Is gentle parenting ruining authority?
I recently came across one of those seemingly random Instagram videos (that are, of course, carefully planned for you by the algorithm). It was a short note by a UK teacher saying that children at primary school don’t seem to be able to follow directions and instructions anymore. I snorted at that and moved on with my mindless scrolling. But in the days and weeks that followed, it kept coming back to me; I kept wondering, why is that and what did she mean?
To kill the intrigue, I’m still not sure what she meant, but in the context of my life, my thought process took me to the relationship between gentle parenting and authority.
You see, I have a nearly three-year old daughter, who I am raising in the best way I can, but not strictly adhering to any parenting style. I read many (maybe not many, but some) parenting books as well as countless self-improvement books written by proven experts that also had many useful implications in parenting. I am naturally a deeply reflective person, so I spend a lot of time thinking about concepts and ideas, making connections, coming up with ways to apply them in my life, challenging and trying to improve upon them. It also just so happened that I live in the UK where parenting style is VERY different to what it is in my native Russia and Eastern Europe in general, so I often lean towards more Western style of respecting a child’s feelings, emotions and personality, but am held back by the sheer respect for parental authority that is (or used to be) the norm during my upbringing, and which nowadays seems a bit uncommon and unconventional.
Just to clarify, I was a stoic proponent of all these “respect your child’s big emotions”, “explain the reasons behind your actions”, “apologise if you are wrong”, “don’t shout at them” and whatever else gentle parenting prescribes (forgive me the simplification). That is, until I visited my mum two months ago, in her natural habitat — her home. She was absolutely appalled at the number of justifications for my actions I had to give my daughter daily, about nearly every decision I made, and the fact that she could not seem to be able to understand (and follow) a simple and oh-so-familiar to my mum “Because I said so”. I didn’t mind all the explanations as I was sure it would help my daughter to agree with me and do what I say more willingly, but mum made one crucial remark that stuck with me — she said “You are making your life so hard by doing this”… And she was right. This is, in fact, one of the main critique points against gentle parenting, but it’s not even what bothered me most. If it guaranteed that my child would grow up to be a conscientious, respectful, authentic, brave, emotionally stable and capable of self-regulation adult, I would engage in a million daily conversations.
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What bothered me instead was that, because of constant explanations and justifications, my daughter did not seem to be content with a simple “No”, or “We are leaving now, put on your shoes”, or so hated now “Because I am your mum, and I said so”. Bigger question for me was, was it just my instructions she wasn’t happy to follow without an orally given reason, or does she not understand the concept of authority at all? Is it the age, or does my parenting simply not teach her that there are people in her life who have the authority to make decisions, and she ain’t one of them?
In Eastern Europe, we fear people with authority (forgive me my generalisation, I’m sure there are exceptions to every rule and there will be those who disagree). This is something that is historically been cultivated as part of our mentality. We are raised to address any person in writing as “You” with a capital ‘Y’, but when addressing ourselves as “I” (“я” in Russian), we are told that it’s the last letter in the alphabet (which it literally is, in Cyrillic alphabet), meaning you have to put yourself last. Mind you, Russian “I” is not capital, like it is in English, it’s lowercase, so i never matter as much as You do. That creates its own host of problems, of course, but it also creates and supports social hierarchy, which I think is a good thing…?
Anyway, it got me thinking and reading more about gentle parenting. The more I read, the more it seemed to me that while it definitely has generally recognized flaws, its proponents (I mean those who are a bit more than followers, and a bit less than worshippers) are still certain that it’s the single best style to raise empathetic confident kids, and whoever complains that they raised a spoiled brat instead has simply not followed it correctly and forgot to create and uphold THE BOUNDARIES… I mean, it’s likely a valid point for many parents who accidentally slipped into permissive parenting (me including), but actually, even having boundaries does not take that excessive focus off of the child’s emotions as the centre of the universe. It does not always matter how we feel about certain things, rules are rules whether we like them or not. It also is not always appropriate to feel those feelings, for instance, if it leads to undesirable (not harmful or dangerous, just unseemly) behaviour in public; there is a place and a time for everything. And it definitely does not mean that consent requires an explanation; “No” is a complete sentence.
But I don’t seem to understand how a person raised in a world where everything must have a valid reason, would be capable of following instructions that have no reason, but are just because a person with traditional authority decided so. I always worried about teachers and how underappreciated they are, but now, I just don’t know how they are expected to handle a class of people who think their emotions are everyone’s top priority. To not be able to recognize and follow authority at such a young age seems a bit dysfunctional to me, and iand I am not convinced so far that gentle parenting has an answer to that (or has indeed ever thought of that at all). I appreciate that many adults have a childhood trauma from not being heard, considered, or God forbid consulted with by older members. I am lucky not to be one of them (I’ve got other issues, but that’s a different piece of writing altogether), and I have certainly been not heard, considered or consulted with in my life. However, seeing as it didn’t traumatize me, I (unscientifically) conclude that it’s possible to respect and not question authority when you are a kid, and still grow up to not be traumatized by it. The million-dollar question is how to balance that all.
I once read an amazing book by this woman who seems to have the capacity to be everything I ever wanted to be — a university professor who also has a family, writes books, popularises science, founded and ran a not-for-profit for some time, and I am sure does ballet or something as a hobby. The book is “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance”, by Angela Duckworth. That was during a time in my life when I particularly struggled with not having any grit whatsoever — I was writing my PhD thesis, and it wasn’t going well. Or really, it was going fine if I actually cared to write it, but I couldn’t for the love of me sit myself down to do some serious work. After all, PhD is a tedious, several years long project that involves enormous amounts of reading, writing, rewriting, more reading, more writing… You get the gist. I have never been the person to dig deep and take time to understand things. I learn quickly and move on to learn the next interesting thing on my list. So, according to Angela, I lack grit. And while I forgot most of the book content by now, one bit stuck deep in my mind, and it was about parenting styles, even though I wasn’t yet a parent myself. Angela discussed four parenting styles that tend to produce four distinct types of kids, and one of them particularly stands out for producing kids that grow up to be independent, disciplined, successful and confident adults. She wasn’t the one to come up with the concept, but I first learned of those in her book, hence why she gets all the credit (a thorough reader is welcome to resurface the actual concept creator). The styles are “authoritarian,” “permissive,” “uninvolved” and “authoritative.” Notice, authoritarian and authoritative are two completely different styles, and while the former results in self-doubting anxious kids with possible behavioural issues, the latter produces assertive, resilient, confident and cooperative individuals who we all either want to be, or want to be friends with. Authoritative parenting is a combination of a lot of parental warmth and responsiveness AND high demands placed on children by their parents. It’s not the same as having boundaries. So, I feel like gentle parenting overemphasizes warmth but severely underemphasizes parentally determined performance standards, which is easier said than done. To me, being highly demanding towards your child sounds good in theory, but in practice, I am a lot softer than I’d like to be. I too tend to focus on emotional connection rather than demanding certain behaviour from my daughter (and notice, those things aren’t mutually exclusive as they are in my head). I have this weird hidden fear that lives deep in my heart that if I am too strict with her, she won’t love me. And I am fully aware of how irrational this fear is. I’m sure we’ve all had those teachers at school who were very lenient and everyone loved them because of that, and those who were really strict, and everyone loved them despite of that.
As a parent, I just want to learn to be like that strict teacher. I don’t know their secret, but at least I’d like to try, and for me, gentle parenting (in its purest form) is not the way.
