Has Gentle Parenting Gone Too Far?

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Parenting is an exhausting adventure under any circumstances. Most parents have to both work and keep up with childcare. But on top of this, there is also Gentle Parenting, and its close cousin, Positive Parenting*. Both of these child-rearing philosophies demand that a parent provide empathy at all times for a child’s feelings, put those feelings into words, and negotiate with the child regarding whether or not the child will do something a parent asks.

And, if you ask me, this is an unrealistic expectation that requires too much of parents.

Both Gentle Parenting and Positive Parenting are outgrowths of something that started in the 1950’s with Dr. Benjamin Spock’s first book, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. Spock revolutionized parenting practices by urging mothers and fathers to trust their instincts and reject rigid, authoritarian rules.

Prior to Spock, parenting tended to be entirely top-down and authoritarian, with parents establishing rules and children being expected to follow them. Harsh punishment for infractions was common. My own mother, for example, born in 1912, had to sit in front of her meal until she ate it all. This sometimes lasted hours, and she was not allowed to get up from the table until she had done what was required.

Since my mother’s time, expectations of children have done a 180. Child-centered, or child-led parenting, has evolved, and here we are, immersed in Gentle Parenting. Children can do pretty much what they want, and parents are not to raise their voices or punish. They are left on their own to wonder how to get their children out the door in the morning or to get them to bed at night.

This subject was discussed in an article in The New York Times entitled, “Did American-Style ‘Gentle Parenting’ Spoil French Children?” The writer, Madeline Schwartz, reports on what she calls a vitriolic debate within French society about the extent to which children should be catered to and empathized with. She comments that each side of the debate has large groups of professionals behind it. And while this same debate exists in the United States, I would say that there are fewer professionals, and people in general, on the side of setting more limits for children.

In France, the center of the debate is psychologist Caroline Goldman, who advocates time-outs for children when they misbehave. She feels that the introduction of Gentle Parenting into French culture has yielded a new generation of parents who do not know how or when or why to set limits. In her book, Go To Your Room, she lists behaviors that should be forbidden. These include complaining and making too much noise. But her detractors say that time-out is a form of psychological violence and that Goldman is encouraging parents to mistreat their children.

So what is a parent to do — whether in France or in the US — when even experts disagree?

As a psychologist and psychoanalyst with over forty years of experience, you will not be surprised to hear me say that the truth lies somewhere in the middle of the debate.

Prior to about 2015, the French were known for having well-behaved children. Pamela Druckerman’s book, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, was a sensation, and many American parents envied the strict French parents she described who seemed to have the secret of how to bring up children while also having time to themselves. Since that time, French parents have begun to adopt Gentle Parenting, and they have also begun to experience the same problems American parents have.

So — how do we begin to sort out the issue of which kind of parenting is best for children and which works best for parents?

Let’s take a broad look at history: For thousands of years, adherence to rules and strict behavioral codes was a matter of survival for children around the globe. After all, if a child felt like running into the meadow when the lioness was hunting, that was the end of the child. Certain rules have existed over time to maintain the safety and survival of children.

Now we no longer live amongst wild animals and we have the luxury of allowing all sorts of behavior in our children wihout worrying they will be eaten. Parents also have the time, and often the inclination, to consider their children’s feelings. Now we have a choice of whether to impose rules and whether to be strict about them.

But we need to be informed in order to make this choice. Do children need rules? Is it better for a child’s development for a parent to set limits?

The answers are: yes and yes.

Starting in infancy, babies need parents to help them to navigate the world. They need parents to provide love, nurturing and care. They need parents to soothe them when they are upset or tired, and they need parents to be clear about what should be done and what should not be done.

When an eight-month-old bites on the electrical cord leading to a lamp, the parent says “NO!”, picks them up, and takes them away. When the two-year-old hits his sister, the parent says “We do not hit” and, if necessary, picks him up and takes him away. When the three-year-old runs toward the street, the parent says, “NO. You must wait for me before going close to the street”. Rules and clear expectations are needed throughout infancy and childhood for the child’s safety but also to help the infant and the young child to tame his own impulses. Babies, toddlers and young children have less ability to control these impulses than older children and they need repeated help from their parents to learn how to begin to do this

Yes, we can say, “You felt angry because your sister took your truck, so you hit her” but we must also say. “And hitting is not OK. It hurts your sister”. And if the toddler or the young child persists, we must have a consequence at the ready. We can hold the child’s hands so he cannot hit, or we can pick the child up and say, “Since you kept hitting, you cannot play with your sister right now” – but the expectation AND the consequence should be clear.

Punishment has become a dirty word. Neither Gentle Parenting nor Positive Parenting philosophies endorse punishment. But we need to acknowledge that children must learn what behaviors are acceptable and which are not, and talking to them doesn’t always get the job done. Children will need consequences and even small punishments in order to really learn that they are not to do certain things. They may even need to be just a little afraid of these consequences and small punishments. This is an unpopular and perhaps old-fashioned sounding idea, but the fact is that we live within the hierarchy of society, and the place your child learns about such hierarchies starts at home. You are the parent, and it is OK for your child to understand that you make the rules and that there will be consistent consequences if they break the rules. If we want our children to be prepared for the teachers, coaches and bosses in their futures we must teach them how to control themselves and follow instructions while they are growing up.


