New generations of parents view 'gentle parenting' as an enlightened, liberal approach, focused on child autonomy. But it may not provide the freedom that it claims to. Its demands often result in burnt-out parents, and despite its gender-neutral language, the burden falls overwhelmingly on mothers. Gentle parenting is repackaged attachment theory, and we should learn from earlier feminist critiques to understand how superficially progressive ideas can reinforce traditional gender roles in practice.
Gentle parenting is the millennial gold standard for child-rearing. The gentle parent is empathetic, validating their child's feelings and viewing them as an autonomous individual whose thoughts and needs deserve adult-level respect. Instead of using rewards and punishment, they teach and problem-solve collaboratively with their child.
Gentle parenting developed within the lineage of attachment parenting, characterised by high parental responsiveness. Its pitch is all about autonomy: by being led by your child and meeting their needs, you help them become a more genuine and confident person.
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Gentle parenting is seen as the progressive option, but it can create distinctly traditional dynamics in the home.
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But its advocates often overlook the trade-off: your interests as a parent will be subordinated to your child, and therefore to the home. The claims of gentle parenting are underpinned by theories that rose to popularity in the post-war era and cast women's workforce participation in a sinister light. Second-wave feminists identified these accounts of mothering as reactionary ideas that created guilt for women who wanted lives outside the home. Today, gentle parenting is seen as the progressive option, but it can create distinctly traditional dynamics in the home.
During the Second World War, women entered the workforce and excelled there. The idea that women might permanently opt to work outside the home was unsettling for many postwar conservatives. This felt like it was somehow bad – for society, for family values, and for children.
The British psychologist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby had studied the impact of children being separated from their parents during the war. This led him to investigate attachment, and how the early bonds between a child and its mother weren't just biologically important, but psychologically important too. Bowlby’s work influenced Mary Ainsworth, who carried out experiments to observe babies and their mothers in the 1960s and 70s.
Ainsworth’s Strange Situation demonstrated three main clusters of attachment styles by temporarily removing babies’ mothers: some babies were initially upset but then quickly calmed when their mother returned, some were inconsolable until she returned and remained upset afterwards, and some were less upset and seemed more self-reliant. Ainsworth labelled these secure, insecure-ambivalent and insecure-avoidant. These, she and her colleagues concluded, were shaped by the sensitivity and responsiveness of the mother.
‘Young children, who for whatever reason are deprived of the continuous care and attention of a mother or a substitute-mother, are not only temporarily disturbed by such deprivation, but may in some cases suffer long-term effects which persist,’ wrote Bowlby, Ainsworth and others in 1956. The implication was clear: if your child was either too needy or not needy enough, you had failed as a mother and created lifelong problems for their temperament and relationships.
In the 1970s, second-wave feminists like Nancy Chodorow and Ann Oakley pushed back against this. While attachment theory acknowledged that you could have substitute caregivers, the default was very much the mother. The weight it placed on mothers in taking on an irreplaceable role in the child's life and psyche was oppressive, reinforcing the old, patriarchal expectations of the woman's role as inextricably tied to childbearing.
When things went wrong, it was the mother who took the blame. It drew from a psychoanalytic obsession with the mother’s breast, using breastfeeding on demand as a lever to keep women in their place. There was a habit of romanticising the role of the mother, to reassure her that her hard work was being valued, but this was a trap to sell them the patriarchal ideal.
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The heritage of attachment theory makes it difficult for the weight of parenting to not fall on the mother.
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And it was unrealistic, too: many women didn’t have the economic means to just stay at home with their child all day. A better way of child-rearing, the second-wave feminists argued, was to distribute it: with the father, with an extended family, either biological or chosen, with state-supported childcare that would allow children to socialise with each other, too.
Today, most Western women have more, if not entirely equitable, access to some of the rights second-wave feminists fought for. Parental leave can be shared with a partner, so that time off work doesn't have to fall to mothers. Most European countries offer free or subsidised preschool childcare. And recent research has debunked some of the breast-is-best claims that there are long-term developmental costs to the bottle-feeding that enables other caregivers to look after babies.
Gentle parenting, pitched at a younger and more egalitarian audience, is more careful not to use gendered language that explicitly piles pressure on the mother. But the heritage of attachment theory makes it difficult for the weight of parenting to not fall on the mother. One core tenet of infant autonomy is the idea of self-weaning. The collaborative, child-led approach advocated by gentle parenting experts like Sarah Ockwell-Smith argues that the parent needs to read the child's cues rather than imposing their own specific timeline. A child, therefore, should be fed as needed, and should decide when to stop breastfeeding when needed. While this is framed as an ideal rather than a black-and-white rule, in the context of an account of child development in which high importance is placed both on the physical attachment of breastfeeding and on child autonomy, stopping for your own reasons rather than at your child’s pace may invoke some guilt.
