Gentle parenting produces anxious conformists

Without punishment and forgiveness, there can be no depth to the person

It’s the tone of voice that is the worst part. You know the voice. “What kind of choice do we want to make, Aiden?” “Ella, we use gentle voices with each other.” “Liam, do you think your behaviour makes Luna feel safe?”

Thus begins an essay on gentle parenting that manages to connect some very big dots. It also puts real meat on the bones of that slight revulsion you may feel in certain company – I mean people who are super moral, in that oh-so-enlightened way. For some reason, these are often the same people who name their kid Liam or Luna. I would be commending this stellar essay to you even if it weren’t written by my own wife.

According to the gentle parenting mindset,

Instead of punishment, a child should face the “natural consequences” of her choices. For instance, if a child refuses to go to sleep, this means that she suffers the natural consequence of getting tired and cranky.

A natural consequence of my own kids acting cranky is that I might lose my shit on them, but I don’t get the impression that gentle parents are encouraged to act naturally. … [T]here is a fake niceness to their wheedling that anyone can see through, including most four-year-olds. It is patronising, and reveals a deep annoyance with children but prohibits any kind of genuine expression of it.

More:

Gentle parenting flattens the human experience into a series of choice options, none of which reflect any natural goodness or badness in the child, but which instead represent optimal or less optimal outcomes. This is crude behaviourist psychology, treating the human as a kind of input-output machine. Under this model, gentle parenting ignores the depth and complexity of a child’s soul — including the baseness therein — and, because it ignores it, the technique also fails to nurture the depth of a child’s soul, resulting in, unsurprisingly, children who have shallow souls.

…

While gentle parenting concedes that a child’s behaviour might be less or more appropriate, well-socialised, and safe, it doesn’t concede that a child’s motivations might originate in wickedness just as easily as goodness. Nor does it accept that a child’s will should be curbed because it is often corrupted in its desires, not simply frustrated.

And the money shot:

Ironically, it is the avoidance of punishment that may very well cause anxiousness in the child, for the work of making oneself more socially appropriate is never done, but punishment has a fixed term. In C.S. Lewis’s prescient novel That Hideous Strength, he writes of the progressive project of eliminating punishment. “You got to get the ordinary man into the state in which he says ‘Sadism’ when he hears the word ‘Punishment’,” says the female leader of the new progressive police force, one Officer Hardcastle. She goes on to explain that “what has hampered every English police force up to date was precisely the idea of deserved punishment. For desert was always finite: you could do so much to the criminal and no more. Remedial treatment, on the other hand, need have no fixed limit; it could go on till it has affected a cure, and those who were carrying it out would decide when that was.”

…

gentle parenting’s rubric of offering more or less socially accepted choice options but not punishment puts a child under the constant pressure to always be under remedial anxieties. The alternative is that she becomes so immune to these anxieties that she ceases to feel them internally, and instead she comes to genuinely expect that the world will conform to her inner feelings. This is perhaps close to what we see with much of contemporary grievance culture. It is now society that is put under the self-scrutinising anxieties of constant remediation. And who will decide when the cure for social ills has been met? Perhaps the angry blue-haired 19-year olds will let us know.

Marilyn finally brings this round to the Christian origins of the wisdom she is laying down, and connects it to the miracle of Christmas.

I want to worship a God who puts the fear of God in me, who has enough faith in me to show me my own wickedness and the judgement that I deserve, and then who will give to me instead of punishment, a baby, soft and small and lying in a manger.

Here is a link to Marilyn’s post on her Substack, Submission. From there, you will be shuttled over to Unherd for the whole thing (thanks to them for publishing it). If you think her essay is deep and true and beautiful, as I do, leave a “like” for her at the Substack link.

Merry Christmas, everyone! And Happy Hanukah. I’ll be giving Archedelia a rest for a couple of weeks, looking forward to some good cheer around the fire and the candlelit Christmas Eve service at St. Margaret’s.

-Matt