The Ultimate Guide To Understanding Gentle Parenting

What is Gentle parenting? There is so much confusion and misinformation about gentle parenting in the world right now!

People say gentle parenting is permissive parenting with no limits. They say it’s going to create snowflake children who can’t handle “the real world”. People say gentle parenting is “what’s wrong with the world today”

These opinions are misguided, uneducated and frankly, ignorant.

Do you want to understand gentle parenting once and for all? This blog post will break down all things gentle parenting in a way that you can understand.

If you know me at all, you know I love an amazing acronym. I have created this acronym for you to remember what gentle parenting is.

First: Grab the Printable point form version of this guide here: The Ultimate Guide To Gentle Parenting

Gain Insight

Children want to do well

Children want to do well. When they can’t, it is because they are lacking the skills or they are beyond their resources in that moment

This concept originally came from Ross Greene in his book “The Explosive Child” where he states that “kids do well when they can.” This is a key concept in gentle parenting because we are changing the lens in which we view our children’s behaviours.

Instead of thinking of kids as manipulative, bad, stubborn, attention-seeking or unmotivated, we see them through the lens of doing the best they can. And when you can view your child through that lens, you can change the way you respond.

When children can’t do well, it is because of a missing skill or need underneath. Examples of missing skills could be: low impulse control, time management, regulating emotions, what to do with big feelings, etc. Children haven’t developed the skills they need to deal with life’s difficulties. In gentle parenting, we know that it is up to us to teach them, not punish them for their shortcomings.

Brain Science

Dr. Dan Siegel has lead the charge in explaining kids brain science to parents. He teaches us that our children’s brain is not fully developed (until age 25!). The prefrontal cortex is where all executive function happens (like impulse control, reasoning, logic, planning) and children do not have this part of their brain working like an adult!

Dr. Dan Siegel also came up with the now famous hand model for the brain. He teaches that when our children experience big feelings, their prefrontal cortex actually goes offline, meaning a child can’t access reasoning and logic when they are melting down. This helps us in a huge way to be able to sit with our child in their big emotions without trying to teach them anything in that moment.

Behaviour is communication

All behaviour is communication. Ask yourself, what is this behaviour telling me?

Often parents want to know what to do about a certain behaviour. In the gentle parenting approach, we know that all behaviour is just communication. In order to change the behaviour, we have to look way underneath the behaviour.

Mona Delahooke, PhD, in her book “Beyond Behaviours” refer to this as an iceberg. You can only see the tip of the iceberg, not the mass underneath. Just like your child, you can only see the outward behaviour, but there is so much going on under the surface.

Curiosity

Getting curious about what is underneath the behaviour is a critical piece in gentle parenting. “What is making this hard for my child? What is making this hard for me?”

I like to ask these important questions anytime I am struggling with my child’s behaviour. Asking yourself what is making this hard for your child will help you look underneath the iceberg to what might be going on for your child.

Equally important is figuring out what is making the situation so hard for you. You might be familiar with the term “trigger”, which refers to a hurt or wound from your past that is being triggered by the current situation. For example: if your child is saying mean things to you, you might react stronger than some parents would because your older brother always said mean things to you and this is a trigger for you.

In gentle parenting, we work hard to figure out why they are being triggered by their children so we can heal what is hurting inside of us so that we don’t react negatively to them when we could respond calmly instead.

Support

Another part of gaining insight is to ask “How can I support my child to meet this expectation?”

We will talk more about this in the section of Limits. When our children are not behaving in the way we expect them to, we recognize it is because of a lacking skill or need and we support our child to meet this expectation.

Support (often called scaffolding in the gentle parenting world) can be emotional support (like validating, empathy or connection), physical support (like helping wash hands, put on shoes, fold laundry), social support (making friends, apologizing, learning to not hit), or mental support (like creating a visual checklist, breaking things into smaller parts or problem solving together)

Empathy

welcome all feelings

Gentle parenting involves welcoming and allowing all feelings. That doesn’t mean we welcome all behaviours. In gentle parenting, you will become very comfortable with your child having big feelings. Feelings aren’t bad after all. Big feelings like sadness, anger, worry or fear are all completely normal and ok for our children to express freely.

Giving our child empathy for their big feelings is key in gentle parenting. Listening and understanding our children when they are having big emotions doesn’t mean that we agree with the negative behaviour they might be doing. It is up to us as parents to teach and coach our children to meet our expectations of behaviour.

First, we can provide empathy and understanding, next we can teach appropriate behaviour. We don’t need to fear empathy, thinking it will send the wrong message. Empathy is always the right message.

Empathy first

Once a child feels understood, they can more easily move on from their feelings to a solution.