This ties the mother to the child for that initial period of infancy. It’s harder to split your parental leave 50:50 in those circumstances. With the mother-child dyad firmly re-established as the default and correct model of infant care, we could still argue that other carers can step in and play a part. But children are often drawn to the familiar, and may feel more comfortable with the caregiver they spend the most time with. If their preferences are followed, this might result in a child who is less exposed to other caregivers, and less comfortable with them. The outcome of this, even if it’s unintended, is the emotional labour of parenting falling to one person: the mother.
The conflict-averse requirement to talk through any unwanted behaviours, rather than setting boundaries with punishments, means that dealing with tricky situations in public settings can be particularly time-consuming and stressful. If your toddler has a meltdown in the supermarket, you need to calmly stay nearby and help them work through their feelings. If they do ordinary anti-social toddler things like hit another child or take their toys, you need to guide them to learn about the underlying causes, validate their emotions and then reason with them about why their response was undesirable before helping them to make amends. Most parenting styles would advise doing at least some of these things, but you’d have the option to march your child out of the supermarket or simply tell them that it’s not okay to hit. If your child has a feisty temperament and is often resistant to your ministrations, the prospect of crowds looking on while you engage in another lengthy cycle of reasoning and repair might make going to public places feel overwhelming, and lead you to stay at home instead.
The high-stakes claims about the long-term harms done to children by parenting outside the model may lead parents to feel highly anxious about other would-be caregivers like relatives or friends stepping in if their style of care is more robust. Even the model's emphasis on child autonomy creates additional work – instead of simple instructions or boundaries, parents (mainly mothers) must constantly manufacture opportunities for choice and collaborative problem-solving. "Put on your shoes" becomes "would you like the black shoes or the red shoes?" – a simulacrum of freedom that requires more emotional labour, not less.
Cumulatively, these factors can create a demanding parenting environment that risks isolation and exhaustion, and that risk falls mostly onto women. A recent study that looked at how parents interpreted the demands of gentle parenting found that, while both gentle- and non-gentle parents were similarly satisfied with their overall experience of parenting, a third of self-identified gentle parents experienced significant self-criticism and burnout. 84% of participants were female.
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The attachment theory that underpins gentle parenting made a causative claim that deficits in maternal availability cause lifelong dysfunction for temperament and relationships. This causative claim is unsupported by evidence.
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This was a small qualitative study intended as a preliminary step to identify additional research into the sustainability of parenting methods in a time of high parental burnout. Perhaps that burnout will turn out to be similar across different parenting styles; at present, we can’t be certain. Another review of ten years of research into intensive parenting styles found that they encouraged more traditional gender roles in the home and placed more stress on mothers than fathers. But perhaps, even if gentle parenting is harder work, losing one’s autonomy as a mother is worthwhile. Perhaps this experience of intensive motherhood can inform a different account of feminism that situates the value of female experience as distinct from male experience – in the line of Mary Harrington’s reactionary feminism, for example.
However, the evidence for the necessity of all this hard, isolating work doesn't convincingly add up. The attachment theory that underpins gentle parenting made a causative claim that deficits in maternal availability cause lifelong dysfunction for temperament and relationships. This causative claim is unsupported by evidence. Research does find correlations between attachment patterns in childhood and later psychological traits, but correlation isn’t causation.
Attachment styles vary across relationships and settings, indicating they aren't determined by one infant relationship. Behavioural genetics research suggests that traits like anxiety or self-control that attachment theory attributes to parenting are significantly influenced by genetics. Different cultures shape how we behave and interact with others too.
Gentle parenting exists in its own distinctive cultural milieu. It is what educated, liberal Western people do within the individualistic norms of Western society. Many non-Western cultures are more collectivist, valuing communal responsibility where children are expected to fit into family interests rather than have their needs consistently centred. If gentle parenting claims are right, we would expect these children to struggle more than their gently-parented peers. But children from African and Asian cultural backgrounds outperform their White British peers in education and report lower levels of anxiety as adults.
A recent study into parental burnout found it to be far higher in individualistic Western cultures due to the high expectations imposed by parenting ideals, the high demands of parenting styles that prioritise child autonomy, and the lack of communal child-rearing practices. The majority of participants were, again, female. We should be open to other ways of raising resilient and emotionally well-adjusted children. Promoting their autonomy is a laudable goal – but we need to consider the autonomy of the people who care for them too. Progressive intentions don’t always have progressive outcomes for women.
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