*Positive parenting is an approach that focuses on building a strong, nurturing parent-child relationship rather than relying on punishment.

References

Druckerman, P. (2012). Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting

Schwartz, M. “Did American-Style ‘Gentle Parenting’ Spoil French Children?”, NYT, 7/13/26 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/29/magazine/american-parenting-french-c…

Spock, B. (1946). The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.

We Are in an Educational Crisis!

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Have you wondered if your children or grandchildren are getting the education they need? Do you wonder if they are really learning what they need to learn and whether it will prepare them for college…or for life? Do you ever wish that schools would ban phones from classrooms or that the United States would ban social media for kids under 16 so that your children could pay better attention to learning, sports, hobbies or even their friends?

I have worried about all of these things. And I have also wondered whether the recent popularity of theories backed not by science but by TikTok proclamations may be a result of the failure of our educational system to teach people how to evaluate ideas and to think for themselves.

We are in an era where opinion trumps science, where scrolling social media is preferred to reading books, where facts are no longer respected, and where screens win out over socializing in person. Whatever your politics, these trends do not bode well for our children learning how to relate to other people, to separate truth from opinion, to evaluate ideas for themselves, and to make cogent, fact-based arguments.

And because of our kids’ habitual use of phones and screens, attention to classroom teaching and homework is suffering.

David Bailey reported on just this in a recent article in Math Scholar. He said that we are experiencing a crisis in education—and he cited plenty of evidence:

  1. U.S. educational test scores are in a generation-long decline: From 2015 to 2025, 83 percent of school districts lost ground in reading, and 70 percent of districts lost ground in mathematics (Bailey, 2026).
  2. Twelfth-grade U.S. reading scores have dropped to the lowest level since 2005. Sadly, the declines have been greatest for those students from lower socioeconomic environments (Bailey, 2026).
  3. A working group at the University of California, San Diego, found that 900 of the latest incoming freshman class had mathematics skills below high-school level, and most of those did not even fully meet middle-school standards. Nationwide, college professors teaching mathematics and computer science courses report growing numbers of incoming students unable to do basic algebra or solve simple word problems (Bailey, 2026).
  4. Even at elite U.S. universities, professors report difficulties getting students to engage with full-length literature texts; in many cases, students have never read such “lengthy” works (Bailey 2026).
  5. Grade inflation is rampant at all levels. At Harvard University, the percentage of A grades soared from 24 percent of all grades in 2005 to 60 percent in 2025 (Bailey, 2026).

In this article, Bailey said that these changes in student performance are concurrent with the rise of smartphones, increased use of social media, and rising student absenteeism.

So it seems my concerns—and possibly your own—are justified.

While many people believe that this trend started during the COVID-19 pandemic—and while it is true that this period severely worsened the downward trajectory of student test scores—recent data from the Stanford Educational Opportunity Project shows that a “learning recession” actually began around 2013 (Miller et al., 2026). This report says that almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers did a decade ago. The term, “learning recession” was coined by the Education Scorecard, a joint project of Sean Reardon at the Stanford group, Thomas Kane at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard, and Douglas Staiger at Dartmouth (Miller et al., 2026).

In a recent New York Times article, Nat Malkus, a senior fellow studying educational policy at the American Enterprise Institute, said, “I cannot be more emphatic: This is an enormous problem that’s not getting enough attention” (Miller et al., 2026).

Students’ ever-present screens are potent sources of distraction. According to The Pew Research Center, nearly half of American teens say that they are online “almost constantly” compared with under a quarter who said the same thing a decade ago (Miller et al., 2026).

Moreover, schools are expecting less and less of kids. Students are required to read entire books far less often than in previous years. And their attentional abilities have also declined, resulting in less attention paid in the classroom and to longer homework assignments.

So parents, I hate to say it, but it is time to worry. And it is also time to do something.

Here are my suggestions:

  1. Make sure your child goes to school every day. This may seem obvious, but regular school attendance and a commitment to school are important for kids.
  2. Start going to the public library on a weekly basis when your children are around age 2. Take out the books they want and read them to them at home. When they are older, let them take out the books they want to read themselves.
  3. Model reading print books and magazines at home. Make sure your children see you reading books or magazines and enjoying it.
  4. Encourage your school-aged child to read for at least 10 minutes before going to sleep. This is a good, relaxing habit. And make sure their cell phone is not in the bedroom.
  5. During homework time, insist on cell phones being put in another room.
  6. Have your kids do their homework in a community space in the house where you can monitor what they are doing on their computers, making sure it is homework and not YouTube.
  7. Monitor your children’s curriculum. If you have concerns about it, or if you think it is not rigorous enough, speak up. Schedule a face-to-face meeting. Talk to the school principal. Demand more challenging work for your child.
  8. Monitor your children’s learning. If you do not think they are keeping up in reading or math or any of the other subjects, talk to the teacher. If the problem persists, ask for a formal assessment of your child’s learning and learning ability. Once a parent requests this, all public schools are required to set up an evaluation by the school psychologist.
  9. If you would prefer that phones—or even screens—not be used in the classroom, again, speak up. Talk to the teacher and the principal. Don’t be afraid to attend school board and PTA meetings and be vocal.

