Gentle Parenting

Letter Exchange with Von

This post is a letter exchange with

Von

about traditional parenting vs. gentle parenting. Von’s post is called “Woodshed Parenting”

Some Background:

My assumption going in was that Von and I agreed on the broad overarching ideas of parenting, and by extension, what it means to be a good person, but that we differed on the nitty- gritty day-to-day approach to achieve those goals.

I am excited about this format because it’s long-form and substantive. I am apprehensive that I will be able to maintain a logical flow while my primary focus is responding to Von’s points, not crafting my own. As I write, it concerns me that (1) this piece is getting very long and (2) that I hadn’t foreseen how much background I would need to include to feel I am explaining myself adequately. A lot of surprises in this format!

Bibliography:

I can’t say that I have read Von’s bibliography. I am Jewish and familiar with the Old Testament. I use the Jewish understanding of the Old Testament as my guide in my parenting and in all things. That’s the one source he mentions that I am familiar with.

Important Disclaimer:

Parenthetically, but of utmost significance: I in no way represent all Jewish people, all people who believe in gentle parenting, or any other group, on any level or in any way. My views are entirely my own, based most powerfully on personal experience, but also from reading some excellent parenting books and, in a smaller way, getting encouragement from some wonderful parenting accounts on social media.

I am privileged to have both wonderful parents and in-laws who raised my husband and me with love and good values, to learn from contemporaneously, and who have suggested excellent reading on parenting as well. The books I would recommend would be The Nurtured Heart Approach by Howard Glasser, The Explosive Child by Ross Greene, The Sears Baby Book by William Sears MD FRCP, and also, from our parents’ era: T. Berry Brazelton’s  Infants and Mothers, The Magic Years by Selma Fraiberg, and the series of Ames and Ilg books that describe each age. But I deeply believe that each parent’s own heart and mind and their best efforts to improve their own character are their most potent and relevant parenting tools.

Parents should wish their children to be:

Von accurately rephrases my picture of what we want our children to grow up to look like.

Turning that into a positive list, I believe she is saying that she thinks parents should wish their children to be:

1) Respectful

2) Generous

3) Hard Working

4) Responsible

5) Moral and/or properly judgemental of their own behaviour

6) Understanding of agency

Some of those might be a bit off, but I think I got the gist. She can feel free to correct me.

So where we definitely agree is that I believe that all parents should have goals for their parenting. I even agree with all of the above goals. And I would add to them.

But for this section I am seconding what I believe is her desire: that parents should think through the goals that they should have for their children, and work out their parenting to accomplish those goals.”

I would phrase it this way: children need to grow up knowing two things: that their parents love them and that there is a G-d; there is right and wrong. The first is a prerequisite, a lens through which to perceive the second.

Principles

Von explains his excellent qualifications of grandfatherhood as a unique and well-founded place in life from which to share wisdom.

I have not finished anything yet. We have two children who are already adults, but most of our children are K-12 and under. My vantage point is having seen some results, though not to the extent at all that Von has, but I am still hands-on in the day to day: the physical safety, logistics, and time management stage of parenting young children.

Dulce et decorum est:

I deeply agree with this. Human beings crave meaning. Not having anything one is willing to die for is not truly living.

Perhaps my greatest criticism of modern living, which I link to the disillusionment of World War One, is when this phrase became a cynical jab at any sort of traditional authority. As much as human beings are flawed, and anyone sending young men to war has made errors that cost sacred human life, and as much as old ways of not questioning authority can be tweaked to keep authority more accountable and regular folks more accountable, the post WWI apathy and ennui has probably brought more death by now than the world wars. “Eat, drink and be merry” is an immoral philosophy. It is also deeply unsatisfying. Mocking G-d, religion, authority, spirituality, meaning, and the value of self-restraint has led us to a world where life expectancy fell because of despair deaths. People a hundred years ago would not have been able to fathom the numbers of people who die today merely because they have no reason to live. We have more freedom, more prosperity, more opportunity, and better medical care than ever in human history, but the lack of meaning in life literally kills people.

Children should be seen and not heard:

As far as specifics, we do not call adults by their first names. We also do not silence children, but obviously real life has an awful lot of enforced quiet times at home, not to mention the enormous quantity of time that children are required to be quiet in school.

Traditional schooling methods do not resonate with me. But I believe that the opportunity to grow up among one’s peers, as part of a community, far outweighs the downsides of structure and pressure inherent in a school setting. (This is my take on “unschooling.”) My personal belief is that the home must be extra supportive, extra gentle, with maximum leeway, so that a child can thrive in a school situation which focuses on the collective in place of the individual. Our children attend and have attended Jewish schools that teach our values. Our goal as parents is to raise them in consonance with those values. I cannot imagine sending children to a school that claims to be value-less or that teaches values that contradict the values we teach at home. I have no input on that.

Respect Your Elders:

Children cannot learn in silence. But a person who is grounded always respects those who are older and in positions of authority. Deference must be shown. We teach children respect by being respectful ourselves to our own elders.

As much as we care that people deserving of respect always deserve decorum, we balance that with the idea that children under a certain age are not capable of respect or disrespect. We manage their behavior practically, but we don’t take it too seriously. It’s not a character defect; it’s developmental.

What a Child Can Do:

Von defines the purpose of childhood as:

The purpose of childhood is training for adulthood. What a child can do, the child should do. His parents are not his slaves. There are things that the children can’t do, and when the children do the things they can do, they free up the parent to concentrate on those things.

