Gentle Parenting Fails to Answer: "What If That Doesn't Work?"
If your child won't say please and thank you to adults, what exactly is the "natural consequence?"
I’ve really been loving Elizabeth Grace Matthew’s work on gentle parenting (or should I say, less gentle parenting) as a former permissive parent who, for a while, lived in fear of my toddler being mad at me. But one problem with criticizing gentle parenting is that, much like The Patriot Act, gentle parenting has given itself a name that makes any dissenter look like a monster. What, you don’t want to be gentle with your child? Some people call gentle parenting “respectful parenting” or “peaceful parenting,” so even worse: any parent who criticizes the ethos appears like a disrespectful, warlike parent.
Gentle parenting is incredibly hard to define, with some people using the big tent definition of “not hitting your kids.” (And yes, let me go on the record and say hitting your kids is bad.) But instead of throwing up my hands in confusion, I will define gentle parenting, based on what most of the respected gentle parenting sources say. Gentle parenting is best defined by three things: reducing or eliminating the hierarchy between parent and child, validating children’s emotions and “big feelings,” and most importantly, not providing rewards or punishments (or any “imposed consequences”) for any kind of behavior. The idea is that your child will behave better than children raised with rules, rewards and punishments, simply because they want to and because they feel safe and loved.
Taken to its extreme, I saw a mom on Reddit accuse parents of emotional abuse for providing stickers or any other incentive for potty training, instead insisting that children need to use the toilet out of genuine, intrinsically-motivated desire. Her child was four and still not potty-trained, and she had no plans to start pushing the issue.
This incentive-phobia is primarily why I am a gentle parenting dissident. Sometimes, you really do need an incentive (hopefully positive, but sometimes negative) to get kids to do things. And yes, kids have to do things. If you are a stay-at-home mom of one toddler who has hired help for all your chores, you can probably let your child scamper off and dilly-dally when you try to put her raincoat on, and happily say, “Okay, Brylee, we aren’t going to the park today!” and that will serve as a fine natural consequence, and maybe she didn’t want to go anyway. But if you have more than one child or literally anywhere important to go, and your child is relatively spirited and strong-willed, gentle parenting will sometimes fail.
And the gentle parenting experts will simply not have a solution for when it does.
