What is gentle parenting?
What is gentle, parenting?
Gentle parenting is about…
Recognizing your child as an individual
Responding to their needs.
Understanding your child
Empathizing with your child
Showing them respect
Setting boundaries
Old School vs. Gentle Parenting
Old School demands respect
Let's talk about old school parenting rules, like, the way that our parents were raised even.
The focus was on the parent control. What the parents said, you did. Respect was about how the child was expected to behave in a way that was acceptable to the society that they're living in.
"We wear nylons to church." There were a lot of these strict expectations. "This is just the way we act as a society." And that is how you earn respect. You just fell in line, which is hard.
If you didn't behave you were pressured into adjusting your behavior, or you were punished.
The idea was you need to respect your parents. Whatever your parents say. You don't talk back, you just do it.
And can you imagine if you have an unhealthy parent? They would say something that was completely off base. But because they were the parent, it's like the blind leading the blind here. They were just demanding respect. And so, these kids had no way of doing anything different until they were free of their parents. I mean, yikes nightmare!
Gentle Parenting is about Mutual Respect
Gentle parenting is about connection, communication consistency, patience, and mutual respect. So sometimes behavior is going to continue on longer because the idea isn't just to stop it. It's to understand it. It's to help the child, learn new skills, is to be consistent with them and help them. When challenging behavior comes up we do set a boundary, that this behavior is not okay, but we can get your need met in a different way. And that takes connection, patience, and mutual respect. And so, the reason why sometimes we default back to the old ways is that it gets that behavior stopped sooner at the expense of the relationship at the expense of emotional health.
The underlying belief here is that the more connected you are to your child, the more likely they'll want to behave in a way that pleases you but I just want to preface it with this. That doesn't mean you're creating people pleasers. It means that you're creating a relationship.
EXAMPLE: If you are like, hey, Sammy my good friend, I haven't seen you forever. I love you so much. We have so much fun, we talk all the time on Marco Polo. Let's get together for lunch and you're like, oh my goodness. I would be so fun. Let's get together. We have a relationship.
Versus your other friend who's not really your friend, who says mean things all the time who just asked you to do stuff. And they say, hey, let's go to lunch next week and you're like, how can I get out of this? The first friend, you have a relationship with, you have a connection to so you're more likely to want to do something with them or even for them. Whatever that looks like, but another friend who just orders you around or doesn't treat you with respect, you're going to try to avoid that relationship.
It's not a people-pleasing situation. It's an actual relationship. And when you have a relationship with somebody, you're going to show up for them and they're going to show up for you and it's reciprocal and it's beautiful.
Good communication and gentle consistency with boundaries all help build that vital connection.
Basic Practices of Gentle Parenting
So here are some basic practices of gentle parenting.
EMPATHY
Number one is empathy. Empathy is such a key piece to what is missing in the world right now. If we were a lot more empathetic, we understood empathy if we could relate to somebody's feelings. Then the world would be a much safer, kind, and loving place. And so let's start by doing it in our home. Show up to our kids with empathy when they have a problem.
Don't judge it, just be there with them, understand that, that is a real feeling for them. Stay curious about the behaviors to curious about the feelings, be there with them, emotionally.
That doesn't mean you have to agree with their emotions. You can just understand they feel that way. "I know it's hard" is empathizing with them. You're also not changing the boundary because they cried.
RESPECT
Number two is respect. Respect means treating your child the way you want to be treated. Talk to them the way you would want somebody to talk to you. Instead of your child telling your child "Be quiet! Stop talking: when they interrupt the chat you're having with a friend at the grocery store, explain to them: "Hey, just a minute. Can you please put 3 bottles of ketchup in the cart and I'll talk to you when I'm done"
UNDERSTAND THE DEVELOPMENT OF YOUR CHILD
Understanding is important because there are age-appropriate expectations that we have for our kids and sometimes we because our kids are mature in other ways, we expect them to act in a way that's beyond their developmental years. Sometimes, we expect them to act like little adults, and guess what, their brains aren't even fully developed. So some of them have already started having children. That was me. My brain isn't fully developed until like a year after I had my first kid! *GASP* WE can't expect our five-year-old to think logically in a way that's hard for many adults to do.
When big behaviors come up, it's not just because they want to throw a tantrum because they enjoy screaming off the top of their lungs and being so upset that they want to just cough and hack and feel horrible inside. No, they are not behaving because they have missing skills because they don't have a better way to ask because they don't have the skills to be able to regulate their body. So if we can come to them in a way of support, and offer support and be there for them in their struggles, then it's just such a beautiful supportive, relationship.
