Gentle Parenting

[Lazuli Waves]

The latest parenting trend is called gentle parenting. It was designed by a woman named Sarah Ockwell-Smith. She claims it is simply about empathy, understanding, respect, and boundaries. These sound good on the surface, but the problem is how she defines them.

Empathy/Understanding: The focus is entirely on the child's feelings and not anyone else's. You never get stern with your child. If you child is having a tantrum on the supermarket floor, you sit next to the child and calmly narrate his emotions to him. For example, you say, "You are screaming because I wouldn't buy more ice cream. You are upset because you love ice cream. You are blushing because you're embarrassed." The theory is the child will automatically recall these phrases eventually during tantrums. He will then understand the reasons for his emotions and stop having a tantrum. A problem with this is when a child is overwhelmed with emotion, he can't learn. It would be like if your child was having a tantrum on the supermarket floor, and you started teaching him math and expected him to learn. Another problem is it places all the focus on the child's emotions and no one else's, including the parents. A third problem is it's too time consuming to analyze and narrate every lecture.
Gentle parenting is black and white. Your focus is entirely on your child's emotions or else you are a bad parent.

Respect: Children are viewed as the parent's equal. They are considered little adults. Parents are either a gentle parents or a tyrants. You never tell your child what to do. Doing so is commanding your child like a tyrant. Your child will learn to blindly obey authority. This could lead him to being abused by someone one day. Gentle parenting argues you should give your child endless choices. This is what you would do with an adult friend. You should present your 5 year old with 10 different options for breakfast. If you were to place a cereal bowl in front of him and tell him to eat it, you would be a commanding tyrant robbing him of the ability to make choices. This would be disrespectful.

Boundaries: The boundaries in gentle parenting are so thin they might as well not exist.

Gentle parenting is huge on TikTok and Instagram. The hashtag on TikTok has 3.4 billion views. Women are eating this up. Some women are complaining that if they don't follow gentle parenting, their children are excluded from play dates and other women won't interact with them. I know a child being raised with this method and he is the biggest brat I've ever seen. He insults his parents constantly and his mother and hen-pecked father do nothing.

 

[RedLagoon]

It sounds more like "I'm your friend" parenting which is the worst thing possible for a child (and parent) as the child will run the household by throwing tantrums. You need to set the example as a parent and if women eat this kind of nonsense up I wonder where the father is...

Spend 2 hours in a household with 4 children 5 years apart and you'll know why this kind of "parenting" doesn't work.

 

[DanielH]

Being your child's “friend” and “equal” is just about the worst possible upbringing for a child I can imagine barring sexual abuse.

And of course it comes from a woman with a hyphenated name.

 

[get2choppaaa]

Well thats an extreme juxtaposition to my perspective.

I watched Major Payne the other night with my wife. She had never seen it.

We both had an epiphany. That is my parenting style. I have 5 boys...a 6th on the way... wont know what that is till it comes in june.



Recently I watched an interview with Joe Rogan and the guy who goes around interviewing crackheads and criminals and all of that. His youtube channel is "Soft White Underbelly" The over-arching thing that I got from it with regard to the down and out people was that they never realized their self worth.

That was helpful to remember to tell my kids, in spite of my austerity, that I am proud of them when they do well and to build confidence where I can when merited.

I guess that's not unlike my own upbringing and my brother's also, and Glory to God we are both doing very well compared to most.

My father used to give me what I call the Scottish Guilt Trip, when I didnt make an A or win something "Did someone do better than you? or did someone else make an A?" when I said yes, he'd say "Well if you dont get it together, you're gonna drive the damn frito lay truck".... which to him was the lowest job possible of a mindless wage slave. He was incredibly hard on us, was rarely able to attend things for us due to work at the restaurant, demanded a lot, and rarely gave praise... but when he did, we knew he loved us.

That is all to say, being hard, but consistent and fair with your kids teaches them that if someone else can be successful, so can they. It gives them self worth and confidence in their successes, and primes them to believe that they are worthy of the same sort of success as anyone else, but they still have to work for it.

 

[FrancisK]

Yea they can keep all that, those kids are screwed.

I was always worried of disappointing my mom but I was absolutely terrified of my father. The last time my dad had to slap me around was in middle school and I definitely deserved it. My parents didn't try to be diplomatic and work things out on my level, what they said was it and if I wanted/needed something I needed to figure it out myself unless I absolutely had no other choice and in most cases just let it go entirely. There was no "mommy daddy help me", that wasn't even a consideration. Not saying that was exactly the right way to go about it but I think I turned out alright, now appreciate that I had to fend for myself and I wasn't coddled. I don't need anything from anyone and I can handle anything on my own, my upbringing is the reason for that. Again not saying it was perfect but that's just the way it went, my parents each had 10 siblings they didn't exactly have a lot of direct parenting experience to draw from.

I have relatives whose father tried to be their friend instead of their authority, i remember i was a little kid and even then i found it odd. When they did something wrong their father would pretend to be sad and crying so they would come say they were sorry instead of disciplining them, also found it odd that he was actually home during the day while my father worked 7 days a week. They grew up to be worthless loser burnouts who have to leech off people to survive.....just like their father.

 

[charliec12]

The latest parenting trend is called gentle parenting. It was designed by a woman named Sarah Ockwell-Smith. She claims it is simply about empathy, understanding, respect, and boundaries. These sound good on the surface, but the problem is how she defines them.

