Listening Calmly Was the Hardest Thing I Did as a Parent.

The Parenting Playbook — Part 7: Gentle Parenting

I did not grow up knowing that gentle parenting was an option. Being nice to your child was apparently how you failed at parenting. Children needed discipline. If they cried, refused, argued or did not cooperate, the adults needed to become firmer.

And if being firm did not work, there was always being firmer.

Then I became a parent. Somewhere in the exhaustion, I discovered Dr. Shefali Tsabary’s reels. Her writing, posts and questions introduced me to a way of thinking I had not grown up with.

The question I took from her work was simple: why do we expect children to accept treatment we would find unacceptable ourselves?

That is my paraphrase, not a quotation from a particular reel. Her work is described as conscious parenting; I encountered it as part of a broader discovery of more empathetic approaches. These labels overlap, but they are not identical. Dr. Shefali’s work

I started looking at my baby differently. He was a week old. He could barely see clearly. Was he really organising a sophisticated campaign to manipulate me? Or was he uncomfortable and using the only communication system he had?

No words. No mobility. No ability to fix the situation.

But apparently, excellent strategic planning.

What does gentle parenting actually involve?

People use the term differently, so I want to be clear about what I mean.

I mean trying to understand my child’s experience, responding without violence or humiliation, and teaching him what to do while recognising what he can currently manage.

There are a few things happening together.

Empathy: I try to understand why something is difficult, even when I cannot change the answer.

Respect: I correct an action without making his personality, body or feelings the offence.

Expectations that fit: I consider whether he understands the instruction and what help he needs to follow it.

Boundaries: His feelings matter. So do safety, other people’s needs and my own limits.

Repair: When I get something wrong, I take responsibility. Being the adult does not make every sentence that comes out of my mouth educational.

That overlaps considerably with the authoritative approach we explored in Part 2. Gentle parenting is not a separate scientific box with one agreed instruction manual. A 2024 exploratory study found that parents using the label emphasised affection and emotional regulation, while also describing difficulties practising it. It did not establish guaranteed long-term outcomes. Study exploring gentle parenting

For me, the distinction from permissiveness is what happens after I acknowledge the feeling.

“You’re disappointed” does not automatically become “so I have changed my answer.”

Sometimes the answer remains no. I am trying to make the no understandable and manageable, rather than frightening.

I am not suggesting that my son should run the household while I respectfully await instructions. I am talking about asking what is happening before deciding that he is doing something to me.

My newborn was communicating, not plotting

When my son cried lying down, I checked. Was he hungry? Uncomfortable? Did he need changing? Holding? Something else? I tried things until he settled, or kept trying to understand when he did not.

He had colic. He did not sleep through the night. Responding did not magically turn him into a peaceful baby, and I did not always know what was wrong. But I did not want to begin with the assumption that he needed to learn that nobody would come.

The American Academy of Pediatrics advises that young babies cannot be spoiled by attention and that responding to their cries is appropriate. So yeah, I did not think I could give my baby too much love. Comforting him did not equal spoiling him or teaching entitlement. AAP guidance on responding to a baby’s cries

I did not follow the advice to leave him to cry, however firmly it was delivered.

At the time, I kept imagining being distressed myself and having someone deliberately ignore me. I would have experienced that as abandonment. I could not make it feel loving simply because the distressed person was smaller.

That describes my response to my baby. It is not a claim that every infant-sleep approach, at every age, is abuse. Nor does responding mean an exhausted parent must never put a baby safely down and take a brief break. The AAP’s crying guidance recognises that parents can become overwhelmed.

Needing help or a moment to recover is not the same as deciding a newborn’s distress does not matter.

I needed that distinction too, even if I was much better at making room for his needs than my own.

Then came the food

In the culture I grew up around, feeding a child was practically a mother’s primary performance indicator. A well-fed child meant a mother doing her job.

The trouble was that “well fed” could mean continuing until the adult was satisfied, regardless of what the child’s body appeared to be saying.

I did not want to force-feed my son.

People told me I was soft.

Honestly, it would sometimes have been easier to stop questioning the advice and do what everyone expected. Serve what I wanted. Get it into him. Declare the task complete.

Instead, I kept thinking: if someone forced food into my mouth after I had said no, would I experience that as care?

I remember a Hindi film scene involving women being coerced into eating beef during a forced religious conversion. I cannot confidently name the film, and I am not treating it as evidence about a religious community. What stayed with me was the justification: like children, they supposedly did not know what was good for them.

They are smaller. They are younger. We know better. Therefore, their refusal can be overridden.

I had heard a version of that reasoning around children’s food for years.

Adults do have responsibilities children cannot yet manage. We decide what food to offer, consider nutrition, make meals available and seek help when eating is difficult. But those responsibilities do not make every refusal meaningless.

Responsive feeding involves noticing and responding to hunger and fullness cues. Pediatric guidance advises against forcing children to eat. NIH explanation of responsive feeding, AAP guidance on food difficulties

That does not mean leaving a child with significant feeding difficulties to manage alone. Pain, swallowing problems, restricted eating or concerns about growth need appropriate professional support.

Listening can lead to getting more help. It does not require giving up on nourishment.

I am still learning when to stop eating

I can finish a plate after I am full. It feels polite. Someone prepared the food. Someone offered it. Leaving it feels wrong.

Hunger is not always the reason I begin eating, either. Stress arrives, and I eat. Something hurts, and I chew. Then there is another problem to feel bad about.

I have worked on this in therapy. It deserves a separate article rather than a neat explanation halfway through a parenting piece.