Parents, it is up to you to monitor your children’s education and to advocate for better services and policies if you do not think your children are getting the education they need. It is also up to you to instill good study habits—starting early—to help your children build their attentional capacities and to prepare them for the later school years and college.

References

Bailey, David (2026). The Great Dumbing Down of America, Math Scholar. https://mathscholar.org/2026/07/the-great-dumbing-down-of-society/

Miller, C., Paris, F., and Dervosh, S. Why U.S. Test Scores are in a ‘Generation-Long Decline.’ The New York Times, May 13, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/upshot/test-scores-school-districts-…

Is It Time to End Phone Use During School?

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The New York Times is reporting that various social media companies have actually made it a policy to try to engage school-aged users during the school day. “Snapchat sent phone alerts to adolescents during school hours, urging them to share what was going on in their classrooms. Meta paid “teen ambassadors” to promote Instagram and hand out swag to their friends at school. TikTok gave the National PTA millions of dollars, in part to throw school events about online safety and provide favorable comments to journalists.”

Ok, as if social media’s threat to kids’ focus, attention, and capacity for socialization wasn’t enough, now we find out that our children’s educations are being purposefully undermined.

While I am not, in general, a person who uses the concepts of good and evil in my life, I can say without hesitation that THIS is evil.

To intentionally grab children and teenagers’ attention away from their teachers and their work at school? For the purpose of larger usership and thus larger profits? 

Evil.

“TikTok’s leaders decided not to disable notifications during school hours, rejecting a change that its safety teams had pushed for years. A Snapchat strategy document referred to classroom phone use as “under the desk” time. Google managers knew YouTube was recommending videos to students during the school day that had nothing to do with their lessons.”

Evil.

No matter how good a teacher is, they cannot compete with YouTube. And no matter how interesting the conversation might be in the cafeteria, evidently, it also cannot compete with social media. During class, kids are indeed looking at their phones under their desks, and during free time, according to the reports of some teens I know, many are sitting in silence, looking at their own phones.

Evan Spiegel, who co-founded Snapchat, is quoted in the New York Times article as having said of the early users of his app: “We were thrilled to hear that most of them were high school students who were using Snapchat as a new way to pass notes in class.”

Ok, maybe evil is not the best word to describe the motivation behind the creation of this and other social media platforms. Perhaps it takes more words: for example, the relentless pursuit of users at any cost. Or amoral business practices that treat human users as mere avenues for growth rather than as sentient creatures whose well-being matters.

According to one article in The Journal of the American Medical Association, phone use during school hours is associated with negative academic outcomes. The study states the obvious, that phones create distraction from learning. This study found that even kids with restrictions placed on their phone use through an app that limits the amount of time a child can spend on their phone averaged 1.5 hours on smartphones during the school day. And a quarter spent two hours or more per day with social apps being the most frequently accessed. Subtract this from the estimated 8.5 hours that kids ages 13 – 18 generally spend on their phones per day (Jackson, 2026), and you have 6.5 hours of phone use at home, when many kids might be doing homework.

Yet another study (Tezler et al, 2026) found that kids use their phones during every hour of the school day, spending a third of their day on their phones. This resulted in what they called “reduced cognitive control”, that is, poorer self-regulation and challenges to cognitive development.

This is an enormous problem.

And not just for school kids. College students and even medical and law students, I’ve seen in my practice have complained to me about how hard it is to study. They feel compelled to check their phones quite literally every other minute. Some have resorted to deleting all their apps, some have had to put parental restrictions on their own phones and some just put their phones in another room when they study. But inevitably, many tell me they give in and add back the apps or bring their phones back into the room with them. Their self-control is insufficient in the face of the demand and the allure of the smartphone.

The word addiction has been used.

So – the evidence, both research-based and anecdotal, is clear. As Tezler et al said,  ” These findings highlight the need for school-level policies and digital literacy programs that address not only overall screen time but also habitual smartphone-checking behaviors that fragment attention.”

Amen.

It is time to take phones away from kids during school hours. It is time to educate kids as well as adults as to the effect of frequent social app use and app checking. And it is time to bring the companies that purposefully manipulate all of us to justice.

References

Kaitlyn Burnell, et al (2025). Smartphone engagement during school hours among US youths. JAMA Network Open.Vol. 8, No. 8

Jackson, J. (2026) Smartphone use cuts into school hours with social media leading the way. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-smartphone-school-hours-social-media.html

Tezler, E. et al (2026. Smartphone use duing school hours and association with cognitive control in youths aged 11 to 18 years. JAMA Netw OpenPublished Online: March 9, 2026

The Most Amazing Thing She Had Ever Seen

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By Tejal Toprani

Tejal is a social worker, therapist and mom living in Arizona.

I recently recommended the book The Amazing Generation to my ten-year-old son, Avyaan. Surprisingly, he took it to school. And finished it in one day. This does make sense, however as his school limits “technology” to a basic computer skills class three times a week, and he has plenty of time to read there. And he actually forgets to charge or even wear the communication watch we got him for drop-offs and events.

