Without agreed-upon markers of adult maturity and the importance of reaching it, society devolves to the point where moms are arrested for letting 10-year-olds walk down the street.
There’s an idea that we currently have way too high of expectations for very small children and way too low for older children. I agree. A sad state of affairs, for sure.
Yes, I've seen your writing on "gentle parenting." I hope to get to that topic more this year! I definitely think some (many?) parents are getting it wrong in an attempt to parent in a non-harsh way and not harm their kids the way they feel they were harmed. It's so easy to swing too far!
Yeah I agree. I think the harm comes from a sense of capriciousness/unjust authority. And I think a LOT of it has to do with parents taking up way more space in a millennial child’s psyche than they did in generations past/for most of history. Like, if mom is being harsh and mean, but there are 6 other adults around, it’s a shoulder shrug. Tomorrow, she’ll be nice and someone else will be mean; but authority and impact is diluted. But when mom and dad are basically all you’ve got as center points of authority as in this nuclear family/anomic/de-communified age…then when mom is mean it can REALLY hurt your feelings. So, millennial who were (understandably!) hurt by parental harshness (because it was diluted by no other authority!) decide “let’s not have authority at all and make kids’ feelings the authority.” Which is worse, of course, because now the kids are not only emotionally wounded but psychologically and intellectually unfit for a world in which their feelings aren’t that important. Happy medium (which is unachievable, but the thing to strive for): non-reactive authority that is calm and consistent.
I'm looking forward to engaging these ideas! I appreciate your voice on this topic. I hate how "parenting" content is seen as sort of... un-serious. I think it's really important to hear thoughtful takes on parenting! Not prescriptive ones, but philosophical ones.
This is one of the only things I've written on "gentle parenting" and it doesn't go too deep. Would love your thoughts if you care to read. It's pretty short.
Thank you for sharing! So, I think your prescription for what makes a baseline for good parenting is accurate: inherently authoritative, presumptively calm, and consistent! It’s what I strive for, for sure! But still, IMO, it is only a baseline, *particularly* with boys, where per that article by Marilyn Simon about how gentle parenting doesn’t address the dark parts of the soil, it needs to be understood that the authoritarian “I speak, you fall in line” is the initial expectation for establishing good behavior; this becomes softer in practice over time, once adhered to, because the child imbibes the expectations when they are clear and genuinely expected (not suggested or malleable). I’ve written a lot along these lines about boy momming, particularly in a piece for Real Clear Books: it’s actually not hard at all to make them behave well at 2, and you won’t have to be harsh to do it; it becomes hard at 4, and you will have to be harsh, if you didn’t establish clarity about who’s in charge (indeed, like a puppy!) when that was easy. But you don’t do this TO be mean and harsh; that’s a straw man. You do it to open UP the space for softness and silliness and laughter! One can only have these things with 4 yo boys who’ve earned them. If by 4 a kid is not fundamentally well-behaved/socialized, all the “fun” is really just cope with the fact that this is an ill-formed kid. When teachers are calm and firm with boys like this, it doesn’t work, because it is too late. They now need a significantly more authoritarian mode to be brought into line, in order to enable them to receive the benefits of exactly the teacher mode you talk about. Too many of them never get it. I do think this is different to an extent along gender lines; I would be a bit more malleable off the jump with girls if I had them. Here’s my other point: If you listen to the monk debate between Sarah Ockwell (sp?) Smith & the person she’s debating against, who’s arguing against “gentle parenting,” you’ll find that Smith herself doesn’t see gentle parenting entirely as a disposition to calm authority as you discuss (and which I support!) She talks about part of the philosophy as being intentional about what situations your child can handle and avoiding what they can’t. Now, obviously, to an extent this is common sense: No, I don’t take my 3 year old to the opera. But if my 3 yo has melt downs in the grocery store, the GP solution as articulated by Smith is “don’t take him there.” I think that’s changing an environment to suit an ill-formed child rather than forming the child to suit the (completely reasonable) environment. So all to say, I 100% agree with your framework, but I also think that some of the problems with GP (or, what people perceive GP to be) go even beyond its borders.
Enjoyed this!
