Gentle parenting is over – it’s time to say ‘no’ to your child, according to experts

Charlotte CrippsWed, April 22, 2026 at 11:46 AM UTC

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Parents are out in force criticising the way UK schools are treating their little angel children, with more than 5 million formal complaints about schools in 2024 to 2025, according to the National Governance Association.

It’s partly down to touchy-feely, “weak-willed” parents, according to Tom Bennett, the UK’s Department for Education’s ambassador for attendance and behaviour, who claims that children are not hearing the word “no” enough at home and it’s causing a parent gap which is leading to huge numbers of mums and dads and guardians complaining that schools are too strict.

As schools are increasingly having to instil rules that would have been aligned with discipline in the home, according to Bennett, there is now a crisis because “parents and schools have moved in opposite directions”.

“Many parents think that if you just speak nicely to children, they’ll behave...” Bennett told The Sunday Times. “But, in many cases, teachers are having to teach a cohort of children who’ve come from low-boundary environments where, for instance, they think they can do what they want and that they’re the most important person in the room and that their feelings are the only feelings that matter. Those schools need to build structures, a behaviour curriculum, from the ground up.”

Regina George’s mum from the 2023 ‘Mean Girls’ musical is a perfect example of overly-permissive parenting (Paramount)

Bennett is talking about the popular gentle parenting style, where caregivers take an empathetic approach towards children, focusing on connection and boundaries, rather than discipline. That means always validating children’s feelings, scheduling in “time-ins” to process emotions together and never, ever yelling, instead remaining a calm anchor to kids even through full-blown meltdowns.

It is a trend that began about 10 years ago as a response to the more strict authoritarian approach, with Millennial and Gen Z parents aiming to do better than those who raised them by focusing on emotional regulation rather than compliance.

But a pushback parenting style is emerging, “Fafo” (F*** Around and Find Out), which emphasises living with the consequences of actions, rather than carefully explaining every decision. This firmer parenting style has clearly not infiltrated UK schools yet – and something is going terribly wrong in classrooms.

While there are many challenges facing children and teenagers today, there is increasing concern that gentle or permissive parenting is one reason for the sharp escalation of pupils' unruly behaviour. To indicate the scale of the problem, there are currently more suspensions in one term at UK primary schools than for the whole school year a decade earlier.

Professor Ellie Lee, director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent and author of 2014’s Parenting Culture Studies, goes as far as to say we should “reject” gentle parenting to curb the “undoubted problem with deteriorating behaviour” at schools.

“What we need is adult solidarity around a common goal of bringing up children – and one that is authoritative,” she says, adding the need for authority on the part of the parents has pretty much collapsed.

There are currently more UK primary school suspensions in one term than for the whole school year a decade ago (PA)

“People think authority is the same thing as being authoritarian and so when schools discipline children, you have parents accusing the school of being a ‘bootcamp’ or ‘fascists’, but authority and discipline are good for children because it teaches them boundaries and self-discipline,” she says.

“Rather than parents going nuts if their child is told off for messing around in the playground, they should be saying ‘thanks very much’. But nobody is allowed to tell them off, the parents take everything personally and feel what their child is feeling, instead of accepting that it’s all a normal part of life and childhood.”

The problem is, she says, that strict parenting has been condemned as “insufficiently child-centred” and is now seen as “worryingly authoritarian” – and even “running into child abuse”.

“Adults and parents are very nervous about upsetting children because they’ve been told by parenting experts it can scar them for life,” says Professor Lee. “But gentle parenting is undermining the authority of parents and teachers because it is child-led, not adult-led.”

American child psychologist Leonard Sax, and author of 2024’s The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups, agrees that in order for schools to be successful, there needs to be an “alliance” between them and parents in wanting their “children to grow up to be men and women of character, and to fulfil their potential”.

“Parents and teachers ought to be allies”, says Sax. “But many parents have bought into the premises of gentle parenting: Don't say ‘no’. Good parenting means letting kids decide.” But if these concepts are applied in the classroom, he says, they lead to disaster.

