Am I gentle parenting, or am I just a pushover?

There are plenty of would-be comedians producing not-that-funny videos featuring the phrase, “gentle parenting.” The most common variation was dragging our parents’ generation for some kind of abusive parenting tactic, followed up by a new parent hugging their child. I found these Reels as informative as they were humorous, so I had to Google the phrase.

This gentle parenting thing turned out to be a pretty big deal, so much bigger than my sleep deprived brain could grapple with.

I eventually distilled down the concept to mean allowing our little dictator to rule with an iron fist. There are, of course, nuances beyond simply complying with your toddler’s demands with the broad aim of allowing them to learn the consequences of their own actions while validating their feelings.

But, isn’t that simply parenting?

I was raised with a different parenting style

My parents are the classic Boomer archetype: hippies-turned-yuppies, granola loving neoliberal Clinton Democrats. My mother shopped at the health food store, a place that sold fruit leather instead of fruit roll-ups. They never grounded me, though I was once or twice sent to my room. Nobody ever beat me, but I did have a few open palm spankings.

Before becoming a parent, I spent time with my friends’ children on long weekends, at barbecues, brunches, birthdays, and even a few times at local bars. Some of those kids are already teenagers now. I had always assumed I would be a better parent to older children than to younger ones. I prefer routines to chaos, reason and logic to whims of hunger-induced tantrums, and conversation to high-energy rough housing.

I had always heard having your own children is different. As it turns out, my tolerance for a whiney, cranky, misbehaving toddler is much higher when he’s my own. My first response is to ask him why he’s upset rather than to yell. It seemed to me, as a first-time parent who had watched other parents struggle to control their children, the easiest way to soothe him was to ask what was wrong. I wasn’t trying to gentle parent, I’m just a people pleaser.

And if logic and reason doesn’t work, bribery surely does, right?

Sometimes I yell, but not often

My wife is less gentle. Recently our son scraped his arm. He didn’t want us to bandage it, even after I showed him the assorted options decorated with puppies, planets, and Elmo. I called them stickers, which he loves, and I even let him stick a BandAid on my knee. Nothing worked. I suggested to my wife that we might bribe him with the promise of a fruit juice ice pop since we’ve convinced him these are just as good as ice cream. I was willing to negotiate with him.

“We just need to make him do things sometimes,” my wife said, adopting the popular tactic otherwise known as “not negotiating with terrorists.”

After dinner, when I went to wipe his hands, I swooped in to wipe his scraped arm. “No, no, no,” he cried. “It stings, it stings.” I held fast and wiped it clean before applying antibacterial cream. As I stuck the bandage on, I tried to explain it was part of growing up. I wanted to comfort him. I didn’t like to hear him cry. He cried anyway.

I have raised my voice. I have even yelled. But only rarely. I wear eyeglasses, and with an astigmatism and high prescription, I’m nearly blind without them. These facts haven’t prevented my toddler from knocking the glasses off my face, sometimes intentionally. He broke two pairs, even after having conversations about why he shouldn’t touch my glasses.

Several months ago, when my second pair had already been glued back together more than once, he heard quite a few choice words when he knocked them off my face. It was the first real expression of anger I showed him, and I confined him to his crib while I waited for the glue to dry. He sobbed the whole time, and even tried negotiating his early release.

The time out in the crib was his first real punishment. He stopped hitting my glasses. Or at least, he stopped for a while. Then, a few weeks ago, while we were at my parents house, he slapped my face directly on the bridge of the frames. The already broken glasses snapped again, the pieces spilling across the floor. I yelled at him. I yelled loud enough my father heard me from the basement. My mother heard me yell from her bedroom. My wife heard me from the shower. My son was startled, frightened even.

I had to crawl around on my hands and knees, moving my hand over the floor until I found the pieces. We had transitioned from a crib to a toddler bed, so I had no place for his time out while waiting for the glue to dry. Instead, I blindly collected his toys scattered around the living room, placed them in their Rubbermaid containers, and stowed them in the closet.

For the rest of the day, he was angry with me. Later, when we got home, he didn’t want me to sit on the couch, and when we went to read to him before bed, he insisted my wife read to him instead. It didn’t feel good. The next morning, when he still held a grudge, I worried, at 3 years old, he was going to resent me for the rest of his life.

I’m not intentionally trying to gentle parent. And I want to set limits for my child because I know he needs them. His level of fruit snack consumption alone is proof of that. But I also know I don’t want a relationship with him that is distant. I want him to trust me, I want him to understand the reason why I set limits for him.

Maybe at 3, that’s too complicated for him to understand. But I’m still going to try.