There’s an idea that we currently have way too high of expectations for very small children and way too low for older children. I agree. A sad state of affairs, for sure.
Thank you! I agree, in many respects. In other respects, I think our expectations are way too low across the board.
Yes, I've seen your writing on "gentle parenting." I hope to get to that topic more this year! I definitely think some (many?) parents are getting it wrong in an attempt to parent in a non-harsh way and not harm their kids the way they feel they were harmed. It's so easy to swing too far!
Yeah I agree. I think the harm comes from a sense of capriciousness/unjust authority. And I think a LOT of it has to do with parents taking up way more space in a millennial child’s psyche than they did in generations past/for most of history. Like, if mom is being harsh and mean, but there are 6 other adults around, it’s a shoulder shrug. Tomorrow, she’ll be nice and someone else will be mean; but authority and impact is diluted. But when mom and dad are basically all you’ve got as center points of authority as in this nuclear family/anomic/de-communified age…then when mom is mean it can REALLY hurt your feelings. So, millennial who were (understandably!) hurt by parental harshness (because it was diluted by no other authority!) decide “let’s not have authority at all and make kids’ feelings the authority.” Which is worse, of course, because now the kids are not only emotionally wounded but psychologically and intellectually unfit for a world in which their feelings aren’t that important. Happy medium (which is unachievable, but the thing to strive for): non-reactive authority that is calm and consistent.
I'm looking forward to engaging these ideas! I appreciate your voice on this topic. I hate how "parenting" content is seen as sort of... un-serious. I think it's really important to hear thoughtful takes on parenting! Not prescriptive ones, but philosophical ones.
This is one of the only things I've written on "gentle parenting" and it doesn't go too deep. Would love your thoughts if you care to read. It's pretty short.
https://www.businessinsider.com/effective-gentle-parenting-discipline-2024-3
Thank you for sharing! So, I think your prescription for what makes a baseline for good parenting is accurate: inherently authoritative, presumptively calm, and consistent! It’s what I strive for, for sure! But still, IMO, it is only a baseline, *particularly* with boys, where per that article by Marilyn Simon about how gentle parenting doesn’t address the dark parts of the soil, it needs to be understood that the authoritarian “I speak, you fall in line” is the initial expectation for establishing good behavior; this becomes softer in practice over time, once adhered to, because the child imbibes the expectations when they are clear and genuinely expected (not suggested or malleable). I’ve written a lot along these lines about boy momming, particularly in a piece for Real Clear Books: it’s actually not hard at all to make them behave well at 2, and you won’t have to be harsh to do it; it becomes hard at 4, and you will have to be harsh, if you didn’t establish clarity about who’s in charge (indeed, like a puppy!) when that was easy. But you don’t do this TO be mean and harsh; that’s a straw man. You do it to open UP the space for softness and silliness and laughter! One can only have these things with 4 yo boys who’ve earned them. If by 4 a kid is not fundamentally well-behaved/socialized, all the “fun” is really just cope with the fact that this is an ill-formed kid. When teachers are calm and firm with boys like this, it doesn’t work, because it is too late. They now need a significantly more authoritarian mode to be brought into line, in order to enable them to receive the benefits of exactly the teacher mode you talk about. Too many of them never get it. I do think this is different to an extent along gender lines; I would be a bit more malleable off the jump with girls if I had them. Here’s my other point: If you listen to the monk debate between Sarah Ockwell (sp?) Smith & the person she’s debating against, who’s arguing against “gentle parenting,” you’ll find that Smith herself doesn’t see gentle parenting entirely as a disposition to calm authority as you discuss (and which I support!) She talks about part of the philosophy as being intentional about what situations your child can handle and avoiding what they can’t. Now, obviously, to an extent this is common sense: No, I don’t take my 3 year old to the opera. But if my 3 yo has melt downs in the grocery store, the GP solution as articulated by Smith is “don’t take him there.” I think that’s changing an environment to suit an ill-formed child rather than forming the child to suit the (completely reasonable) environment. So all to say, I 100% agree with your framework, but I also think that some of the problems with GP (or, what people perceive GP to be) go even beyond its borders.