The cruelty of gentle parenting It neglects the dark corners of children's souls

A natural consequence of my own kids acting cranky is that I might lose my shit on them, but I don’t get the impression that gentle parents are encouraged to act naturally. This brings us back to the insufferable tone of voice that gentle parents all seem to use with children, particularly those millennial mom influencers on social media. My aversion to it is that there is a fake niceness to their wheedling that anyone can see through, including most four-year-olds. It is patronising, and reveals a deep annoyance with children but prohibits any kind of genuine expression of it. One can’t get angry with a child because he is not doing anything bad because he is inherently good. What is needed is to redirect his natural self-expression to a more socially accepted choice, one that will result in Mommy speaking to you with more authentic niceness.

Gentle parenting 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. This is crude behaviourist psychology, treating the human as a kind of input-output machine. Under this model, gentle parenting ignores the depth and complexity of a child’s soul — including the baseness therein — and, because it ignores it, the technique also fails to nurture the depth of a child’s soul, resulting in, unsurprisingly, children who have shallow souls. A child is denied her full humanity as a moral agent, and treated not as an equal, but as somehow less than fully, richly, terribly human. In short, as the little shits they are, yet having a spark of the divine. Just like Mom.

What happens if a child feels himself to be bad, let’s say, by wanting to hurt another child in order to feel a sense of power, satisfaction, and maybe even glee? In that case we must ignore that part of the child’s soul that has those instinctive feelings, both of “naughtiness” and of the corresponding guilt and shame. As this might imply that his feelings are bad, and so he deserves to be punished. Since gentle parenting has no capacity for talking to a child about wickedness, guilt, and punishment, it also has no ability to speak about redemption.

There are significant problems with this approach to parenting and with its results. The most obvious criticism is that instead of raising resilient children, gentle parenting often does the opposite, making kids more fragile, more averse to ideas that don’t align with their own, and less competent in the world.

But the real problem with gentle parenting is that it removes moral freedom from a child because it refuses to accept the moral depth of a child. Punishment is unnecessary because the child is never bad, merely misunderstood. While gentle parenting concedes that a child’s behaviour might be less or more appropriate, well-socialised, and safe, it doesn’t concede that a child’s motivations might originate in wickedness just as easily as goodness. Nor does it accept that a child’s will should be curbed because it is often corrupted in its desires, not simply frustrated.

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. Gentle parents are right: shame and guilt are negative feelings which may cause “trauma” for the child, as for the adult. No kidding. But the job of the parent is not to prevent any potential “trauma”, it is to love the child even when they are bad, and to punish them, and most importantly to forgive them. A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it. (I often wonder if the parents also want to avoid the “trauma” of guilt and shame, and so never acknowledge their own reasons for doing the things we do, such as becoming parenting “philosophy” consumers out of vanity, pride, or sloth. We may one day have good reason to ask forgiveness from our kids.)

Forgiveness is the precursor to redemption, a transformation that happens on the inside. A child becomes an individual moral agent only through the transformative process of parental punishment and forgiveness. It is an act of faith on behalf of the parent which calls out the inner goodness of a child while punishing the badness. Faith in the good is precisely what calls out this punishment. Somehow this doesn’t quite work if one holds goodness as the granted condition of the child, for then there is no faith required, no moment of uncertainty that is the ground of trust. There is no view of the child as an autonomous moral agent, and thus it offers no space for a child to grow.

Since the age of Shakespeare, most of our great literary villains have had depth, reasons for their villainy, motivations that we can sympathise with, even be attracted to. Yet we can also see that they’re villainous because they choose to be. Shakespeare gives his villains and his tragic heroes dignity by granting them their awful humanity. And he shows that it is only because his villains do wicked things willingly that they can be redeemed; the freedom to sin is the precursor for the unlooked-for miracle of redemption, the gift of loving forgiveness is accepted only because one knows he does not deserve it. Rather than teach a child that her soul is good, a child must come to understand her own capacity for wickedness and understand the need for punishment, because only then can she accept the anxiety-eliminating joy of redemption.

Ironically, it is the avoidance of punishment that may very well cause anxiousness in the child, for the work of making oneself more socially appropriate is never done, but punishment has a fixed term. In C.S. Lewis’s prescient novel That Hideous Strength, he writes of the progressive project of eliminating punishment. “You got to get the ordinary man into the state in which he says ‘Sadism’ when he hears the word ‘Punishment’,” says the female leader of the new progressive police force, one Officer Hardcastle. She goes on to explain that “what has hampered every English police force up to date was precisely the idea of deserved punishment. For desert was always finite: you could do so much to the criminal and no more. Remedial treatment, on the other hand, need have no fixed limit; it could go on till it has affected a cure, and those who were carrying it out would decide when that was.”

