Gentle Parenting Tips
What is gentle parenting?
Gentle parenting is exactly what it sounds like: a kinder and gentler way to raise children. gentle parenting is about communicating with your kids and viewing them as unique individuals rather than extensions of yourself.
A lot of people mistake it with permissive parenting, but it still involves creating boundaries and setting rules for kids to follow (as does permissive parenting, by the way, just in a different way). It just approaches how we handle both the creation of those rules and the consequences for breaking them. “The tools of gentle parenting are connection, communication, and consistency.
How to be a gentle parent
Empathy is the most important aspect of gentle parenting, and it needs to be a part of everything that you do. Put yourself in your kids’ shoes. Remember what it was like to be little. The great thing about parenting is that we’ve already experienced what it’s like to be little, so it’s a lot easier to empathize with our children.
Before you set a boundary, ask yourself if it’s reasonable based on what your child is actually capable of doing. Not what you think they should be able to do, not what you want them to do, but actually capable of doing based on their development.
For example, you may want your 2-year-old to sit quietly at a restaurant, share nicely with others, and not throw a tantrum in the middle of the store. However, developmentally speaking she’s just not capable of those things yet. Kids don’t develop abilities such as self-control (including emotional control) and sharing until around age 4.
Discipline in gentle parenting is all about focusing on the actions and making the consequences fit the infraction so that your kids learn and grow. If your son breaks something because he was careless with it, don’t ground him from the TV for a week. TV had nothing to do with his actions, so why should it be included in the consequences? Instead, you could maybe set up a “repayment plan” where he does chores to earn the money to pay for the damage.
By giving consequences that make sense, you’re helping your child learn actual lessons from their mistakes. That’s really the goal of discipline, isn’t it? We all want our kids to grow up knowing that there are right and wrong ways to do something and that it’s important to learn and grow
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