If you were an alien who parachuted into the San Francisco Bay Area on any given Saturday and wound up on a playground, you might get the impression that the human mother’s natural instinct is to describe her child’s every movement and emotion to them as they go about their business. “You’re WALKING Liam! Look at you go! Good job, Liam! Keep it up. No, we don’t put sticks in our mouths. Yes, I know you want to put it in your mouth. Yes, it’s okay to be upset. Mommy is going to take that away now and move your body to another part of the play area so you don’t eat sticks anymore. I’m picking you up. Here we go.” etc etc.
Now, let me just say that I am not a parenting expert and I hope I never will be. My Substack somehow made it to the top of the “Parenting” leaderboard and I’m sure my book will get shelved with other parenting books (there’s rarely a “motherhood” section in bookstores) but it has never been my intention to dol out parenting advice. Part of this has to do with the fact that my children are absolute monsters (in the best possible way), and I’d hate for anyone to look to me as an example of someone who has it all figured out. But mostly it’s because I believe we tend to way overemphasize the influence of parenting–and way underemphasize the influence of the environment, genetics, and broader social context–on how our children turn out. Most research suggests that everything from health, happiness, intelligence and character are at least 50% (of not more like 70%) genetically determined, and within the other 50%, factors like socioeconomic status, school environment, and out-of-home social dynamics have at least as much influence as individual parenting choices.
Don’t get me wrong: parenting DOES matter, but the research strongly suggests that the most important thing is emotional attunement between parent and child. Is the relationship a loving one? If so, then the nitty gritty of how you choose to go about dealing with tantrums probably doesn’t matter much.
My newsletter has always been, first and foremost, about how to make motherhood easier, so when I pick a fight with the “parenting experts” it’s usually because I feel like they are–consciously or unconsciously–part of the global conspiracy to make motherhood harder than it has to be. The hyper-verbal, emotion-narrating, hands-on version of millennial parenting that I regularly see at the top of my feed on social media and at the playground in middle-class America is, in my view, just the latest iteration of intensive parenting that keeps moms unnecessarily exhausted and isolated.
In the title of this piece I call this hands-on, hyper-verbal thing I see moms doing “Gentle Parenting,” but the truth is that Gentle Parenting means different things to different people. Gentle Parenting is one of those weird concepts, kind of like Tradwives, where the founders of the movement don’t necessarily even accept or acknowledge the title. There is no doubt in my mind that Ballerina Farm is the queen of the Tradwives, but she did not coin the term, nor would she ever call herself that. Similarly, there is no doubt in my mind that Dr. Becky is the queen of Gentle Parenting, even though she actively rejects the term and calls her philosophy Sturdy Parenting (probably to further distance herself from Permissive Parenting and highlight the emphasis on boundaries).
Dr. Becky has 3 million followers on Instagram and a book, Good Inside, that has probably sold a gazillion copies. Whether or not you like her (I hear that she is actually super sweet and down to earth) there is no denying that she has single-handedly redefined millennial parenting standards. I think her popularity speaks to our desperate need to find a better way to parent our children. The harsh, disciplinary tactics of our parents and grandparents are out of favor–for good reason–and Gentle Parenting has come in to fill that void.
To be clear, I don’t disagree with everything Dr. Becky has to say. Actually, MOST of it is sound advice. She emphasizes awareness and control over our own emotions as parents (a core component of parenting in traditional societies). She talks about the importance of setting boundaries, even as we foster a secure and trusting relationship with our children (definitely a desirable goal, backed by research). She advocates for modeling the emotions we want our children to emulate (another core parenting principle in most ancient cultures). But where she and I diverge is with regard to all of this nonsense about verbally validating all of your children’s feelings.
Dr. Becky believes that instead of ignoring or dismissing our children’s emotional outbursts, we should acknowledge them, and help them to understand that it’s okay to feel whatever they are feeling. She says, “When we validate our children's emotions, we teach them that their feelings matter. That they are seen, heard, and understood."
On paper this sounds really good. Of course we all want our children to feel that their feelings matter! But is narrating the shit out of everything actually the best way to help them become emotionally mature adults?