BOUNDARIES
The last one is boundaries. Boundaries, make your child feel safe. They know what to expect and what is expected of them. Don't be afraid to set boundaries with your child. But do remember that the fewer rules that you have, the easier you'll find it to be consistent. Think of your boundaries as rules that teach your child, a better way of doing things.
Like, for example, we go to sleep early instead of watching movie after movie, so that we can wake up in time for school without rushing. Like that's just a boundary that you're setting to help them learn.
Rewards and Punishments
What about rewards and punishments? Rewards and punishments aren't a focus of gentle parenting because it teaches a child to behave in a specific way in order to get a prize or avoid an unpleasant consequence. Gentle parenting aims to motivate the child from the inside and not, just go after the carrot at the end of the stick.
Sometimes we do use rewards. Sometimes we use rewards as a way to celebrate or praise, but using reward or threatening punishment to try to get behavior met every time is not gentle parenting.
Benefits of Gentle Parenting
Let's talk about the benefits of gentle parenting. First of all, positive bonding emotional health, happy independent, and resilient adults, and positive social skills.
Interacting with your child gently builds millions of neural connections in their brain. And this repetition of these positive interactions lays down the neural pathways that form the basis for future relationships.
When these connections happen with your kids and they see you respond to their needs, they see you respond empathetically, neural pathways and connections are being made in the brain. You're literally writing the story, the hard drive for them to grow up with. So even if your hard drive is wired, a different way, and you're having to rewire that takes a lot of work. If you're showing up for your kid like this, you are forming that path for future relationships, future learning, future logic, and this is long-term stuff.
Also, imitation is so important. It's an important learning mechanism for these kids. So when we model empathy, when we can show our kids, that we show up empathetically for them, that we show up with respect for them that we understand their behavior as a need, we're laying the foundation of our child's future positive, social skills.
So you're PERFECT?
NO! So sometimes I'm gonna lose my cool, but the cool thing about gentle parenting is it's not perfect parenting. It's that when a mistake happens, when you lose your cool, when you're triggered, when something you react, instead of responding, you then go to your child and say I messed up. I'm sorry. You model making amends showing them what it's like to repair the relationship and that in and of itself is the beauty of gentle parenting, emotionally healthy parenting.
You're not acting like you're perfect. You're not acting like, "oh you respect me, no matter what you respect me, even if I throw a tantrum" NO! If you throw a tantrum back you make it right with that child and you repair that relationship.
Long story short, I've been doing this parenting style since my kids were little and so they see it. They see it every single day and I see my kids do it in their play. I see my kids do it to each other. So like my son was sick. The other day and Maelie went in. How you doing today Char? How are you feeling? *empathy*
Difficulties of Gentle Parenting
So there are some difficulties with gentle parenting that I don't want to just brush over because it is hard. It's hard. And that's why a lot of people aren't doing it because it requires self-discipline. It requires you to be a role model to model empathy, respect, understanding, and communication, which can be very hard if we weren't raised with a model in this. Also, it requires us to be "proactive instead of reactive."
All of that requires re-parenting yourself. And so there are ways that you can reparent yourself. I try to bring in guest experts that kind of talk like my first couple of guests. Experts in my membership talked about self-regulation for adults. For myself, I go to therapy, conferences, courses, coaching, retreats.. . There are so many resources out there.
We have to put in the time and the work for our own emotional health. We can't just be raised a certain way, and then jump into this new world of gentle parenting. When we have all of these triggers and all of these shadows and all of these things that we grew up with hardwired into our system. So if we want to change the story, we also have to be working on our inner self.
Volcano Analogy
Back to the Volcano: I just want to reiterate my volcano analogy. A lot of times we focus on the behavior. We focus on the eruption and the challenging behavior that we see at the top of the volcano. What's coming out of the blast, the ashes, the fire, whatever is in its path.
We focus on the hitting, the Tantrums, The Whining. But what's really going on inside of us? Maybe it's our outbursts or our child. Their tantrum is about a lot of different things: Missing skills, big emotions, their temperament, their cognitive development, where they're at academically, their biology. That's part of who they are. Also, maybe it's because they got bumped. And then this other thing happened and then this other thing happened and RUN! Their lava begins to rise and rise.
Instead of focusing on that eruption in gentle parenting and emotionally healthy parenting and everything that I teach the idea is to focus on understanding, what is going on for the child: What your individual child needs. Don't forget what every other volcano's doing. What does your child's volcano doing? What is your personal volcano doing? How can we bring their lava down? How can we help them? Understand them empathize with them set boundaries. And really create this emotionally healthy volcano that sometimes does have some outbursts, but we know how to respond to those in a way that doesn't put gasoline on the fire.