Heinzel

Gentle Parenting

December 1, 2024

I'm settled firmly in the parenting season of my life, with two kids in college, one in preschool, and one in-between. Of course you never stop being a parent. You do get to sleep in a bit more at some point though.

Some of my friends are becoming empty-nesters. I'm a bit of an old dad with my two youngest, who are 7 and 3. It's been wild to raise two sets of kids who are about 10 years apart. When my oldest two were born, YouTube was in its infancy and iPhones didn't exist. I was in my late 20s, still skateboarding, still young and naive, still using too much body spray, with a solid support system and generally not many struggles.

When Hannah was pregnant with Martin (now 7), I was looking at turning 40 and had to push myself to get into shape physically. Now I'm 47, I've lost both of my parents, and I still have a kid in diapers. Luna, 3, is currently jumping around me, wearing only a diaper, yell-singing the Paw Patrol theme song through the nunny in her mouth. She's a tall 3, but she's also still my baby. She's fiercely independent — what some people call a "firecracker." She's constantly seeking and testing boundaries.

My parenting style has changed a good deal over the years. In our house now, we use what's called "gentle parenting," or "respectful parenting," or "not what they did in the 80s" parenting.

What gentle parenting looks like in our house is this: we strive to treat the kids how we'd like to be treated.

There's a lot behind the word "strive," including some grace for ourselves as we figure out our own selves. Many days we just don't show up in our best form. I am not my best self when chronically sleep deprived. I am not my best self when chronically in survival mode.

Gentle parenting is not Easy parenting. There is no easy parenting. Our lives are messy, our house is dirty and loud, and the kids are now actively jockeying for my attention and asking for snacks and drinks as I write this blog. Which is fine.

I was raised in the 80s with all of its glorious authoritative parenting. Respect was expected but not modeled (and "respect" was really just obedience). Mom was more progressive. Dad was not. I was the middle child, and my specialty was learning how to blend into the woodwork.

I've always been thankful to have grown up in what I consider a "normal," healthy home. We always had food, we were loved, our parents were involved in the community (and kept us involved). We were privileged.

We were also raised with the Blame, Shame, Pain model of parenting. We didn't have a good framework to talk about conflict or mental health. We did get to talk about this more after I had kids of my own. But Mom always liked to have a clean house for guests, and she always kept the messier parts of her life to herself.

I have exactly one memory of Mom smoking a cigarette. We were all on a family vacation heading to North Carolina on a 2-day drive. We had stopped at a rest area, and I was done in the restroom and headed out of the building.

Being a child with the social awareness of a drywall saw, I ambled out of the wrong side of the building aimlessly towards the commercial truck parking lot. I happened to look up and see my mom, who was leaning against a tree, not expecting to be seen. She was smoking. She looked so cool, standing there, having a momentary release from the chaos of dragging her entire family across the country. The stress of the packing, the arguing, the maps, the snacks, the drinks, the cooler sandwiches... all of that was gone in this one moment. Then she looked over and saw me.We locked eyes; she was horrified. I turned and walked away quickly. We never spoke of it.

Dad frequently smoked in the family van, while we were all in there, driving down the highway. We'd jockey for the back seat, which had those window flaps that opened about half an inch, providing just enough oxygen.

On the menu for authoritative parenting in the 80s (and for generations before) is corporal punishment. That is to say, sometimes your parents beat you, and everybody was pretty much cool with it. It's hard to convey just how normalized this was. If you got in trouble at school, you could get paddled. And if that happened, it seemed most parents would do the same to you once you got home.

It's so normalized to me that even now, writing this blog, a strong voice in my head says, "it wasn't that bad. You got spanked a few times. That's it. You didn't get hit in the face. You didn't get sexually abused. You didn't... you didn't..."

And it's really easy to stop there and not dig anymore and just move on. There's always someone in some other house down the street who had it worse, on a different level of "worse" than you could really process. So I'm lucky.

My Dad did the spanking in our house, although Mom was usually in the room, too. I can still see her standing there saying, "this hurts us more than it hurts you." Which I didn't believe at 5 and still don't now.

Sometimes it was the hand. I also remember a belt. But the one I remember most was from "The Paddle." This featured a broad-face board with a hole cut out so that it would have better aerodynamics. So that it would swing faster and hurt you more.

I don't remember what I did this one time, and it doesn't even matter. I was about 7, give or take a year. My dad walked me into his bedroom by my arm, and pushed me towards the bed. He closed the door behind us. Mom was there too.