Which honestly says two things:

  1. The book is incredibly readable.
  2. My child is not yet screen addicted
  3. And my child may already be concerned about the collapse of civilization.

And so am I: A few months ago, I went to a supper club where guests played one of those “get to know you” icebreaker games. You walk around with a sheet of questions, trying to make meaningful human connection while balancing a cocktail and pretending this doesn’t feel like corporate team-building with better lighting.

One of the questions was:
“What is the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen?”

I asked this of a woman in her seventies. Now, from what I later learned about her, she had lived:

She had traveled extensively.
Raised a family.
Spent time with adult children and grandchildren.
Ran a thriving family-owned restaurant.
Built a career outside the home.
Experienced actual life in all its messy, textured, analog glory.

But do you know what she told me the most amazing thing she had ever seen was?  “A Facebook video.” The most amazing thing she had ever seen was a Facebook video –

Not childbirth.
Not Paris.
Not falling in love.
Not watching her children grow up.

A Facebook video. The video involved a woman getting pulled over by the police for holding her phone while driving. The twist — and apparently the hook — was that the woman did not actually have a right hand. The woman at my table leaned in while telling me this story. There was going to be a “trial,” apparently, because both sides insisted their version of events was true. 

She was riveted. I smiled politely and said, “Wow, that’s crazy.” But internally? I was haunted.

Because this woman had lived a full human life, and somehow the most amazing thing she could think of was content specifically engineered to keep her watching. Not living. Watching other people live. And I say this without judgment because honestly? We are all vulnerable to it.

I fall into that strange microgeneration sometimes called Xennials — old enough to remember life before smartphones, but young enough to have fully merged with technology like reluctant cyborgs.

We remember:

  • house phones
  • getting lost without GPS
  • boredom
  • waiting
  • silence
  • not being reachable every second of the day

Our children do not. For them, technology is not an invention. It’s oxygen.

And that’s why I gave my son the book. And it’s also what makes The Amazing Generation feel less like a parenting book and more like a cultural intervention. The author, Jonathan Haidt, argues that we accidentally traded a “play-based childhood” for a “phone-based childhood.” And once you see this, you cannot unsee it. 

Kids are safer physically than ever before. But emotionally? Many are struggling more than ever. Anxious. Lonely. Disconnected. Chronically stimulated but somehow undernourished. As a therapist and a parent, I see this constantly.

Children are losing opportunities to:

  • tolerate discomfort
  • navigate conflict independently
  • develop confidence through real-world experiences
  • experience boredom without immediately anesthetizing it

And adults are not immune either. We are all being trained, little by little, to confuse stimulation with meaning. To confuse consuming with connecting. To confuse watching life with living it. The thing is, if you ask people about their favorite memories, almost nobody says:

“Honestly? Probably that seven-hour scroll session I had in 2023.”

They talk about:

  • road trips
  • summers
  • inside jokes
  • heartbreak
  • friendships
  • sports teams
  • campfires
  • college roommates
  • babies
  • terrible apartments
  • laughter so hard you couldn’t breathe

Real life.

The uncurated kind. And this is where I think parenting gets complicated. Because we are raising children inside an environment that even we do not fully understand yet. We hand kids devices because everyone else has them. Because we’re tired. Because we need to make dinner. Because modern parenting is exhausting and relentless and occasionally you just need someone to watch YouTube so you can send one coherent email.

I get it. But I also think many of us feel a quiet unease. Like maybe something sacred is being slowly traded away. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just one scroll at a time. One less conversation. One less bike ride. One less moment of boredom that could have turned into imagination. One less fully lived day.

I’m not anti-technology. I use it constantly. I am literally writing this on a computer while probably ignoring three texts and an unread email from Costco. But I do think we need to ask ourselves harder questions about what kind of childhood we are protecting. And what kind of adulthood are we drifting toward? Because I don’t want the most amazing thing my children ever see to be content optimized for engagement.

I want it to be their actual lives.

The Amazing Generation makes a compelling case that our society has shifted from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood” and as a result, has directly contributed to the rising rates of anxiety and loneliness in children. As both a therapist and a parent, I felt it was vital for my ten-year-old son, Avyaan, to read this book; I wanted him to understand that good memories are made through living in the present, off-screen, and true resilience and emotional strength aren’t found in a digital interface, but are built through the messy, unpredictable experiences of the real world.

The most powerful outcome of his reading the book, however, wasn’t just his understanding of the theory, but his immediate application of it: he asked to play a board game together as a family when he came home from school the day I gave him the book. This was a small, uncurated moment—a simple step back into the “oxygen” of real life that the book advocates for, one that gave him deep, quiet contentment and a sense of happiness with himself, who he is, and who we are as a family – even while surrounded by peers with greater tech access.

Bedtime is a Mess!

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little bored boy in bed at night hiding under blanket, staring at glowing smartphone screen. Digital addiction, excessive screen time, and late-night gadget overuse.

In many, if not most American homes, bedtime is a mess right now. Many children won’t go to sleep without a parent in the room, they call for their parents a million times, get out of bed over and over, come to sleep in their parents’ bed in the middle of the night, or start out there and never leave. Parents are exhausted, and they get little or no evening time to themselves.

Why is this, and what can we do about it?

