It’s clear you’re dealing with a cultural phenomenon when comedians start making jokes and online parodies begin appearing. That’s now the case with a perspective on raising kids called “gentle parenting.”
Gentle parenting is a philosophy of child-rearing centered on mutual respect, emotional empathy, and positive (rather than negative) discipline, so that the parent-child relationship is marked by understanding and guidance—never scolding, punishment, or obligation.
You may have seen these techniques in action—a child acts out, and a young mom responds with a cloying tone, “What kind of choice do we want to make, Noah?” Or “Emma, I see you’re upset. Can you tell me what you’re feeling right now in a way that helps me understand?” Or “Jackson, what else can you do to show you’re frustrated without making Ella feel unsafe?”
The goal is to increase a child’s emotional intelligence by responding in calm and positive ways when behavior crosses a line, redirecting the child’s self-expression toward something healthier or more socially acceptable. A tantrum is merely the result of frustration. Bad behavior arises from unmet needs.
Children Are Inherently Good?
At the heart of this philosophy is the belief that children are, at their core, good—compassionate, loving, and generous. Affirming a child’s internal goodness is meant to free parents to be curious about why their child might act out. Parents are trained to look beyond behavior to the deeper reasons behind their child’s actions.
In UnHerd, Marilyn Simon describes the philosophy this way:
A child should be understood, never punished. . . . Punishment, in the gentle mindset, focuses the attention on an unnatural consequence rather than on the motivations for behaviour. No motivation is bad, because no feeling originates in one’s selfishness, one’s greed, or one’s desire to dominate. Anger and inappropriate behaviour are caused by frustration: the frustration of not being understood, of not being able to accomplish what one wishes, of not being able to freely do what one wants. When a child experiences a curb to their will, the parent needs to offer comfort. Instead of punishment, a child should face the “natural consequences” of her choices. For instance, if a child refuses to go to sleep, this means that she suffers the natural consequence of getting tired and cranky.
Why has this approach caught on? In The Dispatch, Megan Dent explains part of the appeal: It implies that simply meeting all a child’s needs will improve their behavior. Affirming emotions, making children feel “seen,” or removing sources of stress is the key to raising compassionate and respectful adults.
Flattening Your Kids
The problem with gentle parenting is its reductive view of human nature. Simon goes so far as to call the approach “cruel.” The philosophy patronizes children and “flattens the human experience into a series of choice options, none of which reflect any natural goodness or badness in the child, but which instead represent optimal or less optimal outcomes.”
Furthermore, it denies a child his or her full humanity as a moral agent because it refuses to acknowledge that sometimes our instinctive feelings aren’t just impolite or inappropriate but wrong. A child’s actions are often not the result of “frustration” but of selfishness. Our wills need to be restrained because our desires are corrupted. Simon writes,
In neglecting the dark corners of a child’s soul, gentle parenting does children a disservice. For the fact is that most children know that they’re sometimes bad, and that they sometimes do things out of malice, spite, and greed.
Pervasiveness of Sin
As Christians, we realize the sin and selfishness of child and parent alike will always foil the best intentions of the gentle parenting approach. Human nature isn’t inherently good but bad. We’re born sinners. Our wills are bent. Our instincts are corrupted. Wrongdoing isn’t merely the result of ignorance, injustice, or frustration at not being fully understood—it originates in the evil of the human heart.
Self-help gurus may balk at such an assessment, but acknowledging the sinful propensity of the human heart goes back thousands of years. Dent points to a famous moment early in Augustine’s Confessions where he reflects on the selfishness evident in infancy, even before a child has the awareness to judge right from wrong:
It is not the will of the infant that is harmless, but the weakness of his little limbs. I myself have seen and observed a little baby rife with jealousy. He could not yet speak, but he went pale and cast a bitter glare at the child nursing at the breast beside him.
Parenting, then, isn’t merely about teaching our kids how to live in society; it’s about showing them the moral weight of their actions—that sin is real, punishment is necessary (though not doled out in anger or caprice), and forgiveness is available.
Diagnosing sin in our kids’ hearts doesn’t strip them of dignity. On the contrary, it dignifies and deepens them. We treat children as moral agents, respect them enough to discipline them in love, and then forgive and restore them.
Gentle and Holy God
The God of the Bible is a tender Father, yes. Jesus described himself as gentle and lowly. But his gentleness isn’t patronizing, nor does he evade the true source of our wrongdoing. In God, we see a fiery holiness that names sin for what it is. He upholds our dignity by holding us morally accountable, and he offers himself in self-giving love to bring back the wayward heart that turns from sin and trusts his grace. As Dent observes,
Jesus’ response to sinners . . . is not to unquestioningly affirm their weakest tendencies—their knee-jerk reactions to stress, their yearning for power, influence, and attention, their proclivities for self-aggrandizement—but to show them, in himself, the love that is stronger than those tendencies, and that delivers them from that never-ending maze of human longing.
Our Opportunity
The church will have a major opportunity in the years ahead, as young people come of age having been raised under the philosophy of gentle parenting—with its emphasis on safeness, social niceties, and emotional self-expression, and its erasing of sin, evil, judgment, and redemption.
We do ourselves no favors by downplaying, denying, or diminishing sin, no matter how unpopular it may seem. A patient riddled with the cancer of selfishness will one day tire of the vitamins and tonics doled out by feel-good doctors and yearn for surgery on the soul. When that day comes, we’ll have the opportunity to speak the unsafe truth that every person, deep down, already knows to be true: I have sinned.
As one woman recently testified, “I love the church because she told me I was sinning when no one else would.” Yes. A stark diagnosis, before a magnificent cure.
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