I knew what came next - I was expected to face away from him, pull down my pants, bend down, and put my hands on the footboard of his bed. I couldn't overpower him physically (despite usually trying to), and Mom is standing there too, so what can you do.

But holy crap you guys. I don't know if an angry, dysregulated adult has ever taken their rage out on your body with the use of a wooden paddle with a hole cut out for aerodynamics... but it was something!

I took the first few hits and was screaming and crying. I remember Mom crying. Then he raised up the paddle to hit me again, and all I could do was reach my hand back to try and protect myself. And the paddle came crashing down on the back of my hand.

It hurt more than I remember now, but I do remember even in the moment, seeing the terror in Dad's eyes as it unfolded. And that felt good. I couldn't make him feel that way on my own, and I wanted him to feel how I felt. And I was terrified.

I think that was the last time I got spanked. And just like that, you move on. You wrap up every trip into the bedroom, the screaming, crying, begging... you wrap it all up into "spanking," and it doesn't sound so bad then.

I never really talked to him about spanking. We did have several conversations about fatherhood, when he was dying in that same bed years later, as I sat with him draining his lung fluid. But I had to put up some pretty firm emotional walls in order to maintain my caretaking role, so we usually just talked about easier stuff like death and politics.

One morning, in the days when my sister and I were taking turns staying at the house near the end, I came down in the morning to find him on the bedroom floor. He was too weak to walk and couldn't make it to the bathroom. He was lying by the footboard of his bed in that very spot where he had spanked his own kids. And even then, as an adult standing over my dying father, some part of me was still scared of him.

And I helped him up, cleaned him up, and got him into bed.

It's complicated to dig into childhood trauma while you still love (and miss) your parents. It's difficult to even recognize some of these things as traumatic when they were so normalized at the time. And it's hard to see the generational cycles that your parents broke for you.

I'm lucky to have become a parent after the Information Revolution. So much of my "parenting worldview" has come from the internet, from online parenting groups, social media, YouTube, TikTok. From memes that Hannah will text me when we're sitting next to each other on the couch (she has the best memes).

A common theme I see on social about gentle parenting is, "gentle parenting is for gentle kids, and my kids are fucking wild." And ooo this was my snapback when I first heard the term.

Long before I had kids and knew what "gentle parenting" was, I remember feeling kind of uncertain if I could be strong enough to discipline my future kids. The only cycle I was determined to break, at that time, was to never say, "because I said so." I didn't want to spank them, but I also didn't yet know that I didn't have to.

I had a generally-unquestioned belief that it was going to be my responsibility to be The Bad Cop. That if I was at a restaurant with my future family, and the kids were "being too loud" or whatever, that it's my Societal Responsibility to step in and Do The Discipline.

Dad, at a birthday party at Skateland South in the 80s, probably checking if he needs to "Do the Discipline."

I've felt those moments of frustration as a parent; that rage. I've heard my father's voice coming out of my own mouth, yelling at my own kids. I've seen my kids look at me in fear. But I've never hit my kids. I'm proud to be able to say that, because I've been close at times. It's hard to know what else there is, when that's all you know.

If spanking wasn't this thing that was always hanging out there as a Possibility... what else could there be? What other discipline would I have at my disposal? How was I going to control these unruly, imaginary future kids?

It's easy to sit here, 19 years after becoming a parent and sound like I kind of had it figured out in some way from the beginning. I didn't, and I don't have it figured out now. I've muddled through it, having luck in a few places, making plenty of my own mistakes.

And in the process of muddling through it, a pattern emerged, like patterns tend to do. And I love patterns. Here's the pattern:

  1. Incident with kid happens, parental involvement required.
  2. React on impulse with same or higher level of energy.
  3. Kid raises energy level.
  4. Go back to step 2, escalating until Disaster.
  5. Deal with fallout.

It's a familiar but exhausting pattern. It's unhealthy, and it drives you apart. It took years and a bunch of trial and error and a lot of work on my ego to see another pattern emerge:

  1. Incident with kid happens, parental involvement required.
  2. Have impulse, but don't act on it. Wait. Wait.
  3. Respond with calm level of energy.
  4. Notice a better outcome.

It's humbling to see this new pattern emerge, because it suggests that my impulses are flawed or at least contributing to the escalation. It also compels me to look back with a more critical eye at how I was raised, how my parents handled conflict, and what drove their parenting decisions.

When I was a new parent, I idolized my parents. I had some notes, don't get me wrong, but their playbook for parenting was basically my playbook. My kids were their first grandkids, and they had strong opinions about the way I was parenting (and weren't shy about sharing them).

