Experts question the gentle parenting trend

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 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.”

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. 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 were almost as many suspensions in one term at UK primary schools in 2023 than there were 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. “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 updated 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. “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.”