Let’s take a concrete example, one that she talks about in this video: you need your kid to stop jumping on the couch but they won’t listen. What do you do? Dr. Becky’s approach, as she explains in the video, is basically to just start narrating EVERYTHING. “Okay, I am going to walk over to you and if by the time I get there, it’s too hard for you to get off the couch, I will take you off because you are jumping right near the glass table and my number one job is to keep you safe.” To which her host says, but what if they just throw a tantrum (which they will)? Dr. Becky’s response? Verbally validate their feelings (“I know, you’re having so much fun” etc etc) and then remove them from the couch.
My question is, why can’t we just calmly move them off the couch without all of the talking? Even better, just move the stupid glass table and let them have fun jumping on the couch.
We’ll get more into how parents in traditional societies would deal with this situation in a moment, but before we do, here’s what I think the fundamental flaw in this approach is:
Kids are not adults.
Validating another adult’s feelings, verbally, might make sense, although I’d argue even THAT is questionable. If after nagging my husband to do his share of the laundry he looked at me and said “I can see you are very upset,” I would slap him across the face for being a condescending ass. But I digress. Anyway, a 3-year old is simply not equipped to PROCESS the level of verbiage that Dr. Becky would like us to throw at them, especially when they are emotionally aroused.
You see, a toddler’s brain is not LIKE an adult’s brain. In every traditional society where parenting has been seriously studied, they all acknowledge that “a young child has no sense.” From the arctic to the Kalahari desert, some version of this expression can be found. Children are thought to acquire “sense” around age 6 or 7, at which point adults will start trying to seriously transmit cultural values and begin giving the child more real-world responsibilities (like care of younger children). Before then, children are not treated like adults and not expected to behave like them, and this intergenerational folk wisdom is well-backed by neuroscience. The emotion-regulation centers in young children’s brains are, to put it simply, a hot mess.
This doesn’t mean that children’s emotions are not valid. What it does mean is that all the Gentle Parenting in the world will not solve the problem. As Emily Edlynn puts it in this excellent piece for Psychology Today, “Addressing the emotions underlying behaviors does not eliminate the undesirable—because kids are kids. They have brains and nervous systems that look like a construction zone—flimsy structures, electric wiring not yet hooked up or hooked up sloppily, and a disarray of tools without a toolbox to organize them.”
This is why your toddler is capable of total emotional collapse when you serve their water in the green cup instead of the blue one. It’s not their fault and it’s not yours either. You’re not doing anything wrong. It’s just how their brain is wired. But it sure is annoying!
The trick is not to lose your shit, and if the Gentle Parenting playbook helps you do that, more power to you. But not all of us have that level of patience. As Polly Dunbar puts it in The Independent, “I don’t always have it in me to muster empathy for the distress caused by an incorrectly cut piece of cheese.”
At best, the verbal version of Gentle Parenting requires a lot of parental effort and patience, with virtually zero evidence to support its effectiveness. At worst, you might actually be training your child to behave badly because they know they are going to get a whole lot of parental attention when they do so. And attention is every toddler’s favorite currency.
My experience with Gentle Parenting
My own introduction to Gentle Parenting came from the Big Little Feelings Instagram account, another SUPER successful pair of millennial parenting gurus with over 3.5 million followers, offering “therapist-backed, parent-tested” advice on social media and parenting e-courses for just $99. When my son was two, I decided to purchase this course. All of my friends followed their Instagram account and I was seriously struggling with my son’s increasingly intense tantrums. He was my first and believe me when I say, I had no idea what I was doing.
As I’ve mentioned before, parenting is not instinctual. Love for our children is instinctual. The desire to protect and care for them is instinctual. But the nitty gritty of parenting is not. In free-ranging Vervet monkeys, juvenile females show a high degree of interest in caring for infants, although they are not very good at it initially. The ones who get more practice caring for others' babies before having their own have a higher chance of successfully raising that baby to adulthood (and a lower likelihood that it will die in childhood). Vervets raised in captivity, deprived of social learning opportunities, never move beyond their incompetent-mother phase and may go so far as to completely reject their offspring.
