Before Rosie Whitfield became a mum, she imagined herself parenting very calm children. "Then I had two wild boys," she says with a laugh. Following the birth of her kids, Rosie spent hours online looking for the best advice and was drawn to one particular approach to parenting: Gentle parenting, which focuses on empathy and mutual respect with little emphasis on punishment, albeit with boundaries.
But she constantly worried her choices, from sleep schedules to handling toddler tantrums, were "ruining their lives forever". Rosie does not blame the gentle parenting philosophy itself but instead says the overall amount of parenting advice online was "overwhelming" and "made mundane parenting choices feel like the absolute end of the world." "I felt like if I was choosing to put the TV on for 20 minutes while I did the dishes or had a coffee, I was choosing to destroy my children's brains," says Rosie, who is originally from Birmingham and now lives in Dubai. Rosie believes her confidence and intuition were stripped away as she questioned every parenting decision.
Government research suggests that around two-thirds of parents with young children feel overwhelmed by the amount of parenting information available and struggle with conflicting advice, with many turning to social media for support. Research from the charity Action for Children found that many parents of teenagers who initially contacted the charity for help with school avoidance, ADHD or mental health, often went on to describe their own anxiety, exhaustion and uncertainty of how to parent with empathy and patience when close to burnout. Faced with an array of parenting philosophies, or "brands" to choose from, is all of this advice helping parents or making them more anxious?
And is there really a best way to parent? Or, as we strive to become the perfect parent, are we losing our intuition? Parents today are confronted by parenting styles including "helicopter parenting", which is focused on closely monitoring and protecting children from harm, and "tiger parenting", which involves strict parenting and high expectations for achievement.
There are also "snowplough parents", who try to remove obstacles from their child's path, and "dolphin parents", who aim to be firm but flexible. Author Matilda Gosling, who wrote Evidence‑Based Parenting, says many of the parenting fads or trends complicate what should be a straightforward relationship between a parent and child. "Some parents think 'I need to be a snowplough parent and plough all of these obstacles out of the way'." "But it really complicates what is actually a fairly fundamental part of being human, which is that you are warm and you love your children and you put in place some boundaries around them." Gosling believes parenting trends often represent a pendulum swing, with one generation trying to correct what it believes the previous one got wrong.
"Throughout history, you get these swings from one extreme to the other," she says. Gentle parenting is seen by some as the latest swing away from a strict, detached parenting style popular in the 1990s, which often relied on controlled crying, the naughty step and time out. It is built around understanding, empathy and respect but also emphasises the importance of boundaries.
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