When Gentle Parenting Goes Wrong

When gentle parenting goes wrong. That video, among other videos, are flooding the internet right now. People are leaving gentle parenting. They have recognized this is not the solution for helping their children learn self-regulation and self-management. Instead, it's leading to lots of out-of-control behaviors, entitlement, and as they get older, these behaviors are getting worse. Let's take a look again at that clip with this boy in a supermarket clearing the store shelves. So this is really an extreme case. We've got a kid, he looks like he's maybe 10 or something like that. I mean, I guess he could be 11. Why he's in a store, in a bakery, mad, and just throwing stuff on the shelves, clearing off the bread, clearing off the cakes. He's clearly just trying to do something to prove some point. I don't see a parent around. I don't know who he belongs to. Is he in the store by himself? Why is this happening? And maybe the parent's filming it because she's like, I've had it. This is what he does. I'm just gonna film it. You know, I don't know who's filming it and why they're following him around. Clearly a different country. I don't know what country it is, but a policeman is there trying to stop him from, you know, doing this. But he's like, hey, stop. And he kind of reaches out to try to stop him. The kid's like, stop it. And he just keeps going. Shocking. Absolutely shocking that we live in a day and age where a policeman would not feel like he could stop a 10-year-old boy from vandalizing a store. And we probably could address laws and what the laws are in different lands and whatever about this kind of thing. But there is this approach to parenting, which is this gentle parenting approach, which has been popularized, which really leads to entitlement. Like, no, that's just what they have to do. They have to express themselves. And where is their parent? Why isn't their parent, you know, talking about this? I mean, honestly, if I did that when I was a child, my mom would be like tackling me. She'd be like, no, you're not doing this, you know. And some people nowadays would say like, well, that's really extreme. But with the gentle parenting approach, people have been groomed to think, well, a child has to just, you know, they have to get all of that out. And that's how they feel. And so they have to let them show how they feel. And you don't control it. You don't stop it. You don't get in their way because you don't want to hurt them. You don't want to get hurt. So you just back off. And clearly the whole community is backing off. They're all like, what are you doing? But he has all the control over everybody else. And he knows it. Why would he ever stop that type of behavior when he can get whatever he wants or not have to do whatever anyone else wants him to do if he just goes out of control like that? I mean, he's literally manipulating psychologically all the other people that are in the room, especially because they've been probably trained with like a gentle parenting approach. They can't do anything about it. They have to just try to understand him and instead of stop him. When a person's out of control like that, they first need to get to a place of calmness and then we get to a place of understanding. I don't think you go to understanding first. And that's one thing that the gentle parenting approach really misses the mark. So in this video, someone is teasing the little boy, which is not good. It could happen with anyone though. But did you see his face? Did you see the rage in the look in his eyes and how he started lashing out at everybody? He's on his device. He does not want to be bothered. And he is now absolutely fighting against whoever it was who touched his foot with the little grabber thing. And he's not having it. He's not communicating well. He's definitely not disagreeing appropriately. He isn't understanding that he needs to address his problem. He's just emotionally lashing out. The interesting thing is, is when he does that, we don't see any evidence that he's actually being corrected for this. So the parent shouldn't be teasing the child. But when the child reacts in such a way like that, they should be helping them find freedom that comes with self-control. And the gentle parenting approach does not lead toward helping the child find the self-control and the self-regulation. It focuses more on the why that they might go out of control. Like, what are you feeling? What do you want? What can I do for you? And instead of what skill do you need to handle this? Okay, so this little boy, he's playing. He's obviously not very happy. He's kind of already weeping as he's playing. And he's playing with someone in the room. So they score a goal against him. And he's like, and he just melts down. He can't handle it that he, that somebody scored against him, that he could not stop it. And this little boy is, what is he, three or four? He's not very old. He doesn't know how to not win. He doesn't know how to accept no answers. So in the Teaching Self-Government program, this whole channel is dedicated to teaching self-government and learning how to govern yourself and how to train your children how to govern yourself. You would teach your child how to accept a no answer. You would teach them to look at the person or the situation, which is somebody scored a goal on me. Keep a calm face, voice, and body, which he was not doing because it's just a game, right? And then say, okay, it happened or disagree appropriately with the parents if you feel like they're not playing fair or whoever you're playing with. And then drop the subject, which means you go, well, I'll just move on. Either I'm going