I’m a gentle parent – my teenager says it’s manipulative

I don’t like disciplining my children – who are 19,16,15,11 and seven. This is because I am a terrible people pleaser as well as the fact that I loathe conflict. I am Mrs Yes Day. I hate to disappoint and think – possibly incorrectly – that children deserve a Disney-tinged childhood where they are sheltered and cossetted from the ugly big wide world for as long as possible. So when gentle parenting became popular, I jumped right on the bandwagon, as this approach seemed to hold many answers for me. Gentle parenting is a parenting style that consists of avoiding blame or shame and uses positive reinforcement to raise children. According to expert Sarah Ockwell-Smith, author of The Gentle Discipline Book, it can be summed up in four words: Empathy, Respect, Understanding, Boundaries. Ockwell-Smith grew up in a very shouty household and turned to gentle parenting to break that cycle. It is a great band-aid for parents who grew up in households with friction and who may have struggled to keep a lid on their own anger. It provides a blueprint for an alternative way. Shorts Although Ockwell-Smith is keen to point out that Gentle Parenting is not to be confused with permissive parenting. “Children do not always ‘get their own way’, parents do not say ‘yes’ all of the time, scared of the upset if they say ‘no’.” In fact, gentle parents can be more strict, with more boundaries in place. I think I probably fall somewhere between gentle and permissive. Gentle parents try not to raise their voice and don’t implement the naughty step; they don’t ground their children and they definitely don’t use physical discipline. There are obviously instances when you need to raise your voice, if a child is in danger or about to hurt someone. But shouting is a tool we all use too often in our parenting toolbox and in my opinion it can be blunt and scar-inducing. It can make a child feel shameful, scared and insecure. On the occasions I do yell blue murder at my children, which I try to avoid, I can see them physically recoil. The other morning, when we were late for school, I shouted at my daughter to get her shoes on. Was it nice? No. Did I feel bad? Yes. Did it work? Yes. It might jolt them into submission, at what emotional cost? Although I’m a big proponent of the gentle approach, I’m still on the fence about its application in my house. For me, it only works with some of my children and not with others; one of my teenagers calls it “manipulative” parenting. We have a mixture of characters and ages and this has affected my parenting style. My eldest child Isaac is similar in disposition to my fourth child, Celestia. You can do a “deal” with both of them, they are reasonable children but are extremely strong-willed. Gentle parenting works on both of them (although there are times when it would have taken too long to use it). Sometimes when we have to leave the park, I can’t simply rely on positive parenting techniques to cajole Celestia into the car. Sometimes a bribe-you-with-a-sweet mum has to come out, which I am not remotely proud of but gets the job done. Gentle parenting also works well on my youngest child, age seven, who is sensitive. He doesn’t respond at all to shouting (he hates it and bursts into tears), so in this way he and I are peas in a pod. But it’s not all sweetness and light; we have our disagreements. I have also played elaborate games to get him into the bath and bribed him with Lego, none of which is ideal. But gentle parenting definitely doesn’t work at all on my second child, who is 16. Her view of the universe is very black and white so gentle parenting is totally lost on her; if I try, I get eye rolls, so I’ve stopped trying. In fact, she thinks the way I gently parent her seven-year-old sibling is pathetic. She tells me: “Gentle parenting is confusing and manipulative. When you are telling off in a positive tone, it confuses [children] and doesn’t get the point across clearly enough. “It is better to get your point across with a firm tone and with discipline so your child clearly understands what they have done wrong,” she explains. She says that though she thinks gentle parenting is appropriate for under-threes, she won’t be using it after this age on her own children. I wonder whether this will play out in the future and if so, how my grandparenting and her parenting approaches will collide. Gentle parenting can, I think, probably be done more effectively if you just have one child or possibly two (depending on their disposition), as there are less needs to cater for and you are probably being pulled in fewer directions at any moment. You can afford to take more time over the fact that Johnny doesn’t want to go to his friend’s house if you don’t have two dolled-up teenagers who need a lift into town screaming at you. This sort of situation plays out fairly often in our house with a mixture of temperaments, needs and personalities. I’ve learnt to pick my battles with surly teens and not jump on their stress levels, though I don’t always achieve my aim elegantly, I can tell you. For me, the main challenge is about keeping sanity and boundaries in check and not going headfirst into impractical promises (my permissive parenting again). As Ockwell-Smith explains, gentle parenting “is simply treating our children in the way that we would like to be treated as adults and treating our children with respect and being kind.” Who knows, it might help us as much as it helps them and more. And I haven’t given up on winning my teen round to gentle parenting, hopefully before she becomes a parent herself one day…