Well, there is obviously not one answer that fits every family and every situation, but one thing has occurred to me. And that is, that in this age of Gentle Parenting, parents are often shying away from insisting that their children go to bed and stay there. They are finding it difficult to be firm about this. They are having trouble raising their voices, if needed, to make sure their child knows it is time to go to sleep, and this is non-negotiable.

While parents may not say they ascribe to Gentle Parenting, it is part of the zeitgeist nonetheless. It is everywhere. And, as a result, it has gone out of style to insist that children do certain things in a certain way, and to be stern about it.

Let me be frank. My father loved me—but I was afraid of him. And this was true for many children of my generation. We didn’t go to bed or do our homework because we wanted to. We did the things we had to do because we knew we had to do them and we were afraid of the consequences—which were usually unnamed—if we didn’t.

Do I advise making your child afraid of you?

Well, not exactly.

You don’t want your child to be afraid of you….but you do want your children to know there are limits and to know that you, as their parent, will enforce these limits immediately when needed.

You don’t want your child to be afraid of you – but you also need to accept that you do not need to be your child’s friend, or playmate. You need to be their parent, to take care of them and to help them feel safe.

And this is what being firm, and setting consistent limits, including those around bedtime, does.

But, again, this kind of parenting has gone out of fashion entirely.

Does this have to do with the fact that we are in an age of authoritarian governments? Are parents so put off by what is happening in our country and in the world that they implement the opposite form of home governance?

Well, that I’m not sure of—but I do see that it is hard for parents to be authorities with their own children at this point in time. Maybe when they are angry, some parents are able to do this—but what about when they are not yet angry?

What I see is a great deal of reasoning with children, trying to convince children to do what is good for them, etc. And with most children, especially young children, this just doesn’t work. Children don’t go to bed because they learn they need sleep and understand that it is healthy for them. They go to bed because they have to. And often, they don’t like it. Bedtime means an end to fun. It means an end to playing. It means separation from their parents and separation from the activities of the day. It means feeling alone. And sometimes it means lying awake for a while. None of this is pleasant. That is why parents need to be firm about it.

Additionally, providing the structure of a particular bedtime and bedtime ritual is helpful for children. Most young children need this. They like routine, and they are helped by a schedule. They need to know what to expect and what is expected of them.

As a parent, I was not always good at being firm. But fortunately for me, my son’s father was very good at it, especially around bedtime. My son had a bath every night, three books and three songs—and that was it.

Of course, he tried to push the limits. Of course, he tried to prolong the conversations before bed. But firmness helped.

Sometimes it is just time to say goodnight—and mean it.

Was this easy?

It was not.

For a solid year, when my son was two and a half, he got out of his crib in the middle of the night and came to our room. And for a solid year, I took him by the hand, walked him back to bed, and lay on the couch in his room for a half hour to make sure he didn’t escape again.

Was I tired?

Yes, I was. And this made it hard to go to work the next day.

And here is another problem: Most parents work and cannot afford to be too tired. This may lead some parents to allow kids to sleep in their bed or to do other things at bedtime and at night that are less than optimal. Parents feel they cannot afford to put bedtime rules into operation if it leads to meltdowns at night.

But my advice is this:

  1. Decide with your partner whether you are ready and committed to setting firm limits around bedtime.
  2. When you are ready, implement your plan.
  3. Start by telling your child that tonight he will go up to bed at ___(insert time you’ve decided), you will give him a bath, you will read him three books and then you will sing him three songs. Then you expect him to sleep (substitute here whatever ritual you’ve decided on).
  4. Decide on a bedtime ritual that works for your family. It could be bath and books and songs as described, or it could be something different—but whatever you decide it is, make sure it does not involve any screen time whatsoever, and do it every night.
  5. Be firm. Use a stern tone of voice. Try to forget about Gentle Parenting for this part of your day. Do not be afraid to be the authority. Don’t even be afraid to raise your voice.
  6. Remind your child of the routine and the expectations each evening for at least the first three or four nights that you start this.
  7. Be consistent.
  8. Be prepared for pushback. But do not let it deter you.
  9. And even if it takes a year of walking your child back to bed, don’t give up.

Parents need a few hours of time to themselves in the evenings. But if you don’t institute a bedtime, if you are not firm and even stern about bedtime, if you do not keep at it, your child’s bedtime will run into your bedtime, and then you will have absolutely no time between work and childcare for your own well-needed and well-deserved adult time.

Mentalization: What is it, anyway and what does it have to do with parenting?

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In the last few years, everyone has been talking about mentalization. But what is it, really?

Two British psychologists, Peter Fonagy and Anthony Bateman, began writing about mentalization in the late 1980’s. They introduced the term to describe the process of understanding our own behavior and that of others in terms of underlying feelings, desires, and intentions. 

Often described as “holding in mind” or “thinking about thinking”, (and also called Theory of Mind) this skill is crucial for understanding other people as well as being helpful in understanding and regulating our own emotions. Mentalization allows us to reflect on our own behavior and that of those around us and to interpret its meaning.

