Why I Stopped Being a 'Gentle Parent' (And What I Do Instead)

Let me paint you a picture: It's Tuesday afternoon. My four-year-old has just thrown a wooden block at her baby brother's head because I gave her the wrong color cup. Again.

Old me (circa 2022, peak gentle parenting era) would have gotten down to her eye level, used my calm voice, and said something like: "I can see you're having big feelings about the cup. Can you use your words to tell me what you need?"

New me? I removed the block, checked on the baby, and told her firmly: "We don't throw things at people. You can be angry, but you can't hurt your brother. Go to your room until you're ready to say sorry."

Then I waited for the judgment. Because here's what nobody tells you about gentle parenting in 2025: it has become a religion. And I just committed heresy.

The Pendulum Swings Back

Somewhere between authoritarian parenting ("because I said so") and attachment parenting ("let's co-regulate through this"), we landed on gentle parenting as the holy grail. The promise was simple: validate your child's feelings, set boundaries with empathy, never raise your voice, and you'll raise emotionally intelligent humans who can navigate their feelings.

The reality? A generation of exhausted parents walking on eggshells around tiny tyrants who've learned that "having big feelings" is a get-out-of-consequences-free card.

Dr. Becky Kennedy's "Good Inside" philosophy swept through millennial parents like wildfire. Her Instagram posts got millions of views. Her book stayed on bestseller lists for months. And suddenly, every parent who dared to say "no" without a twenty-minute feelings validation session felt like a monster.

But something interesting started happening around 2024. Parents started burning out. Hard.

The Burnout Backlash

The therapists started noticing first. Kids coming in who couldn't handle any disappointment. Parents coming in who felt like hostages in their own homes. And underneath it all, a creeping resentment that nobody wanted to talk about.

"I spent three years never saying no without explaining why," one mother told me over coffee last month. "My daughter is six. She now requires a peer-reviewed thesis before she'll brush her teeth. And she still doesn't brush her teeth."

Another friend, a former gentle parenting devotee, put it more bluntly: "I realized I was raising an asshole. A very emotionally literate asshole who could tell you exactly how my boundaries made her feel, but an asshole nonetheless."

This is the conversation we're finally having in 2025. Not because gentle parenting is wrong, but because we took it too far. We gave our kids empathy, but we forgot to give them structure. We validated their feelings but forgot to teach them that other people have feelings too.

The Research Never Said What We Thought It Said

Here's the thing that gets lost in the Instagram infographics: attachment theory never said children needed zero boundaries. Dr. John Bowlby, who developed attachment theory in the 1950s, emphasized both security AND exploration. Both connection AND independence.

Dr. Diana Baumrind's research on parenting styles showed that authoritative parenting (high warmth AND high structure) produced the best outcomes. Not permissive parenting (high warmth, low structure), which is what gentle parenting often becomes in practice.

The data is clear: kids need boundaries. They need to hear "no." They need to experience disappointment in safe ways while they're young so they can handle it when the stakes are higher.

Dr. Lisa Damour, author of "The Emotional Lives of Teenagers," puts it perfectly: "Discomfort is not damage. Our job isn't to prevent our kids from ever feeling bad. It's to help them learn that they can survive feeling bad."

What 'Authoritative' Actually Looks Like

So what does this look like in practice? It's not going back to "because I said so" parenting. It's not yelling or shaming or using fear as a control tactic.

It's responding to the block-throwing incident with both connection and consequence. It's saying: "I love you, AND we don't throw things at people. You need a break to calm down."

It's acknowledging feelings without letting feelings dictate everything: "I know you wanted the blue cup. That's disappointing. You're stuck with red today, and we'll survive."

It's requiring apologies not just to make us feel better, but to teach repair: "When you hurt someone, we make it right. Even when it's hard."

It's ending negotiations that go nowhere: "I've explained once. The answer is no. I love you too much to debate this."

The Permission to Parent

The most liberating thing I've heard recently came from a parenting educator who said: "Your child's emotional comfort is not more important than your own well-being."

Read that again.

We've created a parenting culture where mothers are expected to regulate their children's emotions 24/7 while completely suppressing their own. Where getting frustrated makes you a "bad mom." Where enforcing a bedtime without a twenty-minute wind-down routine means you're traumatizing your kid.

It's bullshit.

Kids can handle firm boundaries delivered with love. What they can't handle is a parent who's so burnt out from validating every feeling that there's nothing left.

Finding the Middle Ground

The parenting style wars of 2025 are really about finding nuance in a digital world that rewards extremes. Gentle parenting got so popular because the alternative presented was often harsh, authoritarian discipline. But there's a massive middle ground we forgot about.

That middle ground looks like:

Respect without power struggles. "I hear you want to stay up late. Bedtime is 8pm. Do you want to brush teeth first or put on pajamas first?"

Empathy without negotiation. "I understand you're disappointed. And no, you can't have more screen time."

Connection without capitulation. "I love spending time with you. I also need time to myself. Both things are true."

Consequences that teach. "When you don't put your toys away, I put them in timeout for a day. That's what happens."

The Conversation We Need to Have

Social media sold us an impossible parenting standard. The gentle parenting accounts showed the calm, successful moments. They didn't show the mother who spent forty-five minutes validating feelings while dinner burned and the baby screamed and she wanted to run away from home.

They didn't show the toddler who learned to weaponize "you're not being gentle with me" every time a boundary came up.

They didn't show the parents who followed every rule and still ended up with defiant kids because, surprise, toddlers are hard no matter what your parenting philosophy is.

The backlash against gentle parenting isn't about going back to 1950s-style authoritarianism. It's about giving parents permission to be human. To have limits. To say no without guilt. To recognize that discipline isn't a dirty word.

Where I Landed

These days, my parenting looks different. I still get down at eye level sometimes. I still validate feelings. But I also say "because I'm your mom and I said no" when I'm too tired to explain for the fifteenth time why we don't eat cookies for breakfast.

I apologize when I lose my temper, but I don't apologize for having boundaries.

I teach my kids that their feelings are valid, AND that they don't get to dictate what happens in our house.

I love them fiercely. I also require them to behave like members of a family, not tiny dictators.

Is this perfect? No. Do I still screw up? Constantly. But I'm not burnt out anymore. I'm not resentful. And my kids? They're fine. Better than fine, actually. They're learning that the world has boundaries, that disappointment is survivable, and that their mom is a person with feelings too.

The gentle parenting influencers won't like this essay. That's okay. I'm not parenting for Instagram. I'm parenting for real life, where blocks get thrown and patience runs out and sometimes "because I said so" is a complete sentence.

And that's enough.

Emma Chen is a mother of two, a recovering people-pleaser, and a firm believer that imperfect parenting is still good parenting.