not tiny adult.”
Another said: “I think we need to rename gentle parenting to emotionally intelligent parenting or something because these critics take that word and run with it.”