In the new year, resolve to parent like Mufasa

If more parents would turn away from ‘gentle’ parenting, society would be better off

Now is the time for New Year’s resolutions: Eat less. Exercise more. Declutter the closets. And so on. These are valuable goals, and I intend to do them all — some, no doubt, more effectively than others.

Here’s one more resolution you may not have considered, but one that should be on a lot of our lists: Stop treating the kids like such fragile flowers and start treating them like fellow human beings. Relegate “gentle parenting” to the cringy trends of the past.

This parenting style is steeped in the thinking that children are devoid of innate characterological flaws. As a mother of four, I can assure you they aren’t. Human beings are imperfect, right from the start. Recognizing that kids, like adults, possess virtues to be nurtured and vices to be corrected will not traumatize or delimit them. On the contrary, it is the failure of parents to exercise their authority that is resulting in a dearth of pro-social behavior and rendering our children weaker and less adept at facing challenges.

The other day, my 3-year-old was watching “Daniel Tiger.” It’s not a favorite preschool show in my house, but a Christmas episode was on, and it was harmless enough. At one point, my oldest walked by and said, “Why are you letting him watch this nonsense? Remember, Mom?” He recited a jingle from the show with cheerful derision, with emphasis on the last word: “When you feel so mad that you want to roar, take a deep breath and count to … four.”

Kids remember the darnedest things. He was accurately recalling a conversation from several years ago, when his now 7-year-old brother was a defiant toddler. We’d been watching “Daniel Tiger” as a family and came across its therapy-for-little-kids anger management ditty. It was already dawning on my husband and me then that raising little kids, especially little boys, in the “Daniel Tiger” era was going to be an uphill climb. Counting to four would have done little for my second born — he would have to count to 4,000 and have a time-out. Then, he’d still be mid-tantrum.

But the ethos of gentle parenting, alive in the patronizing singsong of “Daniel Tiger” and mimicked in the voices of so many moms I hear on the playground, has no room for the complicated reality of human nature. And thankfully, in 2024, this parenting style finally came in for for sustained criticism as more people recognized its pernicious effects.

Gentle parenting actively weakens kids, delimiting their virtues by failing to correct their vices. The kid with a naturally hot temper is often also naturally capable of tremendous intensity that powers him through unique feats of will. The two go hand in hand. That kid, like my second born (and like me), cannot calm down by counting to four.

He has to learn, instead, to control himself in the midst of being “so mad that you want to roar” because he is constituted such that he’ll have to do that for the rest of his life. If he does not learn this, one of two things will happen: 1) He will harm and/or delimit himself and others by behaving in socially inappropriate ways, because the “coping strategies” designed to aid people whose version of “mad” is a drop in the bucket of his are the only tools he has, they are no match for his feelings, and he has not been inculcated in the necessity of acting appropriately regardless of how he feels. 2) Some educational bureaucrat, in thrall to the trendy fairy tale that niceness is the universal truth of healthy human nature, will deem his willfulness pathological, diagnose him with a nonsensical “neurological difference” like “oppositional defiance disorder” and put him on some drug — when the only medicine he really needs is an adult will stronger than his own, in the form of presumptive parental authority that demands, not requests, compliance.

In an earlier era, when we expected children to manifest fallen human nature and accepted our duty to help them strive toward virtue, we did much better by them.

Thirty years ago, another set of anthropomorphized felines graced American screens. In an early, poignant scene of Disney’s “The Lion King,” wise Mufasa sternly reprimands his son, the insouciant Simba, for disobedience. Mufasa doesn’t ask Simba how he’s feeling, and he doesn’t tell him that resisting reckless impulses will ever be easy. In fact, in explaining that his son can always look for guidance from kings of the past in the stars, Mufasa is conveying to Simba the reality that the cultivation of self-discipline and true courage will be a lifelong struggle. Indeed, the movie’s broader message is that feelings — fear, exhaustion, infatuation — must be subsumed to responsibility and virtue.

This is a lesson for all of us. Cultivating the virtues attendant to our vices while conquering those vices is the universal goal of human flourishing. So this year, my fellow moms and dads, let’s resolve to parent like our kids’ well-being depends not on shielding them from their character flaws, but on helping them to confront and conquer those vices to the best of their ability.

In short, let’s resolve for 2025: Parent like Mufasa, not like Mom Tiger.

Editor's Note: This article appeared first at Deseret News. It has been republished here with permission.