Why gentle parenting is proving too rough for many parents

For too many mornings this year, Lauren Eaton Spencer was late for work because of a shirt. Her son Noah, 3, has strong opinions about what to wear — which Spencer wants to honor and support — but she also needs to get to work. When a shirt is finally chosen, a new battleground presents itself: socks.

“Having him fight me about socks for 30 minutes while I’m trying to be nice and gentle,” said Spencer, a preschool teacher from Katy, Texas, “it is just not effective.”

Spencer, 30, believes in the concept of gentle parenting — an approach that emphasizes a parent’s emotional self-regulation and deep respect for a child’s feelings — but in practice, it has proved incongruent with the family’s busy lives.

“This approach did not lead to a decision,” she said about those mornings when picking socks turned into tears. “Just to both of us getting frustrated.”

Therein lies the problem: Gentle parenting is proving to be too hard on many parents. In recent months, parents and experts have started to express doubts about the parenting style’s sustainability.

One study published in July found that over 40% of self-identified gentle parents teeter toward burnout and self-doubt because of the pressure to meet parenting standards. There’s been no shortage of recent analysis and think pieces, with some experts saying it promotes “unrealistic expectations.” The influencers are pushing back, and even celebrities lovingly say the gentle parenting approach offers “no results.”

“It’s aspirational,” Annie Pezalla, a professor of human development and family studies at Macalester College and a co-author of the study, said about gentle parenting practices that work best when a parent is emotionally regulated and unconstrained for time — commodities that parents struggle with the most.

For almost a decade, proponents of the popular gentle parenting style have encouraged parents to validate a child’s feelings, model behavior and collaborate with kids on solutions instead of punishing and correcting. And maybe most challenging — allowing tantrums to happen and teach the lesson later.

Its popularity flourished during the pandemic when isolation and existential despair drove people to seek parenting advice from social media — fertile ground, according to the surgeon general advisory on parental stress, for influencers to spread advice that ultimately can do more harm than good.

Lauren Eaton Spencer and her son.Courtesy Lauren Eaton Spencer

Cracks in the sheen of the gentle movement started appearing in 2022. A wave of think pieces called gentle parenting “too gentle” of a practice that required a parent to turn into a “self-renouncing, perpetually present humanoid.”

The gentle parenting philosophy, said Pezalla, is largely a social media trend with no scholarship to back it up. Its nebulous definition makes it hard to evaluate, according to Emily Oster, an economist turned parenting expert.

With the wave of a figurative white flag, could gentle parenting be moving to the fringes of the parenting zeitgeist alongside helicopter and snowplow parenting — philosophies that encouraged parents to hover over their child and remove all obstacles from their path?

Why don’t your attempts to calm a child end with a connecting hug? Maybe, social media seems to suggest, you can do better.

Culture of comparison

Overall, experts say, an overload of advice is leading parents to think every interaction is hugely consequential to their child’s success. Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, even issued a warning that today’s parents need more support and face “unique stressors.”

But changes in parenting practices across generations are nothing new. One generation’s parenting gospel often becomes another’s pain point. Science-backed advice that told baby boomers to withhold affection led to the popularization of Gen X’s attachment parenting style.

Enter gentle parenting. The movement — popularized by Sarah Ockwell-Smith, a parenting expert and the author of over a dozen gentle parenting books — gained momentum in reaction to behavior-driven advice that advocated for timeouts and other consequences.

In describing the gentle approach, Ockwell-Smith asks parents to channel empathy by asking themselves: “Would I like it if somebody did this to me? If the answer is no, then why would you do it to your child?”

Operationalized on social media (on TikTok, #gentleparenting has amassed over 172,000 posts, plus over 970,000 on Instagram), gentle parenting practices often look like at-home conflict resolution scenes, with an unhurried parent who dispassionately repeats “Hands are not for hitting” even after a child throws a chair at their head.

With the influx of information, experts say parents forget their innate abilities.

“I think parents are losing the true North Star of just their intuition — a deep intuition — of trusting themselves that they know and can do right by their kids,” said Pezalla.

What parenting style could take gentle parenting’s place?

