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“Back to my time,” grandparents tell the adult children.
What happened to the timeout? Or “Would I give you something to cry?”
There are certain segments of parents who refuse to parent that form of parenting for something they might say, called “gentle parenting.”
If you hear the term and roll your eyes, and we know it’s likely – pause for a moment. Dr. Brian Lazzino, a licensed clinical psychologist at Falls Church, Virginia, says that calm parenting is often misunderstood and is thought to mean dressing. it’s not.
Gentle parenting – or what many people mean when talking about it, he said, is often teaching skills and enforcing boundaries for adulthood, and there is a lot to offer to families.
According to a 2023 report from the Pew Research Center, the strategy has become increasingly popular as almost half of parents say they are trying to raise their children in a different way than the way they grew up. Those parents said they were trying to give their children more love and affection.
The problem is that even many people call themselves kind parents, the details are different. Here are some things you need to know about the latest parenting trends:
Main parenting styles
Psychology researchers have identified four major parenting styles: negligence, authoritarianism, tolerance and authority.
Nicole Johnson, a licensed professional counselor in Boise, Idaho, said that negligent parenting has no high levels of warmth or rules about child behavior. Children may act and break toys and may not respond very much from neglecting parents.
Authoritarianism refers to parenting that focuses on submission and punitive responses – think “I said that,” Johnson said. A child who breaks a toy can scream and be sent to a timeout by an authoritative parent without having to talk beyond that.
Tolerant parenting focuses on warmth towards children, but she added that there is no many structures or boundaries. The parent will admit that the child broke the toy out of frustration, but will not follow up on the outcome.
Authoritative parenting aims to balance structure and warmth.
“I focus more on the idea of improving my ability to understand what is happening for myself and my emotions,” Lazzino said. “Parents really focus on having that empathy with their children and respecting when they talk to them and their feelings are valid.” Still, they “maintain a very solid, clear limit.”
Gentle parenting is not listed as the main parenting style. It is a relatively new term that is popular on social media, but not often explained in the scientific literature.
Researchers Annie Pezara and Alice Davidson tried to investigate what social media parenting influencers mean when they spoke about gentle parenting in a 2024 study.
“Those identified as mildly prioritized emotional regulation. These are parents who want to keep it calm at all costs, with all the sacrifices possible, with energy and emotions in mind,” said Pezara, who visits an assistant professor of psychology at McAlester University in St. Paul, Minnesota.
“They look like most of the time authority parents to us. They’re trying to build boundaries with their children and put the results into practice,” she said.
She said that calm parenting, like authoritative parenting, emphasizes the importance of boundaries while maintaining warmth and empathy. However, this concept works differently from family to family.
In her study, Pezara asked her parents how she identified her practice as kind parents. Some resemble authoritative parents, while others acted in more ways in line with their tolerance style, she said.
Ultimately, much of what people call gentle parenting on social media is merely another term for authority parenting. They teach them to maintain connection with their children, regulate their emotions and behavior, and enforce boundaries as compassionate authorities.
Imagine a child throwing their food from a plate onto the floor. A tolerant parent may say, “Don’t do that.” And we do nothing else to enforce the boundaries. Authoritarians may be harshly dazzled and quickly move to timeouts or spankings, or send their children to hungry beds.
The authoritative parent, which means when many people identify as kind parents, said, “You can see that you’re playful, but the food can stay on the plate. While you’re having dinner, you can do something else in your hands, but you’ll have to throw it away again,” Lagino said.
Some people criticize this parenting method as too soft for children, saying the world is tough and children need to learn to deal with it, Johnson added.
However, the goal of this parenting style is not to protect your child from accountability. Rather, it is to get to a peaceful place for parents and children, provide the children with tools to make good choices, then enforce logical outcomes and boundaries, she said.
Logical outcomes are directly related to actions. If you hit a friend on a track, the playdate will end, Lazzino added.
For those who understand calm parenting as an authoritative form of parenting, there are two parts. Johnson said it examines understanding of the emotions they are experiencing and teaches that all the ways in which they express those feelings are acceptable or unproductive.
It is important that Lazzino skips the verification step, gets stuck, and is too moving. At some point, it is important to move from talking about emotions to planning how to regulate difficult emotions and what consequences will occur if unacceptable behavior continues.
And research has shown that the approach is effective in raising healthier, more resilient, successful adults, Lazzino said.
A 2022 study found that children who grew up with prestigious parenting styles are more likely to achieve academically. Another study in 2020 found this lack of parenting style is the most important factor in low life satisfaction.
Authoritative or gentle parenting has its drawbacks. It’s a lot of work to calm down, examine the child’s feelings, explain the boundaries and the consequences of breaking them, and then bring about reasonable results, Pezara said.
Johnson, if you don’t have a lot of warmth and empathy, it’s even more work.
Pezalla research shows that many parents feel burned out to try to fully strive to their parents and strictly stick to their calm parenting practices.
Kind parents “work hard to be emotionally regulated as they are burned out 24/7,” she said. “That’s what we found in the articles we published… They’re emphasized from their heart.”
Some online parenting influencers can’t use the word no, they have to say no, they need to be hugged and hugged in a grocery meltdown, or don’t allow children to scoop off the store floor and continue their tantrum.
Rather than worrying about following one right philosophy, Pezara recommends prioritizing four things that every child has found to be something they need to grow up with. They include structure, warmth, recognition as an individual who needs something different from his siblings, and an approach to preparing for parenting as a long game, she said.
“Everything else is like static noise to me,” Pezara said. “It’s like the same general, prestigious parenting style. But we call it something different.”
And don’t worry if you ruin it, lose your temper, or take care of your parenting approach, Johnson said.
Children don’t need the perfect human model. They need to see adults who do their best to become positive authorities, seek empathy, regulate themselves, and take accountability when they make a mistake, she added. Hopefully that model will become a roadmap, so they can grow by doing those things too.