Of course, it would be unfair to compare the job of a parent, which truly is never done, to the task of the judicial system in meting out punishment. But Hardcastle’s basic philosophy is the same: gentle parenting’s rubric of offering more or less socially accepted choice options but not punishment puts a child under the constant pressure to always be under remedial anxieties. The alternative is that she becomes so immune to these anxieties that she ceases to feel them internally, and instead she comes to genuinely expect that the world will conform to her inner feelings. This is perhaps close to what we see with much of contemporary grievance culture. It is now society that is put under the self-scrutinising anxieties of constant remediation. And who will decide when the cure for social ills has been met? Perhaps the angry blue-haired 19-year olds will let us know.

In parenting, it is redemption that should be the focus, a deepening of the human soul that comes from humility and transforms from the inside. The irony of the conscious parenting ethos is that while it purports to understand the child, it has a blind spot for understanding the nature of the human soul. And that with its focus on behaviour rather than on badness, the gentle parent contributes to anxiety rather than alleviating it.

If a view that focuses on the badness of the human soul and its need for forgiveness sounds Christian, that is because it is. Christianity is based on the idea that human nature is corrupt, or rather, that it has been corrupted. It also tells that there should be justice for wrongdoings, that evil acts should be punished because the evil acts originate in the baseness of the human heart. Of course, this isn’t simply Christian. The ancient and even recent world shared this sense of the need for punishing those who do wrong. When we punish an individual it is not exclusively about re-educating him into socially accepted forms of behaviour, but about giving some satisfaction, some justice, to the wronged party. If Kevin hits Johnny, it is all very well for us to encourage both of them to get over it, though of course a “natural consequence” of the hitting might be that Johnny no longer wants to play with Kevin. But “natural consequences” don’t apply in the adult world. We not only do children a disservice if we don’t administer symbolic punishments for their actions, we also don’t treat them as competent humans, capable of entering into the symbolic nature of civilisation. The “natural consequence” of someone doing the unspeakable and murdering my child, for instance, might be that I tear his throat out with my bare teeth. But we instead give the criminal a symbolic punishment of a prison term of 25 years, an arbitrary number that is supposed to answer some demand for justice and some demand for impartiality. “Natural consequence” would see a society spiral into vengeance; symbolic punishments save us from this.

In fact there is a “natural consequence” of understanding the dark shadow of one’s soul and the ache for forgiveness. That is why redemption is the constant theme of great stories, from St. Paul to King Lear to Darth Vader. But even in Christian gentle parenting circles, parents whitewash the central tenets of Christianity in their efforts not to traumatise a child by mentioning sin or punishment. Consider these comments by Anna Skates, a children’s church minister and conscious parenting influencer. She won’t say: “Jesus died for you/your sins.” Instead, she favours a gentle approach: “While I realise that statement won’t psychologically damage every kid, if it damages ONE, it’s not worth using. Period… And the reality is, Jesus didn’t die specifically for your kid. I know that’s a bit blunt but technically — Jesus died publicly and grotesquely because he was a political and religious threat to those in power.” What a dim view Skates takes of a child’s intellect and capacity for handling emotionally difficult concepts. Rather than allow a difficult idea to be presented to a child, she assumes that a safe intellectual space is more sacred than a deep one.

Skates goes on to discuss her discomfort with saying that “God wanted Jesus to die” (in itself the wrong way entirely to frame the issue, and not something a theologian would say). “To attempt to teach the concept of a loving God,” Skates writes, “while also delivering this narrative is confusing and jarring. This also makes the concept of ‘following Jesus’ much more ominous and threatening than it should be.”

“More ominous than it should be”? I am not sure what cheery cupcake-Bible Skates is reading, but in the one I have, most of the disciples and apostles are killed, horribly, because of their faith. And even while they lived they followed Jesus’s injunction to take up their crosses and follow him, something every Christian is commanded to do. Christianity is ominous and threatening. It asks for nothing more than your life. It is life-giving precisely because the Christian is asked to dare all and risk all, because she has faith in her redemption, a faith which gives her joy and freedom. “Conscious parenting” influencers like Skates have an impoverished view of children, one that assumes that they have no intellectual or emotional depth, and so deprive them of the very narratives that will form this depth within them.

We are in the season of Advent. The church lights an Advent candle each Sunday before Christmas: one for hope, one for peace, one for joy and one for love. But until recently, at least until the 20th century, Christians were told to think on four other things during this season: on death, judgement, heaven, and hell. Not very gentle, or very merry. It is a scary religion. And rightly so. Death is not a metaphor. And punishment is something we all have deserved. Holy terrors. Good. I don’t want a gentle Father, one who speaks down to me in a condescending way. I want to worship a God who puts the fear of God in me, who has enough faith in me to show me my own wickedness and the judgement that I deserve, and then who will give to me instead of punishment, a baby, soft and small and lying in a manger.