Day: November 1, 2023

This post was originally published by Parenting Translator. Sign up for the newsletter and follow Parenting Translator on Instagram.
Recently there has been a movement on social media and the parenting community more broadly to practice “gentle parenting.” The exact definition of gentle parenting is not completely clear because it is not a term that has been studied in the research or used by psychologists in clinical practice. The term gentle parenting is credited to British author, Sarah Ockwell-Smith, who wrote several books on the topic. Gentle parenting has since become a buzzword and been co-opted by countless parenting influencers on social media.
Reassuringly though, most conceptualizations of gentle parenting seem to be based on principles that nearly every child psychologist or expert in child development would endorse such as respecting the child, taking the child’s perspective into account, empathizing with and validating your child and building the parent-child bond thr..