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Look, I know that we call every toothpaste brand Colgate and all margarine brands Rama, but, for crying out loud, can people please refrain from misconstruing the meaning of soft parenting.
In essence, soft parenting is about validating your children’s emotions without neglecting your duty of instilling respect in them. A video surfaces of teenagers drinking behind the school toilets. Parents look the other way. An article about underage pregnancy trends is published. No comments from parents. A story breaks about how teenagers react (a teenage appropriate manner nogal) to being groomed by paedophiles.
Does anybody out there have the inside info on how, when and why we deemed it appropriate to scrap the gist of soft parenting’s foundation being “kids are seen and heard”, and replace it with the assumption (yes, the mother of all mess ups) that this parenting approach is anchored in letting kids get away with murder?
READ: Dashiki | Left or right, north or south... Which way is the right direction?
Newsflash: Even if soft parenting was in fact rooted in deliberately breeding unruly kids, ruling your household with an iron fist is not a scientifically proven formula for raising Jesus reincarnates. Soft parenting was unheard of when today’s parents (the 70s, 80s and 90s generations) were basking in their own teenage rebellion.
On the contrary, there was a time when we were conditioned to believe that parents who restrained themselves from violently assaulting their children (our peers) detested their own offspring.
So, since all our backsides were so affectionately whooped by our loving parents, what are our peers doing behind prison bars? I look around and I see tons of people between 25 and 45 years of age who are decaying from substance abuse, being horrible romantic partners and backstabbing friends, contaminating workplaces with their bullying behaviour, and finding refuge from childhood trauma at the bottom of psychotic pill bottles.
READ: Dashiki | The unseen mental health realities of remote work
These children we see on social media are doing childlike things that we also did but can neither prove nor disprove because there is no digital footprint. Besides, we don’t even know their parents from a bar of soap so I can’t even say which crystal ball told us that these “disgusting teenagers” are indeed being softly parented.
For a generation that no longer needs to drag ourselves to sombre aired libraries to access information, we are rather ignorant. (Ignorant: an adjective that refers to lack of knowledge, not the act of ignoring things.) Perhaps we need to redefine soft parenting.
