How 'gentle parenting'  robs your children

The other day, my 7-year-old did not want to do the math worksheet I assigned him as summer work. He dawdled, got things wrong on purpose, stewed and sulked, and through it all kept trying to tell me how much he really wanted to ride his bike.

What would I have done if I were a gentle parent? Listen to how he felt? Engage with his emotions? Negotiate with him about the timeline for completing his work?

I care how my sons feel, of course. It is also my primary obligation to equip them for living, coping, and serving in a wider world that does not, should not, and cannot.

I am not a gentle parent, but I did all those things. Eventually.

But first, I ignored him to the extent possible for over an hour while he dawdled and pouted. Next, I let my other kids (each of whom did as instructed without complaint) ride bikes and play on the playground without him.

Then, I talked sternly over him, repeating “first we listen, then we talk,” each time he tried to explain to me how much he hates math worksheets, how much he wanted to help his little brother on the playground, and just how angry it made him to be told to do any math when he wanted so much to ride his bike.

This whole thing was a pain. For him, for me, and for my other kids.

It would have been much easier and much more pleasant to tell myself some fib about how there's nothing wrong with rescinding a commonplace directive like “do your math” on a particularly inviting summer morning.

After all, the truth was that I wanted to go outside and watch my son ride his bike as much as he wanted to ride it. Indeed, had he been completing his work without issue, I might have let it go at a few problems myself.

But clearly, he needed a given lesson that day. And I could not in good conscience rob him of it.

Did my refusal to engage with my son until the task was complete damage my relationship with him?

Temporarily? For sure.

Permanently? I hope not. But maybe.

Parenting my children — by which I mean plain-old parenting, without the modifier — is not about building their relationships with me. It is about building their capacity for relationships with others and teaching them stewardship of the talents and resources with which they have been blessed.

To put my own and my kids’ desire to “feel good” at the center of that enterprise, as gentle parenting encourages parents to do, is to cheat them. It is to deprive them of the focus, grit, and self-discipline necessary for their own optimal development in deference to the outcomes they (and I) might want in a given moment.

How do my husband and I know this? Because we know and love the people who unyieldingly, ungently formed us such that we are able to do the same by our children.

When I was 6, I cried every night for a month as my dad made me read a chapter book of his choice. When I read a sentence with incorrect punctuation or expression, I had to start over. In the moment, I hated reading. I also dreaded my dad coming home.

When my husband was a kid, household tasks done incorrectly or incompletely had to be repeated until his mom was satisfied. In the moment, he could not wait to get away from his mom. He would, he thought, never clean his own house.

Each of us grew up imperfectly, of course. There were skills we did not have and things we did not know until we were adults. We are profoundly imperfect still, as our children are and will be.

But at least we each learned in childhood, on one dimension if not several, that the only way to get out of a dreaded or feared task is to complete it successfully. The ability to take others’ uncompromising direction, work through our own exhaustion and resistance, and keep both in perspective has served us well. Especially as ungentle parents.

In their respective first-grade years, I put each of my sons through the same lessons in reading fluency that my dad put me through; I even used the same novel. My husband now supervises several of their chores with the same expectations that my mother-in-law bequeathed to him, using some of the same methods she favored.

Our parents were not gentle, because they were parents. Which is why we not only love them but learned from them, too.

So when that math worksheet was finally complete and correct, my son and I talked for a while. About how much he hated that assignment. About how much I hated assignments like that, just like he did, when I was his age. About how much of life involves doing things you hate as efficiently as possible so that you can also do the things you want to do and care for the people you love. About how the shortest way “around” things we hate is almost always “through.”

See, in order to be a haven from unforgiving standards and expectations — as I do hope and intend to be for my sons as they get older — I must first subject them to unforgiving standards and expectations.

I care how my sons feel, of course. It is also my primary obligation to equip them for living, coping, and serving in a wider world that does not, should not, and cannot.

That’s why my son and I also talked, that summer day when he never got to ride his bike, about how sad it made both of us that he lost all the bike-riding time that he so coveted. And about how the loss of that time was entirely his own fault: He decided to test his formidable will against his parents’ wills. And he lost.

As my husband and I hope, pray, and, most importantly, resolve that he always will.

When he is grown, God-willing, he'll be prepared to teach his own children this same countercultural, invaluable lesson — rather than to rob them of its fruits in deference to some self-indulgent fad, as so many so-called “gentle parents” today are doing.