What Gentle Parenting is Missing
Gentle parenting is heralded in many circles as the antidote to punitive or authoritarian parenting approaches. As a trauma therapist with training in parent-infant mental health I don’t disagree with this since gentle parenting emphasizes connection, emotional attunement, and respecting a child’s autonomy. These are all things that I want to promote and encourage. However, for parents who are also trauma survivors, there’s a side to gentle parenting that needs to be addressed: the pressure to show up as a calm, regulated adult… even when you feel like you’re basically the opposite of those traits.
As a therapist who works with cycle-breaking parents and those healing from complex PTSD (CPTSD) or attachment trauma, I’ve seen how well-intentioned parenting ideals can often shame the very people they’re meant to support.
Let me share with you some ideas on how to think about this. This is not to dismiss gentle parenting, but to explore where it can miss the mark for parents living with trauma and ways we can improve this.
Gentle Parenting Often Assumes You Have a Regulated Nervous System
Most gentle parenting frameworks assume you can pause, reflect, and respond with calm presence in the heat of a difficult moment. But if you grew up with emotional neglect, abuse, or constant chaos, your body likely didn’t develop a strong baseline of safety. To be fair, even a parent who group in ideal circumstances is bound to lose their patience when stress is high.
Your nervous system might move into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn without warning — not because you're unkind or uncommitted, but because your body is wired for threat detection, not to be, well, gentle.
Expecting yourself to respond “gently” while in a trauma response is akin to expecting someone to run a marathon with a sprained ankle. It’s not that you don’t want to — it’s that your system isn’t ready yet. And when you inevitably snap, shut down, or perhaps even dissociate, you might walk away overwhelmed, ashamed and probably thinking thoughts like “I’m the worst mom.”.
It Doesn’t Prepare You Properly for Real Life Triggers
One of the central tenets of gentle parenting is seeing children as whole people, respecting their emotions, allowing their big feelings, and not using punishments or coercion to control behavior. This is ideal and often what I want to teach people to aspire to.
However, your child’s emotional expression can often trigger big emotions in you! Who hasn’t been triggered by their preschooler only wanting to eat dinner on a specific colored plate, they don’t want what you cooked, all while screaming at the top of their lungs and running through the house in a Halloween costume that they haven’t let you wash in two months? If you’re running on emotional fumes, how could this not elicit an emotional response from you as well?
It might also be that the exact things you were punished for as a child, such as showing an emotion are the things that gentle parenting encourages you to “sit with and validate”. While it’s definitely the best choice for the child to do this, the thing that is missed is the complete heartbreak that this can leave a parent with if they didn’t receive this as a child. Yes, of course, giving this to your child can absolutely be healing, but there is still grief for the little you that never received this as a child.
Practicing gentle parenting alone may not be enough to heal your triggers that can come from trying to parent differently than you were parented. Healing your wounds completely might take a little bit more effort
It Can Unintentionally Reinforce Perfectionism and Shame
Cycle-breaking parents are often deeply motivated by never wanting to be like their own parents. But then they lose their temper, feel resentful, or want to check out, and suddenly they feel like a failure. What is hard to see here is that the parent isn’t the problem, it’s that the bar has become impossibly high: never yell, never shame, always stay calm, always repair, always attune. It’s hard to feel good about your parenting when these are the metrics.
The truth is that all parents, traumatized or not, do these things, but it can be hard to feel that deep enough to believe it when you’re in your own healing process. Healing doesn't look like perfect parenting, but feeling confident that you’re doing a good enough job.
Gentle parenting doesn't always make space for this nuance. In its most rigid form, it can feel like another set of unreachable rules for people already doing what feels like the impossible: parenting without having received any modeling.
So What Do Trauma-Sensitive Parenting Models Look Like?
We need approaches that include the parent’s healing as a center piece, not an afterthought.
Here’s what that might involve:
Understanding your triggers and responses. Knowing why something happens and getting to those core beliefs and triggers that happen in the moments you are parenting are truly the road map to healing
Emotion regulation and nervous system strategies. Learning how to track your window of tolerance and build capacity over time.
Making space for rupture and repair. Truly embodying the knowledge that less-than-perfect parenting doesn’t make you less likely to have a good relationship with your child. Having a space to repair does matter and can make all the difference.
Reparenting yourself as you parent your child. Tending to the wounded child parts of yourself that never had the chance to be parented the way you needed.
In Closing: Your Healing Is Gentle Parenting
If you’re raising children while healing from trauma, attachment wounds or otherwise less than ideal childhoods, please know that by asking the questions and showing up is already doing a lot. You are already breaking cycles simply by taking a pause to believe that you can do things differently.
Gentle parenting is a beautiful ideal, but it must be grounded in reality for those whose trauma runs deep. You deserve a framework that makes space for your triggers instead of pretying on those exact wounds.
You’re not failing when you struggle. You’re parenting someone who was never parented.
And you're not alone.
If you’re a parent navigating trauma while raising your children, I can support your journey in healing from CPTSD and attachment wounds. Schedule a consultation call with me here.