Dispatch Faith: What ‘Gentle Parenting’ Misunderstands About Human Nature, by Megan Dent:
I recently recognized the afterglow of thrilling misconduct on my 3-year-old’s face. His older brother had left a piece of finished schoolwork unattended, and the younger seized his chance to grab a fistful of crayons and scribble all over it until it was illegible. Capping off his deed off with a sneering holler in his brother’s direction, as well as mine, he stepped back to revel in the strength of our reactions.
The cacophony that followed—tears, exclamations, reprimands—only seemed to fuel his amusement and defiance, until eventually I managed to extract a flicker of half-hearted contrition, and with tight lips and zero eye contact, he apologized.
Such scenes are pretty commonplace in my house, with both my sons. Have I produced gremlins who simply delight in cruelty? I ask myself. Do they enjoy the attention that arises from pushing boundaries and hurting others?
Here’s an unpopular answer: Yes. Yes, I’ve produced mischievous sprites who sometimes delight in cruelty and yes, they are willing to hurt others and push the envelope to get attention.
Bluntly stating that young children sometimes express the worst parts of our adult nature—self-serving behavior at the expense of others, lack of accountability for our actions, the incessant longing to do whatever or have whatever we want, whenever we want—clashes with many of the “gentle parenting” ideas popular among online millennial parents.
“Gentle parenting” refers to a parenting philosophy that focuses on attending to children’s emotional landscape rather than scrutinizing their behavior. Both Becky Kennedy, a New York psychologist known as “Dr. Becky” whose parenting enterprise “Good Inside” went viral during the COVID pandemic, and Mona Delahooke, author of Beyond Behaviors, encourage parents to view their kid’s behavior as “the tip of the iceberg,” advising them to explore their child’s subterranean emotional life to unlock why they may sometimes behave poorly.
Under a gentle parenting framework, my son’s decision to flagrantly ruin his brother’s homework isn’t a sign of a tricky aspect of his personality, or of human nature more generally, but rather, in Kennedy’s terms, “an expression of underlying unmet needs.” A gentle parenting response would not include any scolding or punishment, but a curious questioning of why my son felt the need to disrupt.
Believing that our children’s hurtful outbursts have nothing to do with their character and everything to do with their basic emotional needs is tempting. The implication is that if we simply meet their needs, their behavior will improve. If we affirm their emotions, and make them feel “seen,” as Kennedy often emphasizes, they’ll become kind, caring, and respectful. Right?
If it were that easy, we’d be living in an unrecognizably different world, both as parents and as individuals—a world unhampered by the forces of what Christians call sin, and what other philosophers have pondered and debated about the human condition over millennia: that even when we try our best, we are often overcome by inclinations toward self-interest, territorialism, greed, pleasure, and power. …
You couldn’t build a successful parenting business these days on the basis of the more challenging, but probably more accurate depiction of human nature captured by French philosopher and Christian convert Blaise Pascal in the 17th century, who wrote in his Pensées (c. 1660), “What a chimera a human being is! What a novelty. What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy!”
A “chimera” is an “amalgam of different natures; in Greek mythology, a monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a serpent’s tail.” If Pascal’s description resonates more with parents dealing with a particularly violent tantrum from their child than Kennedy’s pithy “good inside,” it’s because parents often have a front row seat to the seemingly irreconcilable tension between sweetness and short-fused self-seeking that lies at the heart of their children’s natures—and indeed, all of our natures. …
[A] fuller idea of children as fledgling moral agents, possessed of the same ingredients of human nature as adults—the “gremlin” or “chimera” school of parenting, if you will—can be placed comfortably within the traditions of philosophers and theologians of ages past, from Augustine in the fourth century, to Thomas Aquinas in the 13th, through to Martin Luther in the 16th and Pascal in the 17th.
This Christian theological and philosophical tradition can articulate with more nuance why it is that even when we try our best, even when we express as much love, patience, safety, and understanding as can reasonably be expected from a parent in the 21st century, we as human beings—and yes, as children—still find forces of selfishness, jealousy, or chaos rearing their heads in and among our kindness, compassion, courage, and selflessness.
Like adherents of many other faiths, Christians have a strong mandate for treating children with dignity and care, and for being curious about the lessons that they have to teach us. Jesus himself was emphatically gentle with children, including them in his ministry at every turn. When the disciples tried to turn children away from him, he rebuked them and indignantly commanded them to “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”
Biblical scholars debate the meaning behind Jesus’ words about children, but it seems clear that something about their radical vulnerability—and in their powerlessness, their unjaded trust in God’s mercy—made them spiritual models for adults, who more easily become hubristic and cynical. Jesus proclaims in the Gospel of Matthew, “Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever receives one such child in my name receives me” (18:4-5).
Nevertheless, unadulterated impulses can lead to outbursts, like the one in which my son ruined his brother’s homework. He felt like doing it, and he lacked the moral reasoning and regulation not to.
Jesus acknowledged this other side of childhood—children’s propensity for foolish or illogical behavior—in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Speaking of those who condemned him and John the Baptist as corrupt, unable to recognise his reality as the Son of God, Jesus says, “To what, then, can I compare the people of this generation? What are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling out to each other,” then references a song that children might use to taunt someone who does not conform to their expectations (Luke 7:31-32). …
A core feature of Jesus’ gentleness to sinners was his understanding that they were trapped in a world in which the sinful parts of their nature were likely to be tempted and exploited, again and again. In this sense, sinners were indeed victims. But Jesus suggests that their problem was not that other human beings weren’t catering to their every emotional need (and in the process, eliding their own), but rather that they had become lost in a longing that Augustine called concupiscence: an immense desire, or ardent longing for fulfilment that often leads one astray, toward hubris, power, violence, lust, or material greed.
Augustine’s notion of concupiscence describes a longing that cannot be answered by the material world that it reaches out to; it’s a more powerful spiritual thirst, for an affirmation and a love that runs even more deeply, even more unconditionally, than parental love. It is the desire for a sense of pervasive, cosmic belonging and belovedness that can only be fulfilled by the love of God.
Jesus’ response to sinners then, is not to unquestioningly affirm their weakest tendencies—their knee-jerk reactions to stress, their yearning for power, influence, and attention, their proclivities for self-aggrandizement—but to show them, in himself, the love that is stronger than those tendencies, and that delivers them from that never-ending maze of human longing.
This theological history—what those of us who believe this would call truth—takes the yoke of the human condition off the shoulders of parents. It gives us the philosophical anchor, the confidence, not to shy away from the full reality of human nature as we find it in ourselves and our children. The best expression of gentleness in this context is a rigorous, honest recognition that faults exist within us, but that they are not ultimately the most important or powerful parts of who we are.
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