![]() The parent provides a model for keeping one’s cool, but no overt incentives for doing so-the kid becomes a person who is self-regulating, kind, and conscientious because she wants to be, not because it will result in ice cream. The gently parented child, the theory goes, learns to recognize and control her emotions because a caregiver is consistently affirming those emotions as real and important. The gentle parent holds firm boundaries, gives a child choices instead of orders, and eschews rewards, punishments, and threats-no sticker charts, no time-outs, no “I will turn this car around right now.” Instead of issuing commands (“Put on your shoes!”), the parent strives to understand why a child is acting out in the first place (“What’s up, honey? You don’t want to put your shoes on?”) or, perhaps, narrates the problem (“You’re playing with your trains because putting on shoes doesn’t feel good”). ![]() It has no official doctrine: writing in the Times, Jessica Grose called the approach “a sort of open-source mélange, interpreted and remixed by moms across the country.” It doesn’t even have an official name-“gentle parenting” is a catchall for variations that include “respectful parenting,” “mindful parenting,” and “intentional parenting.” In its broadest outlines, gentle parenting centers on acknowledging a child’s feelings and the motivations behind challenging behavior, as opposed to correcting the behavior itself. But that was it: “Hurry up! You’re making us late!” As someone whose morning exercise takes the form of a power struggle over when and under what circumstances my five-year-old will put down his trains, put on his shoes, and leave for school, I knew, reading Delahooke, that I had entered a reality-distortion field, but I wasn’t sure which one of us was the agent of distortion.ĭelahooke’s recommendations in “Brain-Body Parenting” hew closely to the child-rearing philosophy commonly known as “gentle parenting,” which has been the vogue among vigilant, trend-aware P.M.C. ![]() I skimmed ahead for further disclosures of Delahooke’s authoritarian tendencies. I went back and reread the paragraph from the beginning. “When my body budget was in a deficit,” she writes, “I’d sometimes say things I later regretted, projecting my own lack of internal resources onto my kids: ‘Hurry up! You’re making us late!’ ” Stress and exhaustion, she goes on, “turned me into an authoritarian and controlling mom.” She recalls a time when her three daughters were young and she often felt overwhelmed. ![]() Not far into her new book, “ Brain-Body Parenting” (Harper Wave), the child psychologist Mona Delahooke makes a confession. ![]()
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