But the goal of this parenting style isn’t to shield your child from accountability; rather it is to get to a calmer place for the parent and child, give kids tools for making good choices, and then enforcing a boundary with logical consequences, she said.
Logical consequences are ones that relate directly to a behavior: If you smack your friend with a truck, the playdate will be over, Razzino added.
For the people who understand gentle parenting as a form of authoritative parenting, there are two parts: validating that you understand the feelings they are experiencing and teaching that not every way of expressing those feelings is acceptable or productive, Johnson said.
It is important to neither skip the validation step nor get too bogged down in it, Razzino added. At some point, it is important to move from talking about the feelings to making plans on how to regulate the difficult emotions and what consequences will happen if the unacceptable behavior continues.
And this approach has been shown in research to be effective in raising more healthy, resilient, successful adults, Razzino said.
One 2022 study found that children raised with an authoritative parenting style were more likely to achieve academically. Another study in 2020 found that a lack of this parenting style was the most important factor in low life satisfaction.
We need to go easier on parents
There is a downside to authoritative or gentle parenting. Staying calm, validating your child’s feelings, explaining a boundary and the consequences of breaking it, and then following through with a rational consequence is a lot of work, Pezalla said.
It’s even more work if you weren’t parented with a lot of warmth and empathy, Johnson added.
With so much pressure to parent perfectly, many parents feel burnt-out trying to adhere too strictly to gentle parenting practices, according to Pezalla’s research.
Gentle parents “are working so hard to be emotionally regulated 24/7 that they are burning out,” she said. “That’s what we found in the article that we published … they’re stressed out of their minds.”
Some online parenting influencers will say that you can’t use the word no, that you have to say no, that you should pause in a grocery store meltdown to give a hug, or that you need to scoop your child up from the store floor and not allow them to continue the tantrum there, Pezalla said.
Instead of worrying too much about following the one right philosophy, Pezalla recommends prioritizing the four things she has found to be what every kid needs growing up. Those include structure, warmth, acknowledgement as an individual who may need something different from their siblings, and an approach that prepares for parenting as a long game, she said.
“Everything else is like static noise to me,” Pezalla said. “It’s like the same general authoritative parenting styles, just, we’re calling it something different.”
And don’t worry if you mess up, lose your temper or change your mind on your parenting approach, Johnson said.
Kids don’t need a model of a perfect human, they need to see an adult who is trying their best to be a positive authority figure, striving for empathy, practicing regulating themselves, and taking accountability when they get it wrong, she added. Hopefully, that model will be a roadmap so they can grow up doing those things, too.