Often parents move straight into the behaviour and skip right over the feelings. We want our kids to stop crying, quit worrying, calm down, and move on. Human beings truly want to feel understood and like we aren’t alone.

Children will often move on much quicker once we lean into their distress. When we can meet them where they are and provide empathy and understanding, they will more quickly be able to move past them.

Self compassion

Not to be forgotten is empathy for yourself as a parent. You don’t have to be perfect, or anywhere close to it. You can’t be a better parent by feeling guilty about your shortcomings. It is incredibly important to practice self compassion as you take the journey of gentle parenting.

Grow Resilience

Experiencing hard feelings and getting through it with support is what grows resilience.

Children can feel quite scared by their big feelings and if they see their parents getting angry, walking away and leaving them alone, or punishing them for their feelings, they become even more scared of big feelings.

Often one objection to gentle parenting is that people think it creates children who can’t deal with the difficulties of the real world. In fact, what builds resilience is experiencing difficult emotions and situations AND getting through it with a supportive adult. Once our kids can experience hard things and know that they came out on the other side, they will be able to handle hard things much easier than kids who are told to “toughen up”.

Feelings don’t need fixing

A sad child doesn’t need us to “fix” what is wrong. We don’t need to get the blue cup instead or give them the extra cookie. We can just allow the child to be upset and provide empathy and understanding. Feelings don’t need to be fixed, they can just be.

Nurture

Remove Punishments

Consequences, punishments, bribery, shame and rewards will only hurt your relationship and not create lasting change in behaviour.

Alfie Kohn, author of “Unconditional Parenting” and “Punished by Rewards” shows us so many reasons that punishments and consequence are detrimental to child development. It has been shown in study after study that punishing children does not have a positive effect on their behaviour, in fact, it has a strong negative effect. Children who are punished for their behaviour are shown time and time again to have worse behaviour over time, instead of better.

Focus on relationships

In gentle parenting, the focus shifts from control to connection. Controlling our child’s behaviour doesn’t work long term (it might pretend to work for some kids when they are young).

When we shift our focus to connection instead, we create a relationship with our children where they actually desire to want to do as we ask because of our strong bond.

Create Secure attachment

In the wonderful book “The Power of Showing up”, Dan Siegel and Tina Bryson write about secure attachment and the 4 S’s: Safe, Seen, Soothed and Secure.

Providing secure attachment for our children allows them to feel protected and safe to express their feelings. Secure attachment allows children to venture out into the world with confidence, knowing they have a safe place to fall.

Influence

As we already discussed, control isn’t how to get our kids to behave. Traditional parenting relies almost exclusively on control in the form of punishments, consequences, bribery and rewards.

In gentle parenting, we understand that it is our relationship that provides influence instead of control. With influence, our children care what we think. Think about people you are influenced by. You likely care about their opinion and have a deep respect for them. When your children have a deep respect for you, they are influenced by what you say and do. Influence is your greatest ally in having children who behave in a way that you want.

Play

In my opinion, there is almost nothing as important as play in gentle parenting. Children speak the language of play. Using play to communicate and connect will increase cooperation in our children. Play is a big part of limit setting and getting our kids to listen.

Grab the Free Parenting Playbook

Teach

Model

Screaming at kids to calm down. Punishing kids for being mean to their siblings. Giving them consequences for not being respectful. Do we see how ironic and manipulative these traditional techniques are?

In gentle parenting, we model the behaviour we want to see. We can’t model one behaviour and expect another one entirely from our children. We also can’t expect them to do things (like staying calm) when we can’t even do it.

If you want a child who can calm down when upset, you have to learn how to stay calm when you are upset. If you want a child who is helpful, you have to be helpful to them when they are struggling. If you want a child to speak to you with respect, you have to talk to them and their siblings with respect. Model what you want to see.

Coaching

As a parent, you become a coach, a teacher and a strong leader. Ask yourself “What is the skill I want to teach? How can I effectively do that and maintain connection?”

For example: let’s imagine your child has hit their sibling. Traditional parenting would likely have you say something like “No hitting. Hitting hurts” and sending the child to his room or a naughty spot, or even giving the child a spanking or punishments. What has that taught the child? More hitting from their parent, anger, dis-regulation and zero new skills to do differently next time.

In gentle parenting, you would empathize with the feelings underneath the behaviour. “You must be feeling upset to have hit your sister.” Then you would make sure everyone is calm and feeling safe. Then you would provide ideas for next time that big feeling comes up. “Next time you are feeling angry you can call mommy for help or give yourself a big bear hug, like this…” You are now a coach and teaching your child how to handle their feelings and what to do with them. Note: this is a simplistic example and the real version has a lot more nuance than that.

As a coach, you will provide practice outside the moment for your children. Give your child tools they can access when they are not angry or upset. This takes practice and forethought.

