My Misadventures in Gentle Parenting

In this personal essay for Maclean’s, Kayla Huszar reckons with adopting the gentle parenting philosophy after her first son arrived in 2015. Designed to help children recognize and learn appropriate ways to deal with big emotions like sadness, frustration, and anger, the process involves validating feelings to defuse a hairy situation before finding a calmer way forward. After a meltdown at a local toy store in 2019, Huszar began to question whether the approach was doing her family more harm than good.

For me, the greatest insight of gentle parenting is that it treats children not as the automatons of the pre–Dr. Spock era but as full, complicated people. These days, I think of my parenting style as a pendulum. On one side, there’s parent-centred parenting, where the adult’s needs and authority come first. On the other, there’s child-centred parenting, where the child’s emotions and preferences take precedence. That’s what gentle parenting too often becomes. In between is family-centred parenting, in which no person’s needs are elevated, and decisions are made based on what’s best for everyone. That means discussion and compromise, and taking everyone’s wishes seriously. Sometimes my own kids surprise me with their insights. One of them might make a convincing case about screen time, for example, or changing our plans for the day. But my husband and I still hold veto power—if we need it. That’s the tricky part of the pendulum: knowing when to be flexible and when to stand firm.