to be done playing or I'm going to say that's okay. It's just how the game goes and maybe I'll get better. Now I know he's three and four and he may not completely understand that logic, but it's up to the parent to teach it. In this case, they're playing a game with him, but he's just completely melting down. I don't know if the parent's trying to do it or not. If your child is being entitled enough that they feel like that's how they solve their problem, that's how they get your attention, then that's definitely an outcome from a gentle parenting approach because the gentle parenting is all about just, you know, vomiting those emotions so that you can be understood. Let's watch another one. So this child, he's trying to cut the little fruits. He clearly does not have patience. He's like having a tantrum. When he can't get it to work, he's having a tantrum. He doesn't know how to communicate. So why is that called a gentle parenting fail? Well, because if a parent had trained their child how to communicate, how to solve their problems, then they would know to come and to talk to the parent. Mom, I need help with this. You know, or they disagree appropriately with someone or if it didn't work, they just work through it patiently accepting the no answers because they will have been taught. Now this child was pretty small looking, but they're old enough to know that they need to be cutting on that thing and they've got all their little fruits and vegetables kind of organized on their little kitchen countertop there. So I feel like they're old enough to know how to accept a no answer if things don't go right the first time, how to have a little bit of persistence and perseverance as they work through a problem or how to go and get help. But instead they just had full-on tantrum. So now at that point, how long is the tantrum going to last? I don't know. Is mom and dad going to come and just pull them away and give them a hug because it didn't go their way? That's not good parenting. They need to be training them through that and hopefully that's what they would do. In that circumstance with my child, they would go to a calm down spot. We would have pre-taught them that when they go out of control like that, we need to go to a calm down spot. We would get to calmness. Then we would talk about what happened. We would go back and replay it the right way. Then they would get the opportunity to earn an extra tour so that they could accept a negative consequence and it would probably be something small, something off of my teaching self-government app JobJar for their age group. By the way, that app is awesome. Okay, so this last one we have a situation where a boy is playing tennis with his friend or something and the ball comes. He can't get to it in time and then all of a sudden he's like no. He can't handle failure. That is a classic signal of gentle parenting. When a person has to emote on every single thing. Now sure, there's frustrations. That can be frustrating. We also need to recognize there's another opportunity coming up when the guy hits it back next time. I can try to do better. I can learn from this. I don't have to be perfect and there is sort of an obsession with things going your way in the gentle parenting approach and the parent wants the child to feel completely understood, which I agree with seeking to understand children, but if you do it in a way that is emotionally entitling to the child, then you end up with these types of problems. I don't know exactly what the parents of these children were doing, but as I looked at these clips, I thought yep, this is the type of thing that I see and that helps me see around me that gentle parenting has gone wrong. It became a popular parenting movement and we are now seeing people that can't handle just some of the regular moments and regular experiences of life. So parents need to step up, do some parenting that will actually be training for life skills for children. Some of the best things that you can do are teach some of the four basic skills of self-government, which are how to follow instructions, how to accept no answers and criticism, how to accept consequences and disagree appropriately. By the way, in that tennis scenario, that's just a no answer. You have to be able to accept when you can't get to something you tried your best and then you get back at it. You instruct yourself to try again in the future. That's what a person has to do and they have to learn how to handle those disappointments as they are maturing through life. And of course, there's, you know, human development. We go through, you know, hard times as we learn, but if we know what we're going toward, which is I should be able to follow an instruction, accept a no answer, accept a consequence, disagree appropriately, then we actually improve better because we have something to hold on to. Now, all of those particular skills that I'm discussing have steps associated with them. And right now, I've got some free charts on my Teaching Self-Government app. So if you go find the little house with the family in it, it says Teaching Self-Government. That app right now has free Teaching Self-Government four basic skills charts on it, as well as there's a free job jar that you can use for negative consequences. It's not going to teach you absolutely everything, but it's a great resource to get started and just kind of poking around in the Teaching Self-Government world. So there are some things on there that are only for members of the TSG community, but most of the things you have access to completely for free. So go to your app store or your play store and find the Teaching Self-Government app today. I'll see you there.