I think the reason we are so susceptible to the lure of “expert advice” from online parenting gurus is that we are genuinely at a loss for how to handle this shit. I personally have very little “instinct” when it comes to how I should handle my son’s insanity. In fact, I am pretty sure my “instinct,” which is to scream at him to stop being a piece of shit, is not a good one. But what we are missing, in the West, is intergenerational transmission of tried-and-true parenting wisdom. Not the kind that’s backed by “research” (which is flimsy at best) but the kind that’s been honed in the real world, again and again, generation after generation. There is a shocking level of convergence in the parenting styles of traditional societies around the world, which is not down to “genetics” or instinct, but rather to their keenness of observation and repeated real-life experimentation with actual living, breathing children, day after day. Everyone in these societies has loads of hands-on experience with kids, even the ones without kids, even the other kids. That’s worth something.
Back to the Big Little Feelings course. Every night after my son was asleep, I made my husband watch a new “module” with me. We learned things like “positivity sandwiches,” where you say a yes thing, then a no thing, and then a yes thing (here’s a reel where they explain how that works), and how to validate all of our son’s feelings even when he was mad because the “dog was looking at him too much” (they explain how to deal with that here). Then, the next day, I would diligently go about implementing all of this advice, trying my best to recall the scripts we had been taught the previous night, like an AI robo-mom. “Beep boop boop boop, son is acting out, read script number five starting in three, two, one…”
My husband, meanwhile, was totally half-assing it, which pissed me off to no end.
Stephanie Murray has written about “The Isolation of Intensive Parenting” for the Atlantic, and her words struck a chord. Gentle Parenting goes hand in hand with intensive parenting because it is so resource intensive (who has the time to go around validating all of their kids’ emotions all day long?). But more importantly, if you subscribe too heavily to any parenting philosophy, especially one that was invented out of the blue in the last ten years, you are unlikely to align with anyone from another generation or another culture. You are also unlikely to align with your husband. I’ll go ahead and say it even though I’m sure people will be offended: Dads are just less susceptible to the Gentle Parenting scam than moms are. That’s probably because there is less cultural pressure on them to be a “good parent” and so they tend to more easily default to whatever is easiest (not always a bad thing). Whatever the reason, as soon as you leap into Gentle Parenting territory, you are likely to find yourself suddenly very, very alone. How can you entrust the kids to their grandparents for the weekend if they don’t Gentle Parent? How can you trust your nanny to validate your child’s emotions the way you do?
After about a month of following the BLF scripts with zero progress, I started to have some serious doubts. You see, my son is not stupid. When I say, “Yes ice cream is SO yummy, but no you can’t have any right now, but maybe we can have some after dinner” what he hears is “NO.” Then he proceeds to have a tantrum just like he would have done anyway and the only difference is that it took me more words and mental effort to get the message across.
And here’s the worst part of it: after you have gone through the effort of buying an e-course and practicing this “therapist-backed” method in your home over and over, after you were told that this would really solve all of your parenting problems, and after you see it failing again and again, you start to feel real shame. Why isn’t it working for ME? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with my child? And the next step in the shame cycle is…rage!!!
It’s incredible how quickly the hyperverbal approach can spiral in my experience. One second you’re validating the totally understandable frustration your kid must be feeling about being forced to wear pants to school and the next you are screaming “PUT YOUR FUCKING PANTS ON RIGHT NOW!”
After I started researching parenting in hunter-gatherer societies (shortly after my daughter, my second child, was born), I gave up on Gentle Parenting, and PHEW, what a relief! Now my playbook for handling tantrums is ridiculously simple: ignore and distract.
I’m not saying I have it all figured out, but in general, ignoring or distracting my children when I feel a tantrum coming on DOES work (unlike scripted positivity sandwiches). And when you see it working, this amazing thing happens: you start to feel a sense of self-efficacy as a parent. You start to feel like–gasp–a GOOD MOM! It’s exactly the opposite of the shame-rage cycle, where instead of feeling like a total fucking failure you think, God I nailed it! And then you feel more confident, more empowered and more CALM the next time it happens.
How the hunter-gatherers do it
There is immense variability between hunter-gatherer and small-scale traditional societies in terms of how they parent their children, but there is also surprising convergence on a few central themes, especially among immediate-return hunter-gatherers (those whose lifeways most closely resemble our shared evolutionary past).
