The past few years have been rough for gentle parenting.
While the definition of gentle parenting is helping children learn consequences without fear-based tactics like yelling, some parents use it to mean permissive parenting: setting almost no boundaries for their kids.
“Total freedom does not feel loving to a child, because they’re in the business of trying to learn how to behave,” Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson, a psychologist and author of the new book, “How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child,” told Business Insider. “You wouldn’t want your child to not have any willingness to listen to other people — that wouldn’t be doing them a service.”
Gibson, who also wrote the bestselling book “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents,” broadly defines emotional maturity as “the child having a light in them.” Because they have a secure relationship with their parents, they feel energized in trying new things, knowing they have a safe home base when they might fail.
“You could think of it like you’re your child’s first boss, first partner, first best friend,” she said. “You’re the prototype for so many different kinds of relationships that they’re going to have in their life.”
Gibson shared the core facets of raising an emotionally mature child — none of which involve permissiveness.
Nail down the basics: protection and nurture
The first, most immediate duty of a parent is to protect their child, Gibson said. This obviously means protecting them from physical danger, but also emotional and interpersonal danger, she said.
For example, passive parents, one of the four types of emotionally immature parents Gibson outlined in her previous book, might be able to shield their kids from obvious dangers like speeding cars, but fail to intervene if the other parent is volatile. True protection involves stepping in when you hear their older sibling tease too roughly or family members speaking aggressively to your kid.
Of course, with all parenting styles — passive parenting included — the other core piece is nurture. “That’s just a mammal thing,” she said. Both humans and baby mammalian animals “are unable to grow without proper emotional nurturance, loving, affectionate, attentive care,” she said. People with emotionally absent parents, for example, tend to grow up with lower self-esteem.
Choose patient correction over punishment
The other two core parts of building emotional maturity in kids are guidance and limits.
“Kids need guidance because they’ve never been on this earth before,” she said. “No one’s ever explained to them why it’s rude to do this or that.” A parent’s role is to explain concepts like consequences and limits to their kids without screaming or punishments.
Yelling at kids can give the illusion of effectiveness, Gibson said. “They may have a conditioned reaction, like being fearful of you, so they kind of calm down,” she said. “They’re keeping a very tense, kind of artificial control that’s going to break down rather quickly.”
Instead, the best approach is patient correction. “Our job is to realize that Rome was not built in a day,” Gibson said. “We’re going to have to give them that guidance — ‘we don’t stand up in our chairs in restaurants’ — over and over and over again until they learn it.”
It’s also important to know when kids are just too young for certain expectations. Even if your four-year-old is more communicative than they were at three, it doesn’t mean they’re fully capable of sitting still for long stretches at a restaurant, Gibson said.
It wouldn’t make sense to punish them at that age. “It’s not so much that the child needs limits as it is that the parent needs to recognize a small child’s limitations,” she said.
Self-awareness helps you repair
As a parent, there will be times when you regret how you handled a situation.
Gibson said it’s similar to a marriage: even if you don’t know what else to do in the moment, you know you’re not happy with how you reacted, or that you just made the problem worse.
Self-awareness is a huge first step. “Maybe you realize, ‘Oh, I haven’t eaten all day,’ or maybe ‘This is the 10th time he’s bonked his little brother up the head with the toy truck,'” she said. The point is to understand why you lost your temper or resorted to harsh criticism.
Then, it’s up to you to reach out to your child and say you’re sorry, whether it’s for raising your voice or being too distracted to listen to them.
Gibson said these interactions should mirror how all your relationships — and your child’s future ones as an adult — should look.
“You’re treating your child the way you would a dear friend that you wanted to keep,” she said. “I don’t care how old you are, it increases your trust in the person who thinks enough of you to come back in and apologize, because you know that you matter to them.”
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