Gentle parenting has been the latest trend among social media and mom groups. Gentle parenting focuses on a parent’s empathetic approach to parenting and a child’s self-awareness and understanding of his behavior. The goal of gentle parenting is to help a child set healthy boundaries and regulate his own emotions with the help of his “coach,” also known as the parent. On paper, this parenting approach sounds nice and maybe useful; however, this is not how gentle parenting plays out in practice.

The Institute for Family Studies highlights Dr. Leonard Sax, a family doctor who has been practicing for 34 years. In his blog, he writes about a six-year-old patient with a fever. Dr. Sax struggles to look into the child’s throat because she refuses to open her mouth. When he asks mom for help, she responds with: “Her body. Her choice.” Dr. Sax writes about his observations between parenting and politics, stating: “As a family doctor, I simply did not encounter this kind of parenting 10 years ago. Now I see it every day. And the parents who are practicing gentle parenting are (in my experience) almost always politically left-of-center.”

Studies have shown that children of politically left-leaning parents are more likely to be depressed, especially boys. Some suggest that it is due to social media and the drastic change in culture. Dr. Sax adds that others, such as NYU Professor Jonathan Haidt, suggest “the real reason that left-of-center kids are more likely to be depressed compared with right-of-center kids is that left-of-center kids have been taught to catastrophize events, to assume the worst, while right-of-center kids are taught to be more optimistic.”

This suggestion rings true, especially when we saw the reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic and the death of George Floyd, among other highly politically charged events. Tie gentle parenting with a focus on social emotional learning in public schools and we have a generation of children who are taught to constantly track and think about their emotions. While thinking through emotions has its benefits, a child should not be trained to focus on his emotions all day, but this is what gentle parenting and social emotional learning does. Children have become highly emotional, and public schools and left-leaning organizations have capitalized on this to create political activists.

In comparison, parents of politically right-leaning children are shown to be authoritative but loving. This parent group tends to identify as Christian, making it more common for them to choose private and homeschooling over public schools. This makes it harder for activists to impose their ideas onto this group of children and almost impossible for social emotional learning to be practiced on them.

Regardless of political affiliation, parents must provide their children an environment to flourish at any stage of their lives. A permissive parenting approach that teaches children that they call the shots will not have positive results. Children need boundaries, consequences, and love to become adults who will not destroy our society.