Empathy/Understanding: The focus is entirely on the child's feelings and not anyone else's. You never get stern with your child. If you child is having a tantrum on the supermarket floor, you sit next to the child and calmly narrate his emotions to him. For example, you say, "You are screaming because I wouldn't buy more ice cream. You are upset because you love ice cream. You are blushing because you're embarrassed." The theory is the child will automatically recall these phrases eventually during tantrums. He will then understand the reasons for his emotions and stop having a tantrum. A problem with this is when a child is overwhelmed with emotion, he can't learn. It would be like if your child was having a tantrum on the supermarket floor, and you started teaching him math and expected him to learn. Another problem is it places all the focus on the child's emotions and no one else's, including the parents. A third problem is it's too time consuming to analyze and narrate every lecture.
Gentle parenting is black and white. Your focus is entirely on your child's emotions or else you are a bad parent.

Respect: Children are viewed as the parent's equal. They are considered little adults. Parents are either a gentle parents or a tyrants. You never tell your child what to do. Doing so is commanding your child like a tyrant. Your child will learn to blindly obey authority. This could lead him to being abused by someone one day. Gentle parenting argues you should give your child endless choices. This is what you would do with an adult friend. You should present your 5 year old with 10 different options for breakfast. If you were to place a cereal bowl in front of him and tell him to eat it, you would be a commanding tyrant robbing him of the ability to make choices. This would be disrespectful.

Boundaries: The boundaries in gentle parenting are so thin they might as well not exist.

Gentle parenting is huge on TikTok and Instagram. The hashtag on TikTok has 3.4 billion views. Women are eating this up. Some women are complaining that if they don't follow gentle parenting, their children are excluded from play dates and other women won't interact with them. I know a child being raised with this method and he is the biggest brat I've ever seen. He insults his parents constantly and his mother and hen-pecked father do nothing.

My ex-girlfriend brought up her daughter like this but I don't think it had this label. Long story short - exactly like your experience - it turned a very sweet kid into a confused, spoilt brat it was hard to be around.

And youre right, the core problem is that there are no clear bounderies set for them to navigate. The child doesn't know where they end and where the mother begins, it's all a blur and everything becomes a negotiation

It's another cranky method to mess up people's lives especially if they are an only child as will often be the case these days, and especially if they are on the autistic spectrum

 

[bucky]

I'll admit that I only skimmed the description of what "gentle parenting" is but the "child is the parent's equal" stuff is probably all I need to know. Also, invented by a woman with a hyphenated surname as @DanielH pointed out above.

As a father I've always tried to emulate Ward Cleaver from the 1950s sitcom Leave it to Beaver. He's a kind and decent man but also very strong and firm with his boys and he disciplines and corrects them when necessary. It's clear that Ward is the head of the household, and his wife is feminine and adores him and his boys grow up right with good values. It's worth noting that SJWs and feminists absolutely hate Ward Cleaver and consider Leave it to Beaver ridiculous, but largely through using him as an example ("What would Ward do?") my life has more or less become a modern version of that show and it's great.

Ward Cleaver - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Viktor Zeegelaar]

Is there Jewishness to be tracked? Notice how the woman's name is her man's name AND her own name, which signals from the getgo massive disrespect for the guy.

Well what we see here is what happens when you let women raise children. It'll lead to the absolute destruction of children down the line. Oh man life is gonna hit so hard to all of these youngsters growing up now, who grow up in the female centric solipsistic fantasy fairytale Disney movie frame of ''everything will just work out'' and ''just manifest it'', and where all difficulties of life are removed. But the waves will hit hard, and they'll be disparaged like sand. Illness will come, difficulty, divorce, relationship problems, sickness, life questions, personal issues, psychological problems, spiritual problems, societal problems, life direction problems, problem solving problems and they'll have 0 answer to deal with it. Tragedy. It's gonna be waaaaaaay worse than we can imagine, way way way way way worse. The majority will be reduced to smitherines in their 20s and either get on a red pill journey (hopefully) or resort to drugs, alcohol, Netflix and mindless entertainment/junkfood to numb the pain, meaninglessness and directionlessness of their delusion based lives.

 

[Viktor Zeegelaar]

Yea they can keep all that, those kids are screwed.

I was always worried of disappointing my mom but I was absolutely terrified of my father. The last time my dad had to slap me around was in middle school and I definitely deserved it. My parents didn't try to be diplomatic and work things out on my level, what they said was it and if I wanted/needed something I needed to figure it out myself unless I absolutely had no other choice and in most cases just let it go entirely. There was no "mommy daddy help me", that wasn't even a consideration. Not saying that was exactly the right way to go about it but I think I turned out alright, now appreciate that I had to fend for myself and I wasn't coddled. I don't need anything from anyone and I can handle anything on my own, my upbringing is the reason for that. Again not saying it was perfect but that's just the way it went, my parents each had 10 siblings they didn't exactly have a lot of direct parenting experience to draw from.

I have relatives whose father tried to be their friend instead of their authority, i remember i was a little kid and even then i found it odd. When they did something wrong their father would pretend to be sad and crying so they would come say they were sorry instead of disciplining them, also found it odd that he was actually home during the day while my father worked 7 days a week. They grew up to be worthless loser burnouts who have to leech off people to survive.....just like their father.

Think about that for a second. What is the biggest threat a mother can make? I'll tell it to your father... that's about the power a mother has with regard to her child. When a boy is 13 he's the same height and weight as his mother, of course there's not gonna be that respect necessary to take what your mother says about the world seriously (if she'd say anything at all). Consequence? People even more looking towards the culture to guide them, and Cardi B, Beyonce, HipHop, gangster rap and pornography will be there to welcome 'm with open arms! It's such a multilayered scam and trap the way this system is set up, unbelievable.

 

[Lazuli Waves]

At what age should a boy stop playing with stuffed animals?