This sort of reflection is an important skill for use in parenting. Fonagy states that for the optimal development of children, it is important for parents to imagine what their children are thinking and feeling and to keep these feelings in mind in their everyday interactions with their children. This is different from what is called “gentle parenting,” where parents meet their child’s every behavior with an explanation to the child of their feelings. In fact, you could say that gentle parenting takes mentalization to an illogical and unnecessary extreme. 

Sometimes described as “having the mind in mind” or “seeing ourselves from the outside and others from the inside,” the capacity for mentalization is important for building an internal picture of how other people’s minds work. 

Fonagy says that some parents have more trouble understanding what their child is thinking and feeling than others. In such cases, the parents’ own feelings can get in the way of understanding what might be in their child’s mind. They may misattribute the motivations that often drive themselves to their child, or they may attribute the motivations that were attributed to them as children to their own child. This can interfere in really understanding their own child. It can also result in their child not feeling understood or truly seen.

Once, when my son was about a year and a half old, we were at the Bat Mitzvah of my niece. When the photos of the Bat Mitzvah girl’s late grandparents (my parents) were projected, I began to cry. My son looked at me with concern….and then offered me his bottle.

I wonder now, was this metalization on his part? At one and a half? My eighteen-month-old could relate to my feelings and he wanted to comfort me. Was this more an example of empathy – which is an identification with another’s feelings – or was it mentalization? Was my son able to understand and relate to my feeling sad or was he able to understand more fully why I was feeling this way? The former would seem like a primitive form of mentalization while the latter would be a more fully developed theory of mind.

I suspect that at that age, my son was not able to imagine what I was thinking and what it was that made me cry – – but he was able to see my sadness.

Endearing – but not mentalization.

When children can more fully mentalize, starting at around age 4, this is very helpful to them. Understanding the motivations of others aids in building their own emotional regulation. If a four-year-old child can begin to understand that his friend took his toy because he had waited a long time and just could not wait any longer, he learns several things – first, that his friend was in a different position than he was. Often called alternate perspective taking, the child can realize that he had the toy and he was enjoying playing with it but his friend did not have the toy and was having a hard time waiting to play with it. This is helpful because it is much more tempting to hit someone when they take your toy if you have no understanding of why they did it.

And for parents, mentalization is important for several reasons. First, using mentalization, that is, keeping your child’s mind in mind while being his parent, helps with differentiating your feelings from your child’s and being able to understand your child’s feelings, thoughts and motivations separate from your own. This is useful when trying to maintain your own emotional regulation while dealing with your child. Second, modeling mentalization is helpful for your child’s development of this skill. We want our children to achieve theory of mind because children who are able to reflect on their own feelings and to predict the feelings of others are better able to develop good relationships, strong self-confidence and a healthy sense of self.

So what does mentalization look like in parenting? An example of a lack of mentalization would be a parent who hurries their reluctant child into the car for a pediatrician appointment saying only, “Hurry up, we’re going to be late!” The same parent, using their mentalizing function, would realize that their child might be slow in leaving because they are frightened to go to the doctor’s. The parent might remember that the last time they went, their child received a vaccination, and they would be able to keep in mind that their child might be feeling anxious about the visit. They might imagine their child thinking, “I don’t want to go!” or “I won’t go!”. The parent can choose whether or not to reflect back to their child what they realize, but their awareness of the child’s mental state can guide their actions with their child in a very helpful way. 

How Are Parents Supposed to Learn to Parent?

~ corinnemasur2331 ~ Leave a comment

In hundreds of thousands of homes in our country, parents are reinventing the wheel … of parenthood. 

Upon having a baby, many parents realize that they do not have the slightest idea what to do. They do not feel prepared to care for that baby. Often, after years of feeling competent at work, they suddenly feel incompetent – – – and anxious. 

Donald Winnicott, the famous and beloved British pediatrician and child psychoanalyst wrote, “The most important element at any one moment is the ordinary home in which ordinary parents are doing an ordinary good job, starting off with infants and children with that basis for mental health which enables them to eventually become part of the community” (The Spontaneous Gesture,1950, p. 21).

However, in our country, and I suspect in other places as well, there is no “ordinary” way to raise a child. This sort of communal knowledge or this set of common values has been lost. 

And the mental health of both infants and parents is affected by this.

Many new parents have focused on their own lives and education and have just not had prior experience with babies or young children. They really don’t know what to expect from a one-year-old or a five-year-old and, as they become parents, they are at a loss when called upon to meet the ordinary situations of child rearing.

Henri Parens, another child psychoanalyst, advocated for parenting curriculum to be instituted in every school. As one of my psychoanalytic mentors, I often heard him talk about this, and quite honestly, at the time, I didn’t see the point. But now that I am working daily with first-time parents, professional parents, and harried parents, I do. 

I see that the parents I come in contact with are desperate to know what is developmentally “normal” at each age as well as to know how to handle the inevitable challenges of raising children at all of the various stages of development. 

Given the much heralded death of the extended family and the loss of true community for most young families, questions arise: where are people in the early years of parenthood supposed to learn how to parent? Where are they supposed to learn about child development? And where are they supposed to learn how to manage their own internal reactions to the extraordinary stressors of normal parenthood?

Somehow, we have come to a place in history where many kids grow up never once having to take responsibility for a younger sibling or cousin and never having worked as a babysitter. We have put the emphasis on children doing well in school and going to college, and in some cases, even graduate school. In this march toward “success”  many young people never learn about babies and children.

