Gently Courting Disaster

When gentle parenting produces not-so-gentle results

Three-year-olds should be on a terror watch list. I mean, I get that those have their own Constitutional issues, but there are just some individuals who need to be monitored by the government because they pose an open and immediate threat to the common good.

I’m not just talking about my three-year-olds. All of them. They’re menaces to public safety. And mine are great! But its also possible they should be caged for our safety.

Recently, my husband and I started incorporating elements of “gentle parenting” — a form of preschool-accessible hostage negotiation — into our repertoire on the suggestion of social media influencers who have largely taken the place of “cool kids” in the peer pressure game. It’s marketed as a method of reducing tantrums and helping neurodivergent kids regulate their emotions better and one of our kids is neurodivergent — at least we think so. He could also just be weird which, let’s face it. Look who’s talking. I wasn’t exactly in the popular group in high school. Or the unpopular group.

If I’m being generous, I'll say it had mixed results. If I’m not, I’ll say I was completely owned by my toddlers, the three year olds used my methods against me, and I should have known not to negotiate. The State Department’s line on state-sponsored organized crime is a good one, and my toddlers are nothing if not organized.

The method involved two distinct actions that simulated deep breathing. In one, you prompt the kid to “smell the freshly baked cookie,” which encourages breathing in. In the other, you prompt the kid to “blow out the cupcake candle,” which simulates breathing out.

Smell the cookie! Blow out the candle! Smell the cookie! Blow out the candle!

It worked for a while. Kids were melting down over Magnatiles and instead of throwing them at the TV (which really didn’t matter after the first time), they pretended they were cookies. Eventually, as they do with cookies, they threw them at each other. But kids are resilient and reparable, LCD TVs are not.

And then I got mad.

I’m not sure what it was about. What I am sure of, is that I was screaming like a banshee over something dumb, and maybe crying, too, because at this point, my life is kind of a train wreck and every minimal infraction feels like the end of the world. Someone was doing something. And the offending child, instead of being shamed into acting right, or perhaps applying on his own for charm school, stopped dead in his tracks and approached me with his outstreched hands.

Then that tiny jerk asked me to smell the cookie, mama.

Blow out the cupcake, mama.

You’re being silly.

Is this a win? Is this emotional regulation? Is this the kind of situational intelligence we’re supposed to expect our kids to imbibe from gentle parenting? Everything I read seems to suggest that, yes, children will repeat what they feel works for them. But its never specified whether the “works for them” is an emotional maturity or just, it works to win the war, like guerilla tactics.

All I know is that I was owned and I was owned hard.

That’s parenthood, as far as I’ve learned. There’s a lot I didn’t expect when I found out I was pregnant. There are a lot of things I didn’t know I’d say. I spend a lot more time than I thought I would policing where my toddlers urinate, and determining whether food mined from under the sofa is still safe to eat.

But I mostly didn’t expect that my job wasn’t necessarily to keep them safe and sheltered, it is to make them functional enough to deal with the scary stuff, and ensure they’re successful enough to afford the therapy they’ll someday need for the times when I don’t “gently parent.”

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Tuesday’s posts will continue to be free. Paid content, with recipes, product lists, and advice, will move to Fridays. This Friday’s newsletter will have a code for two weeks of paid content as a try-it-before-you-buy-it deal, and my recipe for Pasta Fagioli.

Next week Friday, my thrifting secrets.