Over time though, the dynamics shifted as I was now the Keeper of the Grandkids. Now I was the one with Rules. I was finally able to see my parents as humans and deconstruct some of the patterns of my own upbringing.

Oh but the sweet taste of blaming ones problems on ones parents quickly gives way to the realization that while they may be partly responsible for how I am, for the playbook I started with, for some beliefs I hold deep — the reality is that it's my responsibility to audit those beliefs, to observe the effects of my actions, to deal with my childhood trauma, and to challenge my impulses. Because I'm responsible for my actions and the hurt I put out there into the world.

It's a little bewildering at first to restrain a deeply-rooted parenting impulse and instead do nothing. Yelling, for example. I used to yell at the kids sporadically on a somewhat regular basis. It was reactionary, always coming from something external, and I didn't really think about it. I was breaking other cycles, fighting other battles in my life. The worst it ever got was that there was some yelling at home, and sometimes a door was slammed. That was great!

But once I was able to start identifying the instinct to yell, and cut it off before it came out of my mouth... that's when my parenting really started to grow. I started noticing the way everyone would look to me when there would be an incident, like, "is he going to blow up at us?" And I'd notice the way Hannah would consistently handle it more gracefully than I would have. Or I'd notice what the child would do in the absence of what would normally be yelling directed at them.

And with parenting, the data just keeps coming in. Almost every time, the outcome was better.

And if I looked closely enough, I could sometimes catch Hannah momentarily raising her voice at the kids, only to bring it back down and apologize afterwards. It was graceful as fuck, and it helped her stay close to the kids. Because it is so easy to push them away. They are all so sensitive.

And I know what my dad would say about all of this. He'd be the tough guy that says you have to be tough on your kids, because the world is going to be tough on them, so they have to learn how to be tough.

He also proudly boasted in social settings, with his family by his side, that he never changed a diaper. So there's that.

So in our house, we practice Gentle Parenting. Happily, aggressively, proudly.

Here's what Gentle Parenting looks like in our house:

Blame, Shame, Pain. We avoid (or strive to avoid) blame, shame, and pain in all aspects of parenting. Blame and pain are a little easier to address; shame comes in so many flavors though, and it can be wildly subtle (even disguised as a compliment!). Many of the cycles we are breaking have roots in blame, shame, pain.

Bodily consent. Your body, your choice. This one runs deep, but it's pretty simple. The kids have control over what happens to their bodies, with very few exceptions (health & safety). This means we don't force them to hug or kiss other people (even family, even us!), we don't tickle or roughhouse unless they want to, and they have a wide latitude over diet (their body!). We present healthy options and have age-appropriate dialog about why we want them to eat certain things. But we don't force them to eat anything or play stupid food games.

Punishment. We basically don't punish the kids. This includes timeouts, taking things away from them, grounding. Punitive punishments not only don't work, they're harmful. Many of the times I've felt the urge to "punish" the kids have been due to my own dysregulation or need to control something that really doesn't matter anyway. The important lessons in life seem to have their own natural consequences. And I try to be the kind of parent that helps my kids avoid or manage natural consequences rather than one who doles them out artificially and inconsistently.

Respect. And not the kind of respect that's really just obedience. There's not a hierarchy of respect in our house. We don't use "because I said so" or "respect your elders." Instead, it's more about respecting each others' boundaries, needs, abilities, and accommodations. It's about using clear communication. It's about trying to fill the kids' power and attention buckets every day. It's about setting age-appropriate expectations.

Those are the big themes at least. And we're continually growing, reevaluating our parenting style, leveling up for the next stage. I find myself changing how I parent the teens as I learn and grow with the little kids, and that's a beautiful thing. I continue to process my own childhood, and I try and do that openly around the teens, encouraging them to process their own as well.

It's wild when your kid brings up some incident from their childhood that affected them greatly that you don't even remember. That happened with one of the teens and I not long ago. And my first instinct was to defend myself! I didn't even remember the thing that happened, yet I was starting to get flush and anxious and feel the need to defend myself as soon as it was my turn to respond!

Fortunately, I noticed how my body was responding before I had the chance to ruin the moment by making it all about me. And all I had to do was... keep listening. Because it wasn't about me at all. It was about how they felt when it happened and how they were processing it now. And all I really needed to say was, "I really don't remember that... tell me more." And listen. And validate. And it's so much more gentle on the body, the mood, the relationships.

And it's finally at this point where I realize that of all the work I've put into gentle parenting, of looking outward at my relationships with the kids, how I handle difficult situations... most of the work is really just learning how to be gentle with myself.