Gentle Parenting Discipline Examples and How to Nurture It

“Gentle parenting makes kids unruly and selfish!” You probably hear it often about gentle parenting. However, many gentle parenting discipline examples showcase understanding toward children’s inner works, such as understanding and empathy. You can absolutely use gentle parenting in your approach while still maintaining boundaries.

The Principles of Gentle Discipline

Gentle parenting is a method that nurtures children’s awareness and understanding of their own behaviors. Unlike the traditional reward-punishment style, gentle parenting emphasizes several principles, such as:

Mutual Respect

Common wisdom says, “Respect is earned, not given.” In traditional parenting, children’s opinions, dignity, and feelings are often deemed unimportant by parents. Gentle parenting teaches children mutual respect through actions such as encouraging positive actions, avoiding comparisons, and replacing commands with invitations.

Empathy

Empathy is a key to better understanding the meaning behind a child’s action or outburst of feeling. It also helps parents to engage more fully with children. Parents can also instill empathy in children, helping them grow into considerate and compassionate adults.

Understanding

Understanding here means ensuring that parents comprehend the underlying motivation behind certain behaviors. Parents can also emphasize understanding, especially if they want to teach children social skills like sharing, expressing opinions, and many more. This way, children will not get confused, especially if parents expect children to learn specific behaviors.

Is Gentle Discipline = “No Boundaries”?

After seeing many gentle parentings discipline examples that “fail miserably,” you probably wonder why. The answer is: gentle discipline is not the same as removing boundaries!

Gentle parenting relies on parents becoming more like coaches than wardens or punishers. Just like sports coaches, this type of parenting requires discipline, more specifically, positive discipline. This kind of discipline regulates children’s behaviors in a more cooperative, empathetic, and collaborative way.

In positive discipline, children learn about self-respect, determination, responsibility, and other positive traits by understanding the importance of these qualities. You can achieve it by teaching children about various social skills instead of relying on threats and punishments.

Benefits of Gentle Discipline in Parenting

Gentle parenting discipline examples, when done right, can bring benefits to your parenting. They include:

1. Nurturing Social Skills

Social skills require empathy, effective listening, and the ability to understand one’s surroundings. Parents can teach children these social skills through gentle parenting, especially at an early age. Gentle parenting can also help babies and toddlers imitate parents’ positive examples.

2. Improving Emotional Intelligence

Elements in emotional intelligence include empathy, social skills, self-awareness, and having healthy coping mechanisms. Children can learn these through gentle discipline and parenting. Parents emphasize understanding, responsibility, and other social skills in teaching children about good behaviors.

3. Nurturing Children’s Self-esteem

Discipline based on rewards and punishments, especially without consideration for children’s feelings, can diminish their self-esteem. Children may grow up comparing themselves to others or not having self-worth. With gentle parenting, parents rely on more open communication and mutual respect, which is excellent for fostering self-esteem.

4. Reduced Risk of Anxiety

Children learn about self-regulation in various social skills. This way, children can adapt to various situations more smoothly as they age, reducing the risk of anxiety.

How to Apply Gentle Discipline while Teaching Boundaries

Setting up boundaries is still important in gentle parenting! You only enforce it with principles like mutual understanding, respect, and clarity about your messages. Do not punish children out of favoritism or just for a quick getaway from disciplining them!

Make sure these boundaries are clear with your children. For example, you and they set up a rule to always return their toys to their box after playing. Explain why returning these toys is important (cleanliness, making the house look nice, and stopping someone from tripping and falling). If they don’t do it immediately, they will not be allowed to play with the toys for one day.

In this case, the boundary is the promise to always return the toys to the box. Parents emphasize the possible behaviors and accidents instead of just spreading the word “punishment.” If parents keep the toys, the next day, explain why the kids cannot play with those toys that day.

Gentle Parenting, an Empathetic Alternative in Modern Parenting!

Modern parenting is not a new concept, but many of us think it is bad because there are no clear boundaries and a lack of understanding. Gentle parenting discipline examples are numerous, and you can still teach this to children while setting up boundaries.

With all the perceived benefits, gentle parenting may be what you’re looking for. Try this style and improve your children’s self-esteem, social skills, and empathy through this unique method.