I would say that the purpose of childhood is to give a child the emotional fortitude necessary to be a functional and moral person.

On a practical level, children are capable of so much. It is empowering to have expectations for children, to teach them to do practical tasks as early as they are able, and to allow them to take care of themselves and contribute to the care of their family in developmentally appropriate ways. It is difficult to run a household of a large family without help from children, but I wouldn’t give that as a reason that children should help. It teaches children how much effort is involved in various tasks: that things don’t do themselves, and gives children buy-in to the family as a unit. They feel part of the family because they contribute. They also are able to make their mark on how the house is run through the choices they make when they help. Agency, as Von lists in his collection of attributes a parent ought to want their child to have, is extremely important. Children who can care for themselves and contribute to their families in age appropriate ways have agency and therefore a sense of pride in their work and themselves.

(I won’t go into “parentification” here. I will just say that it is not a contradiction to have children who help who are not parentified.)

Helicopter Parenting:

I personally view parenting as raising children to worship G-d. Overly involved parenting like helicopter parenting gets in the way of raising a child with G-d’s laws as parents assert too much control based on ephemeral goals. Too many rules muddy the waters for teaching G-d’s rules. I don’t think that’s a religious parent’s universal view, but that’s my view. Helicopter parenting elevates things like- safety concerns, which may or may not be rooted in reality; nutritional preferences, which may or may not have scientific basis; overemphasis on appearance- takes concerns which are magnified by parents’ insecurities and either puts them on par with G-d’s laws or worse, replaces G-d’s timeless instructions on how to live with passing fads.

Helicopter parenting, like Von mentions earlier in his piece, counteracts the idea of a child having agency. It positions parents as all-powerful and children as helpless defenseless pawns.

The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of parenting is the strength of the parent-child bond. Every conflict strains that bond. That bond is what enables a child to be functional and moral. As a parent who wants a child to grow up worshipping G-d, that child’s future attitude towards G-d is largely rooted in the strength of the parent-child bond. A core idea of my view of parenting is that silly things like a second helping of dinner ought not be reason enough to strain the parent-child bond.

Physical Discipline

I think that corporal punishment had its place in an era where life was harsh. Parents had typically been through awful things. Physical conditions were universally poor and life was really difficult.

We live in an unimaginably prosperous and cushy world. Our children can learn right from wrong without the methods of yesteryear. They can imbibe the lessons of yesteryear with more gentle methods. Parents today haven’t suffered through wars, haven’t known true hunger, and generally lack experience with premature death. The harsh methods that made sense in previous times are not the standard modern parents should hold themselves to. Those of us whose lives are so much more pampered than our forbears owe it to our children to soften our approach appropriately.

I agree that non-corporal punishment can be harsh and cruel. There is definitely harshness in various non-corporal punishments.

Like I mentioned in the section on helicopter parenting, the parent-child bond is the strongest weapon in the arsenal of parenting, not the ability to punish or reward. The connection between parents and children is the foundation of life. It is the cornerstone of a happy childhood. It provides a durable and flexible foundation for a functional, moral adulthood. Gentle parenting does not use punishment. By-the- book gentle parenting doesn’t believe in rewards either, and frowns on too much praise. (I do use rewards and praise.)

Instead, an environment conducive to proper behavior is established, expectations are kept to a minimum, explained very clearly (a parent must be clear on this themselves), scrutinized as to age-appropriateness, and positive feedback is crucial. By-the-book gentle parenting will not say “good job,” instead “I noticed that you put the books away neatly.” The point is to amplify desired behavior by focusing attention on it. And that desired behavior should be laid out with detail in a child-friendly way that doesn’t make assumptions as to what the child knows.

(Rewards and praise are seen as a substitute for real choice. A child is trained to expect praise and reward. This erodes their sense of self. It makes their self-worth conditional on the approval of others, not their intrinsic worthiness as a human, and not the judgment of their own conscience. For example, telling a girl that she is pretty. She may think that she is only worthy if she is attractive. I don’t think an incidental use of rewards and praise will do that. That’s why I don’t entirely avoid rewards or praise.)

There is negative feedback as well. Bad behavior should not elicit a powerful response from a parent; that reinforces the behavior. One of our most basic needs as humans is for attention. Intense reactions train us to do it again to repeat the response. In simplest terms, a child playing with a dangerous toy has the toy calmly removed. For everyone’s safety, it can’t be returned. That’s not a punishment; that’s a natural consequence of behavior. As adults we learn from the consequences of our behavior. Children can learn that way too.

Not utilizing punishments means not creating artificial consequences, but it does not mean insulating a child from the consequences of their own actions, like lying for a child, jumping in to replace something the child broke recklessly or intentionally, or blaming every interaction the child has on the other person.

Training:

As far as proactive guidance, I agree. Individual parenting decisions should emerge from a greater framework of overarching parenting goals, not ad hoc reactions.

Training can be utilizing reward and punishment to circumvent a child’s inner right and wrong and to condition them to certain behaviors without actually convincing them that those behaviors are a good idea. That is not as durable and flexible a foundation as a willing and understanding participation based on a parent-child connection.

Conclusion:

Intentionality in parenting is key. Having a picture of the adult a parent hopes to raise, and gearing parenting methods on a day to day level towards that goal is what gives parenting meaning and what makes parenting effective.

A goal of transmitting timeless values is a lot more likely to produce children who can function as moral adults than haphazard methods or following fads.

There is a lot Von and I agree on.