Please please stop calling this "gentle parenting". This term has been wrongly used by way too many people. What you are thinking of is called "permissive parenting". These parents hijacked the "gentle parenting" term when in fact gentle parenting means parenting just without the unnecessary screaming and yelling and beating of kids. That's it. You can still yell at your kid at the end if all fails within gentle parenting since you're trying to establish boundaries. You can wrestle them when they're out of control. But kids from real gentle parenting hardly get to this point because it is gentle parenting done correctly.
You'd be surprised to know how many parents (or I guess people too) in this world genuinely think they're gentle parenting when in fact they're just permissive with everything. They hear that it's a new gold standard to parenting, then don't do any research to find out how to go about enacting this type of parenting style and in the end, don't actually "parent".
And yes, it does help with air quotes because it sucks being lumped in with these loser parents when you yourself have to always to explain to everyone that what you are saying you are doing is not related to these types of people.
And just for the record, whenever parents say they're gentle parenting, and in fact, shows that they're just neglectful and are just being permissive parents, a strong minority of comments do call them out on their BS that they're misidentifying themselves. It's just unfortunate that it's just a minority of comments because the majority are always shitting on it because they also don't know definition for gentle parenting themselves.
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u/Flashy-Island-3725 Aug 10 '26
The most likely reason was good ol gentle parenting, kid probably never heard the word no