I do not know if Henri Parens had the right solution – teaching about parenting in the schools – or if there are other solutions to this problem. But what I do know is that right now, right here in our country, hundreds of thousands of parents are struggling – more than in other generations, I think – to figure out how to do even “ordinary” parenting.

Winners aren’t people who don’t lose, they are people who keep trying: a personal essay

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When I was a child I never won anything. I mean never. I went to an academically competitive school and while I suppose I was smart, evidently I wasn’t smart enough to win any awards.

This was in an era, long ago, when it had not yet come into vogue to tell children they were doing a good job. My school was big on telling children they were not trying hard enough.

Often, my parents were told that I was not living up to my potential. And once, my mother was told that I always sat in the back row – and this was in a classroom that only had two rows. This kind of feedback was crushing to my self-esteem, not to mention other aspects of my self-confidence. 

It made me feel badly about myself. And you could easily think that this was destructive. However, what actually happened is that it made me mad, really, really mad. And I decided to show them. In high school, I got interested in psychology and in theories of education. I decided I could understand and help children in a way that I had not felt helped or understood. I went to a college that was as different from my high school as possible. It was a wonderful antidote. And then it went bankrupt. I had to find another college. And then I had to convince that new college to accept the credits from my beloved and highly non-traditional, now defunct, former school. Then I decided to go to graduate school to get a doctorate, something the director of studies at my high school would not have predicted. I didn’t succeed the first year. I didn’t succeed the second year. I had to try three years running to get into a program I wanted to go to.

If I wasn’t as “smart” as the kids who had won the awards early in my school career, at least I had perseverance. 

And then, at a time when psychologists were not allowed to enter clinical psychoanalytic training at most institutes, I decided I wanted to become a psychoanalyst. Of course. 

I say all this for a purpose. Telling kids they are doing a good job is now in fashion. Shielding children from criticism, protecting them from failure and helping them to feel they have succeeded is something parents routinely do. But it is important to keep in mind that motivation and drive do not necessarily come from a lifetime of success. And success is not defined by always succeeding, or by a life lived without suffering.

Henri Parens, a child psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor, revamped the psychoanalytic theory of aggression. He wrote that aggression comes from an overabundance of frustration. But he also said that there are two kinds of aggression: hostile, destructive and non-hostile, non-destructive. And, it turns out that this latter type of aggression is what motivates us to move forward in life. We need SOME aggression to motivate us. And we need SOME frustration, in addition to our inborn, natural aggressive impulses, to generate that motivation.

So, frustration is necessary for children. Some frustration can lead to a feeling of wanting to do better next time. Shielding children from experiences of frustration and even occasional failure is not beneficial. And telling kids that they have done a good job when they actually have not is not helpful. Kids need to feel motivated by not doing well sometimes and the frustration that comes from that in order to want to try again and try harder.

If you have any doubt about this, read Ernst Papanek’s Out ofthe Fire about the hundreds of children he housed and educated during the early days of World War II in France. These children were separated from their families; some walked across Europe, some went from hiding to hiding until they reached one of Papanek’s homes for children. And what did those who survived become? They became lawyers and doctors and writers and professors. 

Winners are not people who do not lose – or suffer – they are people who keep trying.

Parental Expectations: Do They Help or Hurt?

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We all have expectations of our children. We are conscious of some of these – and less conscious of others.

I want to talk about several issues regarding these expectations:

First of all, expectations are not necessarily good or bad. They just ARE. And they start even before conception. As soon as we think about having a baby, we imagine what that baby will be like, what they might look like, what their personality might be like, what talents and abilities they might have.

This is universal – – and it is normal. It is part of the process of becoming a parent. 

Often we hope for a child who will be a particular way, and have particular skills and abilities. Whether school was important for us, or whether we missed out on going to college or graduate school, we might hope for a child who is “smart” and does well in school. Or, if we were shy as a child, we might hope for a child who is gregarious or assertive. If we love sports, we might hope they will be talented athletically.

In one way or another, our expectations will be formed by our own histories, values and wishes. And to the extent that they are unconscious, it is a good idea to try to make them more conscious. This allows us to decide whether they want to act on these expectations – or to rework them.

Because our expectations WILL affect our children. 

Children naturally want to please their parents – and this is good motivation for them. But when we expect things of our children, we also want to make sure that our expectations are realistic, and that we leave room for our children to be who they are, and to establish their own goals in life.

So, small expectations – like helping around the house, being kind or doing homework? That’s a definite YES.

But regarding our deeper fantasies of what we want our children to be as people? We need to ask ourselves if these are reasonable. For example, if we expect our children to get all A’s, what happens if our child turns out to have a learning disability? What happens if reading or math just doesn’t come easily for them? How will they feel about themselves when they come home with B’s or C’s…or worse?

And how will WE feel?

Will we be disappointed? And will our child pick up on that disappointment? What will this do to their motivation? Will they try harder? Or give up? Will they feel badly about themselves? Less confident?

For a while, everyone was talking about Oscar winning actress, Bri Larson’s YouTube content. She said, famously, “my job is 98% failure”. She talked about how many times she was turned down for parts in TV and movies before she got anything significant at all. 