The first theme is the shocking level of autonomy they give to their children, which fosters independence and self-confidence, often from a much earlier age that what we consider normal in Western society. “Respect for an individual’s autonomy is a core cultural value and foundational schema,” Barry Hewlett writes of the Aka, “One does not coerce or tell others what to do, including children. Men and women, young and old, do pretty much what they want. If they do not want to hunt that day, they do not do it; if an infant wants to play with a machete, she is allowed to do so.” Anthropologists around the world have chronicled children with burn marks from playing too close to the fire. What we interpret as negligence is just the hunter-gatherer way of letting children learn and figure things out for themselves.
Most toddler tantrums are actually power struggles, so the more autonomy you can give your child - the more you can help them do things for themselves - the less likely they are to act out.
Another central theme, that I mentioned above, is that they let kids be kids. They are not overly concerned with “bad behavior” like we are in the West, because it is widely understood that such behavior is to be expected from children. So they are not angry about it, nor are they trying to “fix it.”
Melvin Konner’s description of the !Kung’s approach to childrearing is beautiful:
“The !Kung have essentially a Piagetian folk theory of child development: behavior is appropriate to the stage of development and changes naturally with growth. Children do not need to be beaten out of sinfulness, carefully taught every behavior, inclination and schema they must one day have, nor even consistently rewarded for desirable behavior. What they mainly need, according to this theory, is to grow, engage with the world, and learn on their own.”
Lastly, the hunter-gatherer approach to discipline is usually very relaxed and nonverbal. Adults in hunter-gatherer societies are extremely indulgent and affectionate with their children and respond very quickly to the cries of young babies. According Jared Diamond, in Aka society, “if one Aka parent hits an infant, the other parent considers that grounds for divorce.” So they are not disciplinarians, by any stretch, but neither do they feel compelled to narrate all of their children’s emotions to them. Frank Marlowe writes of the Hadza that “during their ‘terrible twos’ children throw tantrums and pick up sticks and hit adults, who do little more than fend off the blows and laugh.”
They are not angry at their children. They are not trying to mold or shape them. But they are also not validating this behavior with extra attention and instruction. They are not shouting, “Kantla, you must be feeling very frustrated to be hitting mommy with a stick!” Rather, they understand that this is simply a phase. It will pass. In Hadza society, the preferred approach when an adult wants a child to stop doing something is to make “a loud grunt disapproval” and then gently intervene if necessary.
And that’s how I like to do it in my home now too.
Putting it into practice
Let’s get into how this works in practice. Let’s take a famous, concrete scenario: meal time. You have just worked hard to prepare a healthy meal for the family and the second your child sits down at the table she goes “ew! I don’t LIKE anything!”
In the Gentle Parenting playbook, you would reply by saying, “That’s okay. Everyone likes different foods. You can listen to your body and eat what you like from your plate.” They also suggest serving a “safe food” with every meal.
So you run the robo-mom script by your child which causes her to scream and protest even more loudly. She insists she doesn’t like ANYTHING and demands her “safe food.” But her only safe food is white pasta with butter (well, sometimes with butter but sometimes without butter and woe to anyone who gets it wrong). So you capitulate and make pasta. She eats pasta and leaves everything else untouched. Next thing you know she’s eating sand out of the sandbox because she’s so iron deficient (this actually happened to us) and you have to start giving her chewable vitamins with her pasta.
Here’s another way you could handle that same situation, based on the age-old wisdom of traditional societies:
Your child sits down and says, “Ew! I don’t LIKE anything!”
You IGNORE her. You say NOTHING. You eat your own meal and she watches how you enjoy it. Then she stops whining and eats her dinner. End of story.
Does that sound impossible? Too easy? Too simple? I swear to you, it works. Maybe not for some exotic, spicy weird thing you have ordered from a take-out restaurant but for rice, chicken, and green beans (or whatever healthy kid-friendly foods you generally cook), I swear to you, it works. Eventually, by failing to give any attention to your child’s outrageous mealtime demands, they will stop making them.
Now, this might not work on every occasion. And if it doesn’t, your backup strategy is distraction. Find a way to make them forget that they are mad about dinner.