Many have recently turned their attention to lighthouse parenting, a term coined by Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg, a pediatrician and professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Proponents of lighthouse parenting say it’s the middle approach between being overprotective and overindulgent.

Ginsburg created the lighthouse metaphor to remind parents to be a stable force in their children’s lives. Guide and protect your children and use phrases like, “I love you, but the answer is no.”

Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg coined the term lighthouse parenting.Courtesy Center for Parent and Teen

“Lighthouse parenting is not a trend,” said Ginsburg. “It is about what has been proven to work.”

But it’s not a new concept.

Much of lighthouse parenting’s research-based advice is also derived from authoritative parenting. The problem is in the name, said Ginsburg. People often misconstrue authoritative parenting with the authoritarian (“No, because I said so”) parent, so he created a metaphor and penned a forthcoming book to help parents find a balanced way to raise children.

Our goal as parents should be interdependence with our children, said Ginsburg.

“The question is how do we get there?” he said. “We get there by not pushing our kids away and not having them be anxious of losing us. We get there by positioning ourselves as guides, not as controllers.”

Authoritative parenting by any other name

In the 1960s, psychologist Diana Baumrind identified three main parenting styles: authoritarian, permissive and authoritative. A fourth style — neglectful parenting — was later added. Of the four styles, studies show authoritative parenting — which emphasizes a balance of clear expectations, discipline and affection — creates the most confident and academically successful children.

Since then, some experts have attracted a celebrity-like following with catchy new phrases (think popular parenting guru Dr. Becky Kennedy’s mantra, “good inside”) to rebrand and dole out advice based on the authoritative parenting model. Ockwell-Smith said in an email to NBC News that the gentle approach is authoritative parenting. What makes a parent gentle, she wrote in a blog, is the ability to uphold boundaries while a child is upset while offering empathy and comfort.

For parenting experts, the intent is always to educate, but also to capture the attention — and buying power — of parents who want to do right by their kids.

For those parents, adopting a parenting style or identity can feel like an earnest attempt to pave the path to success for their child. According to a 2023 Pew survey, modern parenting is harder now, in part because parents feel pressure to be intensely hands-on with their kids. Over half of parents surveyed said they value more emotional engagement with their kids. This means less yelling and disciplining, and therefore less room for parents to be human and imperfect.

But some parents gravitate toward gentle parenting nonetheless. In theory, gentle parenting has great values to apply to parenting practices — speak kindly and honor connections. What’s not to like?

In 2021, before Mariah Maddox of Lucas County, Ohio, gave birth, her social media feed started pushing content about a parenting style that emphasized gentleness and attentiveness — core values that contrasted sharply with her own upbringing. She decided to be a gentle parent.

“I think there was an urgency for me to label myself as a certain type of parent in order to make myself feel like I was doing a good job,” said Maddox, 26.

But she soon found it was too difficult to try to label herself as one type of parent. She still counts herself as a gentle parent — just not strictly.

Her son Nate, 3, often wants to run across the street to play with the neighbors.

“This is why I have to step in,” said Maddox about the danger of moving cars. “It’s being authoritative, but at the same time, remembering that he’s a child.”

Parents, trust yourself

Parenting pedagogy can be both divisive and lucrative. An entire industry peddles parenting advice, books and paid workshops. The global market for parenting apps is expected to grow significantly within the next decade. The primary customers: deeply insecure parents.

“It’s kind of left our parenting generation in a place where we’re tiptoeing and we’re kind of walking on eggshells with our kids,” said Spencer, a digital creator who recently completed her doctorate in educational psychology at the University of North Texas. She sees this attitude reflected in the comments of the parenting videos she posts as “Dr. Loly Spencer.”

“We’re so concerned with how everything that we do will impact them for the future,” said Spencer. “It is almost paralyzing.”

For those parents, Pezalla, the researcher, has advice: Put down your phones and return all your parenting books to the library. The best kind of parent is the one who trusts themself to be the best for their child.

“I think there is deep wisdom in the marrow of our bones about how to raise our kids,” said Pezalla. “We’ve been raising kids since the dawn of time, and we’ve done so without the help of parenting books and social media parenting experts.”