Perhaps we need to spend less time expecting our children to be a certain way and more time helping them to learn how to handle the times when they don’t meet our expectations – or their own. Perhaps we need to help them to be more like Bri Larson. And maybe we need to think less about our own wishes for our children’s success, and instead, help them to learn how to fail – and to survive through failure. Because, after all, Bri Larson is right. Life is full of failures, both little and big. And, if our children are to be successful, we have help them to learn to keep trying, and not let individual failures define who they are.

Perhaps it is more helpful as a parent to think about how we are going to talk to our children when they don’t get an A or when they don’t make the team or get the part in the school play. All children experience these disappointments and all children feel badly about them. 

Here are some things you can do as a parent:

1. Make goals small. Starting in infancy, when your baby is trying to learn something new, encourage them. But also, watch out if you notice yourself comparing what your baby is doing to what other babies are doing.

2. Concentrate on your own child. Stay in the moment with your own baby or child. Stay with them where they are.

3. Make your goals small for your child. Help them to accomplish tiny milestones; for example, an extra minute of tummy time, one new word, one spoonful of a new food, or for an older child, getting a B when their last grade in that subject was a C.

4. Help build frustration tolerance. The famous psychoanalyst, Heinz Kohut, coined the term “optimal frustration”. He talked about how important it is for people to learn to tolerate some frustration – not so much that they feel like giving up – but enough that they feel challenged. When your baby or your child gets frustrated, whether it’s building a tower that won’t stay up, or learning the letter R, just tell them, “It’s hard. But it’s OK. We’ll try again later.” Build in the idea that some things are difficult but you can take a break…and then keep trying later….after you’re done being frustrated.

5. Check your own expectations. As children get older, keep checking your expectations, keep setting your goals small and keep helping your child to keep their goals small. For some kids, a more appropriate expectation than getting all A’s is establishing longer and longer periods of doing homework. For a child who can’t sit still for an hour, success might mean doing 20 minutes of homework when they only used to be able to do five.

6. Normalize failure. Tell your child your own stories of failure. Tell them how you reacted. Tell them about Larson and what she said and how she persevered through lots and lots of failure.

7. Talk to your children when they are not in the middle of feeling frustrated. Talk about how hard it is to not get what you want or to succeed in the way they want. Talk to them about frustrated feelings and how hard they are. Encourage them to take breaks when they are frustrated with a math problem or with their average when shooting baskets. Encourage them to come back to the activity later when they feel less tired and frustrated.

We want our children to learn how to live in the real world and to endure both the downs and the ups of life. It is important that we think about how to best do this — and how our own expectations may play a part in how our children do or do not “succeed” and ultimately feel about themselves as people.

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Related posts:

The Importance of Failure

Holiday Re-Do

~ corinnemasur2331 ~ Leave a comment

Now that the holidays are over, it’s time to start thinking about…the holidays. 

Next year.

How do you want to do it differently? What didn’t work? What do you WANT your holidays to look like from here on out?

These are the things many of the young parents in my practice and in my parenting groups are talking about.

The first topic was presents. So many of the parents felt that their way of doing presents wasn’t working. Their children were disappointed, or overwhelmed or both. One mother described it this way: “everybody opened everything all at once. It was chaos…and I had a headache.”

The second topic was relatives: when they came, how long they stayed and how many presents they gave. One mother with three small children had tried to control the overwhelm by having everyone come to her house instead of having to travel. That too was chaos.

So what’s a parent to do?

Perhaps now is the time to sit down with your partner and talk about how you want the holidays to look next year – and to start to prepare family members for any changes you intend to make.

One mother in our group who has older children said she wanted Christmas Eve and Christmas morning just for her own nuclear family. But she was afraid to tell her parents and her in-laws for fear of causing hurt feelings. 

Another mother talked about how “bratty” her children were around gifts. She had not wanted them to expect a gift every night of Hannuka, but when there was a night without gifts, her kids whined and complained. 

The discussions we had around these issues were really fruitful. The mother with three children told everyone that after numerous years of overwhelming holidays, she finally told her relatives that her family would celebrate Christmas Eve and Christmas morning on their own and that she would then have an open house on Christmas afternoon….and to her surprise, everyone was fine with it. 

And as for presents? We discussed how important it is to tell children ahead of time what to expect in regard to presents. If you decide you are just going to give each of your children one big gift for the holidays and you are going to let the relatives give the other gifts, tell your children well in advance. If you are going to give a gift every other night of Hannuka, tell your children ahead of time and let them know which nights will be the present nights. You may also want to talk about other things, for example, the meaning of the holiday, and for that matter, the meaning of gifts. You might want to emphasize the good feeling derived from giving, the importance of generosity, the importance of the children giving as well as receiving, and the importance of graciousness when receiving a gift. Your children may not be able to quell their disappointment when they don’t get what they want or when they don’t get as much as they want, but the topics of meaning, gratitude, generosity and graciousness can be discussed repeatedly over the years.

And as for the other disappointments of the holidays? Well, one mother told us her solution: radical acceptance. She said she assumes there will be some disappointment around presents and she also assumes someone – or several people – will get sick over the holidays….and she just accepts it.