Regulation

One of the big ideas in gentle parenting is being able to model to your child what a regulated person looks and acts like. This is absolutely the hardest part! Being calm when your child is acting up is far from easy. Every parent struggles with this and it’s very normal. It is a work in progress.

Being able to regulate your emotions however, is possible. And when you can do it, it models to your child the way that they can regulate themselves in your loving presence. This is called co-regulation and it is how a child learns to sooth themselves over time.

Need more help staying calm? Check out the Roadmap to Calm.

Learn about the Roadmap to Calm

Limits

Kind and firm limits

Limit and boundary setting is another very challenging part of gentle parenting. Many parents struggle with how to hold clear limits with respect and in a loving way. Unfortunately I can’t explain it to you in 1 blog post, but I can give you some pointers.

Values

Setting limits starts with getting clear on why you are setting them in the first place. Get clear on your values and set limits based on that, and not on a knee jerk angry reaction. For example: your child wants another cookie and is having a tantrum. Why are you saying No to another cookie? Perhaps you can actually say yes. Perhaps you cannot. That is up to you. But be very clear on why you are setting the limit.

Holding a limit

You are allowed to set the limit and your child is allowed to feel how they want about it. Your child is allowed to be upset and cry or be angry. You can welcome all feelings without changing your limit. You can respond with empathy and understanding, while still holding your limit.

Redirect

Unwanted behaviour can often be redirected using empathy and play. You can allow the feelings and help your child move past them using play. This is a tricky balance and takes some practice.

Make sure you grab the Free Parenting Playbook.

Expectations

Sometimes parents set limits without taking into account their children’s perspective, current emotional state, skills or temperament. We might expect our children to get dressed alone for example and in this moment they can’t meet this expectation. Are you setting limits that are reasonable for your child in this moment?

Your child might be capable of doing a task. Maybe they got dressed fine every day last week. But today they are struggling. Meet your child where they are, in this moment.

Co-create

Ross Greene, in his amazing book “Raising Human Beings” lays out the groundwork for how to work with your child on a collaborate solution vs. using control. Even young children can be taught to work together to create a win/win solution. This is strongly linked to limit setting because you don’t want either party: the parent or child to feel like they lost.

For example; you want your child to get in the bathtub. Your child screams no and runs away. You decide this is a limit that is important to hold because he didn’t bath yesterday and he played outside a lot today. You get curious and ask yourself “what is making it hard for my child to meet this expectation?”

You can ask your child as well “what is making this hard for you?” Perhaps your child is worried about being cold, or doesn’t like water in his eyes, or wanted to finish his lego tower, etc. Can you work together to come up with an idea that works to get both of your needs met?

Energy

Self Awareness

When your child isn’t listening or acting badly, what energy are you bringing to the situation? No matter what you do, you are co-creating what happens next. This is a relationship and you are half of it. What are you bringing to the relationship?

If you are coming in yelling, angry, punishing or shaming, you have to take responsibility for the storm you are helping create. If you take a moment to centre and calm yourself and respond to your child’s needs vs. react in anger, you are taking responsibility for the calm you are helping create. Is it easy, NO! It take a LOT of practice and tools and often coaching!

Grab your f ree Coaching Discovery Call here!

Responsibility

Gentle parenting involves taking 100% accountability for how you are responding. No one MAKES you act a certain way. You are in charge of yourself, not your child. Your child doesn’t make you mad. Your temperament, past experiences, triggers, and current mental and emotional bandwidth is what is making you mad. The behaviour is simply a catalyst.

Triggers

As I spoke about previously, a trigger refers to a hurt or wound from your past that is being triggered by the current situation. Your past experience might make it very triggering for example when your child breaks something or when they swear at you. Another parent, who has a different past, might be triggered by completely different things.

Your triggers are your responsibility to figure out and heal. Your children’s behaviours can shed a light on those parts that need healing. But you have to be willing to see it as a trigger in you and not your child’s fault or responsibility.

We walk through tracking your triggers in The Roadmap to Calm

Calm

Bringing a sense of calm energy is not always possible, and not the goal. You are a human who has feelings as well. You are also allowed to be mad, sad and frustrated. The difference is that you are an adult and the leader of your family and you can’t unleash your feelings onto your child.

Regulating your own emotions takes work. Usually parents can’t sit with their child during hard emotions and stay calm because it make the parent feel uncomfortable. Most of the time these big feelings were not allowed when we were children.

Conclusion

Gentle parenting is NOT about being perfect or raising perfect children. It is a journey into change and discovering a new way to view yourself and your children.

I trust that this guide has given you a strong overview and manual of sorts to understanding this new way of parenting.

Thank you for reading!