One of my earliest memories is from when I was about 4 years old. I was mad about something. I don’t remember what. My mom got down at eye-level with me and said, “Elena, watch this” and started doing this weird thing where she flared her nostrils in and out like a Lizard. I thought it was HILARIOUS. I promptly forgot whatever it was that I was upset about.
In the context of a meal, my go-to tactic is to make a game out of it. I’ll pick up a green bean and say “Help! A sea monster is trying to bite my head off!” and then my daughter will forget all about the fact that she wanted to fight about dinner and start trying to bite the green bean. This is a labor intensive effort, but it’s less work than making a second meal, and your child is less likely to end up with macaroni-and-cheese-induced anemia. Often, we will start the meal this way just to deescalate the battle and then she will finish her plate on her own.
Now, here’s where things get tricky. Sometimes neither of the above tactics works. Sometimes your child is just so exhausted that they can’t hold it together, and your job as a parent is to figure that out. This time it has nothing to do with the food. They are not even hungry. Maybe what they need is SLEEP (or at least to lie in a quiet, dark room with minimal stimulation). For instance, I’ve noticed that my son will behave like an absolute monster the day before he comes down with a cold.
In that case what you want to do is just scoop him up and (nonverbally) whish him off to bed. You’ll know you got it right if after 5 minutes of rubbing his back in the dark he’s out like a light.
As I mentioned earlier, if there is one key take-away from all the literature on parenting that is truly backed by research, it’s this: emotional attunement between parent and child is the end game. When you are truly emotionally attuned to your child, you are not following a script or a playbook. You can see what they need. That’s why this stuff is so hard to teach in an e-course or a newsletter. I think it’s something you can observe, and also something you just have to come around to through experience and hands-on practice.
Finally, work on giving your children more autonomy and control wherever possible. Relax some rules. Let you children do more things for themselves. In hunter-gatherer societies a six-year-old child is considered a competent babysitter and active contributor to the community, capable of foraging, fetching water, and helping to thatch the roof.
If you set up your home in a way that allows your children to do more things without you (pick out their clothes and get dressed, make themselves a sandwich, get themselves a glass of water) you will give them a sense of agency and there will be fewer power struggles. Similarly, when you are out at the park and they are doing something scary, resist the urge to police them and allow them to learn from their own mistakes (within reason). Let them take risks. Keep a watchful eye but quit the verbiage. Stay out of their play. Give them chores and responsibilities at home. All of these things are related even if it doesn’t seem like they are.
Final thoughts
Maybe folks will say that I AM a Gentle Parent! After all, I am not advocating for you to spank or yell at your children. But the major difference between my preferred approach (the hunter-gatherer approach) and the Gentle Parenting approach I see promoted on social media is that my approach is mostly nonverbal, focuses on keeping yourself calm (as the parent), tuning in to your child’s underlying needs, and modeling the desired behavior.
Having said all that, as I mentioned at the outset, I generally try to avoid giving prescriptive advice, because every parent and child is different. So on that note, if this is NOT helpful to you, and you have MASTERED the Gentle Parenting playbook, please feel free to ignore me.
If however, Gentle Parenting has NOT worked for you, know that you are not alone, you don’t HAVE to parent that way, and it’s one more thing you can go ahead and cross off your Mom Guilt List.
I was pretty skeptical about your take here when i started reading this, but then by the end found that your approach is almost exactly how i parent - and it’s not even intentional most times!
I have also found the narration of a child’s every move to be excessive and not natural. Especially when it’s from a perfectly composed script. When i push away all the noise from gentle parenting experts, i start mothering instinctually, which can look like holding my daughter close but silently as she cries, sitting near her during a tantrum but not trying to intervene, or letting her jump on the damn couch if she wants to.
Another great post, and another great perspective. Thanks, Elena! Your point about ignoring is spot on! A big issue I see in the application of gentle parenting is that the attempt to search out the underlying emotional motivation of every behavior or validate each expression of displeasure actually brings a lot of energy and focus to behaviors and expressions we may want to see diminish over the course of development. If parents validate every frustration and complaint of a child, not only does it quickly become unsustainable for the parent, it doesn't allow the child to gain a healthy perspective regarding what is actually a big deal and what is something they should be able to move on from without a huge amount of fanfare.