Out with the naughty step, in with validated feelings… Francesca Angelina tries a softer approach with her toddlers
WORDS: FRANCESCA ANGELINI ©THE TIMES/NEWS LICENSING. PHOTOS: ANNA BATCHELOR/THE SUNDAY TIMES/NEWS LICENSING
One sunny morning last year I took my two children, Hope and Isaac, to a playgroup at our local park in south-east London. Isaac was asleep in his pram and I reckoned I had at least eight minutes of uninterrupted me time to scroll through my phone.
After two of my eight luxurious minutes, Hope reappeared, transformed into some kind of Dalmatian mongrel. ‘I’m a puppy,’ she announced, pawing at my leg. But already I had a sense of foreboding. To extract a three-year-old from a dog costume was going to be torture – for both of us.
Sure enough, when everyone began singing the hideous ‘tidy-up time’ chant, Hope was still 100% dog. ‘Five more minutes,’ I said, ‘and then it’s time to take it off.’ A bark signalled a hard no. I switched to reasoning with her. ‘Your brother’s hungry, it’s lunch.’ She jutted her chin out, a warning.
Then I noticed another defiant doggie. This one was further along in the stand-off, already writhing on the floor. But what really turned my head was her father. He was crouched down on the floor at his daughter’s level, repeating, ‘I understand you want to keep the dog costume on, you’re having a really nice time, you feel frustrated because you wish you could stay in the dog costume all day. You don’t want to go home. It’s time for lunch now, you need to take it off.’
His tranquillity sounded familiar. Then I twigged. This was a real-life performance of the #gentleparenting videos I’d been looking at minutes earlier. The dad wasn’t shouting, bribing or shaming. No threats were hurled. Instead he was narrating his toddler’s emotions back to her with astonishing calm, thereby affirming her feelings as real and significant. This would, according to the parenting theory behind it all, lead to a stable child who can recognise and control their emotions.
Right now, gentle parenting is all the rage. On TikTok, videos containing the term have had 3.5 billion views. Open the app and you’ll find thousands of parents posting stylishly curated mini-tutorials of themselves carefully coaxing in return for happier, more emotionally mature offspring.
So what exactly does #gentleparenting mean? And how does it work? There are many variations – some call it respectful parenting, others authoritative – but they all blend into the central ide
