Gentle discipline: Have you tried never getting angry with your children?

This article on gentle discipline is published in the attachment Vanity Fair Junior of September

A few Sundays ago I invited a friend I hadn’t seen for a while to my house with her two children, who are more or less the same age as mine, the eldest is four, the youngest is two and a half. After the first 30 seconds of cautious mutual study, mine decide to stage the worst behavior they are capable of: they fight among themselves over who can handle the yellow play dough rolling pin (it’s no use running around and finding a blue one), they snatch toys from their friends’ hands, they perform desperate cries over who has to drink the last drop of juice. The two little guests, on the contrary, except for a few rare moans, seem like peaceful dolls who observe that performance as if it were a movie. Horror genre.

Attempts to calm, distract, and please the two possessed people are of little use: every minute, their behavior worsens, the amazement of the bystanders increases, and so does my embarrassment. Under my friend’s falsely compassionate gaze, I read her judgment: do they always do this? No, is the answer. Not always, often yes.

Anyway, at a certain point comes the straw that breaks the camel’s back: for no apparent reason, my big brother pushes his brother, makes him fall and, not satisfied, pulls his hair. The other one starts screaming. Above him, I impose myself: “Enough!”. I shout at him with ferocious eyes, I admit it. For three seconds silence reigns. It doesn’t last long, the big one bursts into a disconsolate cry, my friend turns around and, while caressing one of her very good and very composed little angels, asks me: “But have you never tried to be sweet?”

After an eternal moment in which I thought about everything (from the generic “but have you ever tried to do your own thing?” to the clumsy attempt at self-absolution, like “but I’m always sweet, except when they make me really angry”), a question began to creep insidiously among my certainties: Is it she who can afford to always be sweet because she has two quiet children or are her children so quiet because they have a mother who is always sweet?

Not having an answer at hand, I began to study. It is called “gentle discipline” or, for the English, gentle parentinggentle parenting, the educational method based on empathy and respect for the child, considered as a bearer of needs. It focuses on non-violent communication, welcoming all emotions and promotes self-regulation and responsibility from an early age.

This approach, summarized in the book Kind parents by Sarah Ockwell-Smith (Giunti, 2020) – and then variously reinterpreted, blended or watered down by a plethora of experts or self-styled experts, who on social media indulge in advice (if not in guilt-inducing warnings) – makes use of four fundamental assumptions. First, do not punish. Neither physically (and so far so good…), but not even with shouting, scolding or punishment. The penalty is the risk that “your child will not respect the rule because he has understood it, but because he will be afraid of you. And, if your child is afraid of you, he will be led to lie to you to defend himself from your punishments”, writes the pedagogist Elena Cortinovis, author of the Italian bible on gentle parenting, The Ultimate Guide to Gentle Discipline: Loving Them Unconditionally (self-published, 2020).

Second, don’t reward. Yes, even the little gift for a good report card is one of the methods to be abolished: it seems to undermine autonomy.. Again Cortinovis writes: «Instead of continuing to repeat “how good you are”, try asking him: “Are you satisfied with what you have managed to do on your own?”».

Third, all emotions are useful: we must learn to recognize and welcome them, without ever suppressing them.. It is forbidden to exclaim: “You can’t cry over this nonsense!”. It is imperative instead to embrace the child’s spleen: “You are melancholic, I understand you, I am here”. We do not want to raise insecure adolescents who will become emotionally illiterate adults (read under repressed).

Fourth, confine. What all supporters of gentle discipline are keen to emphasize is that This approach should not be confused with a generalized laxity in which everything is permitted. On the contrary, rules are necessary, better if few and clear, because they give security.

Returning to the disastrous afternoon mentioned above, the right reaction to the older child’s push towards the younger one would have been, in order: to insert myself between the two to avoid a crescendo of retaliation; to address the older one in the sweetest tone possible and say something like “I know, it’s difficult to have a little brother who is always underfoot. You’re very angry, aren’t you? I understand, I’m here for you, I love you”; finally, to offer a hug. And then? Well, then no one explains well how this acceptance of his anger (and concomitant repression of mine) leads to the desired result, that is, a permanent de-escalation of the rivalry between siblings who learn to self-regulate. In his recent essay The Good Inside Method (Mondadori, 2024), the American psychologist Becky Kennedy admits: «The results are seen in the long term». How long, difficult to sayThe important thing is to persist.

What everyone seems to agree on are the disastrous consequences that the failure to apply this method entails. It ranges from “the risk is that parents and children will drift apart” (Elena Ravazzolo in the magazine Upp) to “they will lose the instinct of attachment” (Becky Kennedy) to the catastrophic “as adults they will develop addictions, eating disorders, anxieties, or get entangled in endless toxic relationships looking for the love they never had in childhood” (Marika Gigliarano on NeuroEducation). Aside from the surplus of fatalism, the extreme blaming of parents is striking, who, according to the most austere supporters of this approach, must be “always calm” (they actually wrote it, on the site) Wamily!), available for every need of the child (because there are no tantrums but only requests for help) and above all knowledgeable: reading, studying, keeping constantly updated on the latest pedagogical trends is essential to not repeat the mistakes of the generations that preceded us and therefore to raise healthy and happy children.

Even the very moderate Kennedy, who in her book, repeatedly tries to attenuate the sense of parental guilt (“making mistakes is okay, I’m not the last thing I did”), in the end can’t do it, she also sinks into blame. In the sense that making mistakes is okay, if we are immediately ready to “fix” them. Here is a suggestion of hers: “You know, Mom had big emotions that came out screaming. It’s never your fault if I start screaming, and it’s not your job to figure out how I can stay calmer. I love you.”

The initial question about the effectiveness of gentle discipline has now been joined by another: given that the basic principles are shared (yes to kindness, no to violence), is it really intolerable for a child (as well as the cause of future misfortunes) to have a mother who, every now and then, gets angry and bursts out with a shout, a threat, a punishment? “No”, says psychotherapist Giulia Virginia Mazzarini, an expert in family relationships (psychologist-mi.com). «The damage is caused by the repetition of violence or neglect, not by single episodes of emotional ambivalence. Yes, because the angry mother is never only and exclusively angry, just as the good mother is never only and exclusively good. In fact, the “all good” mother does not exist. Already at the beginning of the 20th century, Winnicott spoke of a “good enough mother”. An approach that demonizes emotional ambivalence as something that urgently requires repair takes something away from the mother and the child. From the woman, the possibility of living her most instinctive part, also made up of anger, aggression, selfishness. From the child, the ability to manage frustration. As they grow, children should be able to give meaning to themselves also by remembering that day when they felt unloved or misunderstood. The opposite is a stereotyped, and unrealistic, vision of an angelic mother and child stripped of all complexity».

And what about Kennedy’s thesis according to which children are by nature “good inside”? Mazzarini answers: “Admitting that There are no good children or bad children. There are children. Who, like us, contain multitudes».

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