Generation Gentle Parent
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What is gentle parenting?
Gentle parenting is hard, even for the super practitioners like influencer Olivia Owen. And when you're all done, then we can get you down and you can go play with the toys.
It's hard to hear a toddler out. So we definitely will get in the face of our toddler and ask him how he's feeling and help him have feelings.
Why is gentle parenting difficult to explain to older generations?
It's hard to explain this mess to your boomer parents. I think that they are super skeptical of what we're doing. And it is very, very hard for your parents to understand what you even think you're doing.
It's just exhausting. They just go round and round and round talking.
So why are we doing it? Ahead, Today Explained is for the children.
Hopefully we don't raise a serial killer.
Today Explained
Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, we are live from New York for the Liberty's home opener with an extra special guest, Brianna Stewart. We talk about the Liberty's newest additions, the best lessons Stewie ever got from Sue, and what it was like to be at the Met Gala this year. And of course, we couldn't let her go without asking her about that 2024 foul call. Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
Today. Today. X-ray. So cute. Growing up, we had a wooden paddle that was just always sitting out. And if we misbehaved or acted out or talked back, we would get the paddle. And even though I think this is effective because we were well-behaved kids, When I first had to try to spank my son, I could not bring myself to do it. It just broke my heart.
We asked you to call the Today Explained hotline if you are gentle parenting, and many of you wanted to talk about the way that you were parented. And we get it. The paddle, the wooden spoon, the slipper, the switch. Were our boomer parents just kind of mean parents? Alison Schaefer is a longtime family counselor and parenting teacher, and she says, no, they were not. But there really is something to the old chestnut that times have changed.
The history, if we go back and look at sort of North American culture anyway, we came from a history where the goal of parenting was to raise children who would mind our will, to be obedient. And if you think about parenting, the general idea of parenting is preparing the child to be competent to enter the greater world once they leave your home. We came from a society where you would have gone into the workforce that was very hierarchical. Colonialism where the power was really cloistered up high on top and you had to Mind your will and be subservient if you were going to survive, even in the Industrial Revolution, to go work the lines or to go work in the mines. And so obedience was the goal of parenting.
And to raise an obedient child, you know, you really had only two parenting tools that you had to master. And that was either punishments, which we, you know, the corporal punishment with the paddles or, you know, the threats. But it was fear-based and it worked. It did make kids become obedient. We don't like that so much. We realize that we probably have emotional scars. We know that it hurts self-esteem and whatnot. And what we're seeing now with gentle parenting and some of these other methods, brand names, is really a move towards a different goal altogether, which is about how do we raise a cooperative child who behaves not because they're fearful, but they behave because they realize it's the right code of conduct. It's the good thing to do.
That's a very different goal. And it's very new. It's very fresh. And that's why we're having this cultural confusion.
All right. So that brings us to gentle parenting, a term that is all over the Internet. Does it have a formal definition?
So we know Sarah Ockwell-Smith out of the UK came up with it.
It's just simply treating our children in the way that we would like to be treated ourselves as adults. But also, if we think back to when we were children, what would we like? from our parents and our carers. So if we were struggling with something which perhaps came across in our behavior, how would we like them to treat us?
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