'I tried gentle parenting for a week - and it made me a worse mum'

Natalie Brown, 43, tried a different way of parenting with her four children for one week. And, that was enough for her...

It's the latest parenting style dividing social media, with influencers extolling the virtues of gentle parenting. According to experts, gentle parenting is all about never raising your voice, never saying no, encouraging empathy, respect, understanding and boundaries. 

The idea is, parent and child work together to make choices based on internal willingness instead of external pressure. As a mum of four I’m constantly questioning my parenting skills so I set myself a challenge: to gentle parent my children Bluebell, 12, Max, nine, Marigold, seven, and Violet, four, for a week in a bid to bring calm to our hectic household. It works for a lot of families, so why not ours?

I start with baby steps. ‘I missed you when you were sleeping,’ I say to Violet on day one, because gentle parenting is all about ‘filling their love cup’. The trouble is this is a Big Fat Lie. I did not miss her when she was sleeping. After  years of broken nights breastfeeding, I love sleeping through the night on my own. I can see Violet digesting what I’ve said. ‘Are you telling fibs, Mummy?’ she asks. I realise gentle parenting is going to be harder than I thought.

Techniques like swapping ‘no’ for ‘yes, but after you do x, y or z’ are harder than I thought, too. ‘I know what you’re doing,’ says Max when I ask him to take his breakfast plate through to the kitchen and get dressed before he switches on his Xbox without doing either. Violet is shouting ‘f-f-f-finished’ from the bathroom so I don’t have time to ‘positively discipline’ him for ignoring me.

My husband Rob thinks I’m too soft with the kids, and he’s probably right. I routinely make four separate meals because life’s just easier that way. But this week I’m going to gentle parent mealtimes by making one thing and if they don’t like it, I’m going to validate their feelings, but stand firm. 

And I do – until Violet has a meltdown because I cut her sandwiches into triangles instead of squares and Marigold refuses to even try them because I put ‘green’ (lettuce) inside. I validate these problems by telling the girls that I hear them, but this is what’s for tea today, and I’m proud of my boundary-setting skills. My pride is short lived, however, because I underestimate their screaming and to cut a long power struggle short, I end up making two extra rounds of sandwiches – one cut into squares and one minus the offending ‘green’. I eat the ‘rejects'.

At the end of the week, as I hand Violet (another) packet of crisps for breakfast because I know it's the only way to get us out of the door on time without (another) meltdown, Bluebell, who knew I had been trying a new parenting technique, asks me who gentle parenting is supposed to be for. It’s a good question, because it’s certainly not gentle on me. It’s not gentle on them (the tantrums prove that) and it’s not gentle on our neighbours who are probably hearing all of the tantrums, either.

Gentle parenting might be about ‘filling their cup’, but what about my cup? It’s exhausting coming up with ways to say no without actually saying no. Instead of bringing calm, it's bringing out the worst in me, and that’s when I lose my internal willingness. Gentle might be the trendiest way to parent your kids, but this mum is proud to be doing things her own way.

• Confessions of a Crummy Mummy – The Baby Years by Natalie Brown (Amazon, £14.99) is out now.

Are you a fan of gentle parenting? GoodtoKnow's family editor Steph Lowe is and has been following this style for years with her son. Read her honest account of why (as he son has got older) she's learned to 'regret' gentle parenting, and the reasons might surprise you.