I cannot prove that childhood feeding rules caused every difficulty I have with food. I can say that I learnt to keep eating in response to other people’s expectations, and recognising what my own body is telling me has taken work.

I suspect other people of my generation will recognise that conflict. I cannot speak for all millennials.

But I wanted something different for my son.

How was he supposed to learn that his body’s signals mattered if I treated them as an inconvenience whenever they disagreed with the plate?

Empathy became more important when I did not understand him

My son was diagnosed as autistic around his fourth birthday. It took me time to recognise the difficulties.

And yes, I can hear the familiar response forming in my own head: worst mother ever. How did I not notice sooner?

At the time, I had a job, PhD studies, a house to manage, cooking, cleaning, laundry, a baby to care for and my husband’s needs to consider. Sleep was something I fitted into the gaps.

My son had colic and did not sleep through the night. When I was not tending to him, I was working. I dozed when I could.

I was running on fumes.

That is the context in which I was trying to understand a child whose development did not look the way I expected. Eventually, I noticed enough to take my concerns to the doctor. We got the diagnosis and began learning what support he needed.

His speech therapist helped us understand something we had missed: hearing words did not necessarily tell us how much language he understood.

He could say “banana,” but that did not necessarily mean he understood or used the word in the way we assumed. We had heard vocabulary and taken it as evidence of understanding.

There were gaps we did not know to look for.

Autistic children can have different profiles of spoken language and comprehension, including repeating words they have heard. But repetition is not automatically meaningless: it can have communicative functions. I do not want to rewrite my son as a child who understood nothing simply because we were only beginning to understand him. NIDCD guidance on communication, ASHA guidance on autism and communication

We worked in different directions, gradually learning how to support him. After more than a year of sustained work, we began seeing changes. There were stretches when it was difficult to see any light at the end of the tunnel.

That is another story too.

Here, the point is what happened when I asked whether he needed help instead of deciding that he was simply being difficult.

Some family members suggested that he was rude, manipulative or spoiled. If I had accepted those explanations, I believe I would have missed opportunities to understand him.

Empathy did not diagnose autism. It did not replace assessment, speech therapy or other support. A child’s access to diagnosis should not become another test of whether their mother was loving enough.

But, in our relationship, curiosity helped me keep looking.

But what happens when he still does not want to?

Responding to a newborn and avoiding force-feeding helped me understand the approach. But children grow. They begin wanting things we cannot always provide, and refusing things that still need doing.

What does gentleness look like then?

The following are imagined examples—not conversations I am claiming happened, or scripts I expect to work on demand.

None of those examples promises a quiet child.

A child may remain angry after the screen goes off. They may need time before they can talk about hitting. They may need more assistance than I expected.

And sometimes I will need to stop talking.

A distressed child does not necessarily need a detailed explanation of emotional development while I stand over them delivering it.

Keep people safe. Help with the immediate difficulty. Teach when there is room to learn.

The same applies to me. If I am too overwhelmed to respond usefully, I may need a safe pause or another adult’s help.

Gentleness cannot depend on one person having an unlimited supply of patience.

Gentle does not mean easy

I think this is the part that gets lost when people call the approach soft.

Finding out what is wrong takes work. Checking, observing, changing an approach, asking for help, waiting, trying again—none of that becomes effortless because the word gentle is involved.

Sometimes I wanted things done in the way I had planned. Sometimes I was exhausted enough to understand the appeal of demanding compliance and ending the conversation there.

But getting a child to stop objecting does not necessarily tell me that I have understood the objection.

And understanding it does not mean I must agree to everything.

I can respond to a baby’s cries without knowing immediately how to settle him. I can respect fullness while remaining responsible for offering nourishment. I can maintain a reasonable expectation while changing the help I provide.

Those are responsibilities, not an invitation to resign from parenting.

They are also aims, not a report of my flawless daily performance. We have already discussed our school mornings. Nobody should be under the impression that I have achieved permanent enlightenment before breakfast.

The child is not the only person who needs gentleness

I find it much easier to explain my son’s needs than to extend the same consideration to myself.

He needs help understanding something? Of course.

I needed time to recognize something while working, studying, maintaining a household and barely sleeping? Apparently, evidence for the prosecution.

I do not want to replace the old impossible standard with a new one.

Previously: a good mother always makes the child obey.

Now: a good mother understands every need immediately, remains calm, finds the right professional, says the perfect thing and never needs sleep.

That sounds like another way to make a woman responsible for everything, no?

Gentle parenting, as I want to practice it, has to leave room for me to be a person too. I can make mistakes. I can apologize. I can ask for support. I can say that something is beyond what I can manage alone.

I am trying to teach my son that needing help is acceptable. It would be useful if I stopped treating my own need for help as a character defect.

What changed for me

I did not begin with a complete philosophy. I began with a question that made an old assumption harder to accept.

What if my child’s crying was communication?

What if refusing food meant something?

What if apparent non-cooperation involved an instruction he did not understand?

What if being kind did not mean failing to parent?

Over time, those questions changed how I responded. They did not remove the difficult days. They gave me somewhere else to begin.

I still need to provide structure. I still need to make decisions. My child still needs guidance.

But I want his experience to be part of those decisions.

For years, I learnt to finish what was on my plate.

With my son, I wanted to start by noticing the person eating.

About this series: The Parenting Playbook explores parenting philosophies through lived experience and research. Gentle parenting has no single agreed definition, and no label guarantees a particular outcome. This is an account of what changed in my thinking, not a claim that one approach prevents disability, guarantees diagnosis, or suits every family in the same form.