If being smacked and shouted at was how you were raised, you may feel there must be a better way to bring up your own children. But if the other extreme – ‘permissive parenting’, where there’s very few boundaries and little or no discipline – is a step too far, could ‘gentle parenting’ be a good middle-ground?
Gentle parenting focuses on four key elements: respect, empathy, boundaries and understanding. And while it’s all the rage on social media at the moment, this school of thought has been around under different names for a long time. As consultant clinical psychologist Emma Citron (citronpsychology.co.uk) explains: “Gentle parenting has likely become another fad, but it’s merely a different name for old rope.
“Any type of parenting should be encouraged to be gentle parenting – in psychology, we call it positive parenting. It’s based on the idea that we notice the positive things children do and make a fuss of them, but ignore the silly things, because the model is encouraging good behaviours rather than poor.”
