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

Children aren't inherently good. Tim Graham/Getty Images

Children aren't inherently good. Tim Graham/Getty Images


December 23, 2024   9 mins

It’s the tone of voice that is the worst part. You know the voice. “What kind of choice do we want to make, Aiden?” “Ella, we use gentle voices with each other.” “Liam, do you think your behaviour makes Luna feel safe?”

Gentle parenting, or conscious parenting, professes to foster compassion and emotional self-understanding in a child. It’s about respecting the emotions of a child and the motivations behind those emotions. If a child has a tantrum, hits, or generally misbehaves, it is because she is frustrated — and a parent’s job is to address the root cause of the child’s frustrations. A child should be understood, never punished. This is because for a gentle parent, children aren’t bad. They aren’t even neutral. They are inherently good. As a mother myself to two teenagers, this is news.

Punishment, in the gentle mindset, focuses the attention on an unnatural consequence rather than on the motivations for behaviour. No motivation is bad, because no feeling originates in one’s selfishness, one’s greed, or one’s desire to dominate. Anger and inappropriate behaviour are caused by frustration: the frustration of not being understood, of not being able to accomplish what one wishes, of not being able to freely do what one wants. When a child experiences a curb to their will, the parent needs to offer comfort. Instead of punishment, a child should face the “natural consequences” of her choices. For instance, if a child refuses to go to sleep, this means that she suffers the natural consequence of getting tired and cranky.

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.

“Gentle parenting ignores the depth and complexity of a child’s soul.”

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.


Marilyn Simon is a Shakespeare scholar and university instructor. She writes the substack Submission


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Alcina Ward
Alcina Ward
1 hour ago

Classic straw man. Positive parenting is great if not overused.

As a mum of 3 little girls, I must say all the verbiage about dark corners of souls rather passes me by. I’m more focused on encouraging proper table manners and collaborative play. On that basis, I’ve found some of the ideas of “Positive Parenting” extremely useful, particularly when dealing with tantrums. It’s basic psychology – works on adults too! – admit the validity of anothers’ perspective and it acts like a magic key to defuse their anger. Like anything though, it can be overused. Concepts of absolute good and bad are also important. Moral relativism is a path to madness. I don’t know any parents who’d disagree.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 hour ago
Reply to  Alcina Ward

Your children are still small, just you wait….

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
1 hour ago
Reply to  Alcina Ward

Well said. I found the arguments in this piece rather overwrought, not least when it ventured into the territory of Christian “original sin”.

It’s possible to be fully cognisant of the capacity for good or bad inherent in every human being, without recourse to some imaginary “saviour”.

David Morley
David Morley
1 hour ago
Reply to  Alcina Ward

Sounds sensible to me. Use what works, reject what doesn’t, don’t tie yourself into knots over it. Aim to be a good enough parent, and don’t beat yourself up if you fall short sometimes.

And let your kids realise that they have to fit in with adults – that the world doesn’t just revolve around them (it’s what the French do).

Mark O'Neill
Mark O'Neill
1 hour ago

Parenting should both soften you and harden you at the same time.

You can melt at the sight of one of them tucked up in their beds but you’d better stiffen up when they get out of line.

This is your duty as a parent

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
57 minutes ago
Reply to  Mark O'Neill

There is also nothing wrong with learning from natural consequences. It’s the parents/adults that protect their children from any consequences that are the problem!
I work with a child that refuses to wash, the kid stinks. The natural consequence of this should be that the other children refuse to play with him because of it and call him stinky but they don’t because they’re scared of getting trouble for being mean.
we seem to take snippets of psychology that apply to serious cases and think it will work wonders on those that don’t need it. It doesn’t!
People also think that being nurturing is all about being gentle, it’s not, it’s about preparing then for adulthood in a balanced way.

David Morley
David Morley
1 hour ago

Christianity is based on the idea that human nature is corrupt, or rather, that it has been corrupted.

This is where we need care. While parents a few generations back were more willing to punish and admonish, they were also more accepting that kids were just kids – without the language of corruption.

If kids went scrumping (stealing apples from an orchard or garden) this was wrong, but it was also just what kids did. If boys fought, they needed to be broken up and talked to – but boys were just boys. It wasn’t “toxic masculinity”, one of our modern versions of corruption.

What we need to do is guide and punish as necessary with the aim of producing good adults – without all the heavy religiosity (secular or not) of seeing normal children’s and adolescents behaviour as signs of corruption and evil.

AC Harper
AC Harper
1 hour ago
Reply to  David Morley

Unfortunately the leftish stance is still that people are born as ‘blank slates’ and may be ‘civilized’ by worthy education. This is an error and (surprise) decidedly against religious principles that human nature is corrupt.

David Morley
David Morley
1 hour ago
Reply to  AC Harper

I kind of agree – though I see it the opposite way.

Because of the belief in a blank slate and the denial of any kind of human nature, we see perfectly natural behaviours as signs of corruption. We lay a heavy moral stress on behaviours which may not be great but are really pretty normal.

Ours is actually a very moralising age.

J Bryant
J Bryant
5 hours ago

Great essay.
More than anything, this essay convinces me we’re living in a decadent society; a society in its over-ripened end stage.
More than ever, I find secret joy in Betjeman’s famous phrase, “Fall friendly bombs…”
Fall friendly bombs on cities: they aren’t fit for people now.
Let the bombs extinguish the deep, plush cushion of hypertrophied civilization. Let the bombs make us forage for our daily bread, fight for our place on earth, fornicate mindlessly to create a new generation that will care for us in old age.
Let the bombs return us to a nasty, brutish past, not because it’s inherently good, or in some abstract sense ethically better than our present state, but because it’s what we’re made for. It’s where we’ll flourish or die, and it’s where the entire human community would laugh raucously at the concept of gentle parenting.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
1 hour ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Until the next time?

Following your argument, it’d just become a repeated cycle, so what would be the point?

No! Fight for what needs to be changed now. We’re not all “Slough”.

Last edited 1 hour ago by Lancashire Lad
David Morley
David Morley
1 hour ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Sounds like you are wishing it on. A sure sign of decadence.