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“If teachers know that parents will not support them, and that parents will be actively hostile, teachers will be reluctant to assert their authority. Or they may actually be unable to assert their authority. And the result, often, is chaos.”

Gentle parenting has been profoundly disempowering for parents. Parents are told that imposing a consequence for a child’s behaviour is innately cruel or damaging

Anita Cleare, parenting expert and author

Alyssa Blask Campbell, author of 2023’s Tiny Humans, Big Emotions: How to Navigate Tantrums, Meltdowns, and Defiance to Raise Emotionally Intelligent Children, tells me that gentle parenting started as a much-needed shift away from dismissing kids’ emotions and validating them, but in many cases, the pendulum has swung too far.

“When we tiptoe around feelings or avoid boundaries, it’s actually disregulating for kids because they don’t know what to expect,” she says.

Kids don’t need perfect calm or endless flexibility, either, that gentle parenting offers. “They need confident, respectful leadership from adults who can hold both empathy and limits at the same time. Without that, we often see it show up in classrooms as kids who feel unsure of expectations, struggle with frustration, and push boundaries in search of where they actually exist.”

While Anita Cleare, expert and author of 2020’s The Work/Parent Switch and 2024’s How To Get Your Teenager Out Of Their Bedroom, says that as a parenting trend, gentle parenting has been profoundly disempowering for parents.

“Gentle parenting started out as a helpful shift in emphasis away from control and towards children’s emotional development. But by centralising children’s feelings so completely, it has left many parents struggling to set the boundaries that their children need,” she tells me.

The way gentle parenting has been translated into popular culture, she says, particularly via social media, is the real problem. “Parents are told that imposing a consequence for a child’s behaviour is innately cruel or damaging, even when that consequence is logical, brief and consistent and despite half a century of research showing that this can be an effective way of setting boundaries for the majority of children.”

Cleare is a proponent of “positive parenting”, in which children are seen as developing through experience. Like gentle parenting, the focus is on relationship and emotions, but it also presents boundary-setting as an essential component of children’s social and emotional development. “It looks to equip parents with practical strategies for setting boundaries calmly but authoritatively,” she says,

However, Sarah Ockwell-Smith, author of 2016’s The Gentle Parenting Book: How To Raise Calmer, Happier Children From Birth to Seven, says that, unfortunately, there seems to be a current trend of people “wilfully misunderstanding gentle parenting” and “blaming it for everything”.

Social media can often support the theory that instilling consequences on a child can be ‘cruel’ (BBC)

“Gentle parents absolutely do say ‘no’ to their children,” she tells me. “They are not afraid of upsetting them when doing so, though they will support any upset and focus on reconnection, and they use both natural and logical consequences, as opposed to illogical consequences such as time out, naughty steps, exclusion and isolation,” she tells me.

She describes gentle parenting as having “high expectations and discipline combined with high levels of support and nurturance”. “This is the opposite of the authoritarian style Tom Bennett is so keen on and years of science have told us is not only ineffective but damaging,” she adds.

Gentle parenting is often confused with permissive parenting, which lacks boundaries and discipline, she tells me, but it could not be more different. “I find it concerning that those so deeply involved in educating our children today are confused by the differences.”

Instead, Ockwell-Smith says the real problem is that schools are grossly underfunded, overcrowded, with ever-changing curriculums, overworked and underpaid teachers who are leaving the profession in droves.

“This all has a strong impact on pupil behaviour,” she says. There is a SEND crisis in schools, which she also points out is hugely problematic. “Most of the pupils who have ‘poor behaviour’ likely have undiagnosed or unsupported SEND needs.”

She takes the side of the complaining parents, adding that parents today are trying to do what no generation has ever done before. “They work full time to pay the bills in a cost of living crisis, try to repair the damage caused by the shambles of Covid ‘home schooling’, tackle a rise in adolescent mental health problems with a broken CAMHS system and shoulder the blame of difficulties experienced at school,” she says.

The real culprit? “It’s political,” she says. “Neoliberalism puts parents and teachers against each other, children suffer, gentle parenting is lazily blamed, but nobody considers the real issues.”

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Source: “AOL Breaking”