Have you recently heard about gentle parenting and want to know what the hype is all about? Gentle parenting has been around for a long time. It is a great parenting method to help you connect with your child, all the while setting firm and healthy boundaries.
If you are struggling to find a parenting method that feels good and doesn’t feel like it is harming your child, gentle parenting may be exactly what you need!
Here is your guide on gentle parenting. Learn what it is all about and how to get started with this method.
What is Gentle Parenting?
Gentle parenting is an evidence-based way to raise your kids. Its key principles involve:
- Respect for both yourself and your child
- Empathy
- Boundaries and open communication
- Healthy age-appropriate discipline
This approach is all about teaching and modeling respect to your children. You give them respect, and they give it back in return.
It is also about establishing clear, healthy boundaries. The main focus is on using empathy to fully understand your child.
Gentle parenting is all about teaching your kids how to express and healthily take care of their emotions!
How is Gentle Parenting Different From Traditional Methods?
Traditional parenting styles usually involve a more authoritative approach where the parents are seen as powerful and what they say goes, whereas gentle parenting involves your child in the process and allows them to fully express themselves. Gentle parenting helps your child to be seen and heard, and not just disciplined.
Other parenting styles are very lenient and don’t discipline or really care about their children’s behavioral outcome. Gentle parenting focuses on the child wholly and helps them at each stage of their life.
Does Gentle Parenting Include Discipline?
Most people, when they hear about gentle parenting, think it is all about being kind and loving to your child with no actions or discipline. However, that is not the case at all. While gentle parenting does not use yelling, spanking, or shaming your child, you can and will still discipline your child. You will use positive discipline techniques instead.
These techniques focus more on what needs the child is not getting rather than immediately stopping the behavior. When your child misbehaves, first, take a pause. Then try to figure out why they misbehaved rather than just punish them straight away.
These discipline techniques usually involve the child and help them to make their own choices. This, in turn, helps your child learn from their mistakes and fix them rather than do them again without you knowing.
What are the Benefits of Gentle Parenting?
There are countless benefits of gentle parenting! Not only are you helping your child’s brain develop properly, but you are also teaching them how to express their emotions and deal with them in a healthy way.
Children will also be respectful to themselves, to you, and to those around them.
Some studies have shown that gentle parenting can help reduce anxiety and decrease the likelihood of your child being shy as well.
Your kids will also take responsibility for their actions and will be able to make better choices when they are raised in a gentle home. Your child will also be more resilient to stress and life in general.
Tips to Get Started With Gentle Parenting
Here are a few tips to help you get started on your gentle parenting journey!
Give Choices
One of the key principles of gentle parenting is allowing your child to make choices and not just you dictating everything. Even from a very little age, children can learn how to make good and healthy decisions.
You can start when they are a toddler! Give them a choice between what to wear, what to eat, and so on. While it may not seem like much, it greatly impacts their learning of how to effectively make decisions.
Allowing your toddler to make a choice will often help stop toddler tantrums as a whole too. Kids want to feel like they are in control and have power. All kids, regardless of their age, want to be independent. Giving them choices helps them do just that.
This will take plenty of time and practice, especially if you are not used to asking questions and giving your child choices.
Choose Your Battles
You probably have heard of the phrase, “pick your battles.” This is one of the hardest parts of gentle parenting and it takes a lot of patience and practice.
There will still be fights and tantrums and battles. That will always happen with parenting. However, when you choose and pick what battles you are going to work on, things get a lot easier.
If you see your child doing something that annoys you but is not generally wrong or unsafe, you can choose to let that go and focus on another bigger problem.
Maybe your child got into the flour and spilled it on the floor. It isn’t terrible or unsafe, so you could choose to let that one go for now. Then, if your child is shoving their sibling, that is a battle you will choose to work on.
Have Patience with Yourself
Having patience is crucial when it comes to gentle parenting. It is a hard way to parent. It takes a lot of self-control and discipline with yourself.
You must be patient with yourself. We will all make mistakes when we are gentle parenting. You will mess up. You will slip and do something that doesn’t fit in with gentle parenting. But that is okay.
You are learning. Give yourself a break and start over again. It will take a long time until gentle parenting is a habit for you.
The most important thing when you mess up is to apologize to your child and try again. Not only does this show your child that you are trying, but it also teaches them how to correctly apologize too.
If you want to teach your kids about being respectful, empathetic, and a pro at expressing their emotions, then gentle parenting is for you! As you make a daily effort to implement these traits into your parenting, you will notice happier, healthier children. And you will be happier too!
