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When Your Parenting Strategies Stop Working: Why It’s Time for a New Approach

October 23, 2026By Dr. Leigh Anne Terrebonne0 Comments

The sticker chart is full, the privileges have been removed, and the warnings have been repeated so many times that they no longer register. Yet the morning battles, the refusals, and the meltdowns continue. For many families, this is the point at which exhaustion turns into doubt: about the child, about the method, and often about themselves as parents. It is common to feel that you have tried everything, and to feel unsure what is left to try.

If the thought that your parenting strategies are not working has become a familiar one, the problem is rarely a lack of effort or love. More often, the approach is aimed at the wrong target. Rewards and punishments are designed to change what a child does, but they do not always address why a child is doing it. This article explains why reward-and-punishment systems lose their effect, what research shows about the alternatives, and what a different approach looks like in daily life at home. It is written for parents and caregivers of young and school-age kids who feel stuck in the same cycle, and it is meant to give you a clearer framework, not a longer list of rules.

Understanding the reasons behind a child’s behavior matters because the response you choose shapes far more than the next five minutes. It shapes your relationship with your child, your child’s sense of security, and the skills your child carries into adolescence and adulthood.

Why Parenting Strategies Stop Working

Most parents begin with the tools they know best, and many parents find that those tools work well for a time. Parents tend to reach first for the approaches their own parents used. Praise for good behavior, consequences for bad behavior, and firm reminders in between can work well for minor misbehavior. The difficulty arises when a pattern persists despite consistent use of those tools. At that point, more of the same approach usually produces more of the same result.

A strategy can stop working for several reasons. The child may have grown out of it, since what motivates a four-year-old rarely motivates a nine-year-old, and kids change quickly. The behavior may serve a purpose the strategy does not address, such as escaping a task that feels overwhelming. Or the child may lack a skill the strategy assumes is already present, such as the ability to tolerate frustration or shift gears from one activity to the next. In each case, the parenting strategy is not wrong in principle, and a different parenting strategy may suit the same child well; it is simply mismatched to the child in front of you.

Behavior Is a Form of Communication

A useful starting point is to treat challenging behavior as information. For example, a child who melts down at homework time may be telling you the work is too hard, that the day has been too long, or that attention and connection have been scarce. Diagnosing the root cause of the behavior, rather than responding only to its surface, is often what turns an ineffective parenting strategy into an effective one. Identifying patterns, such as when, where, and with whom problem behaviors tend to occur, gives you far more to work with than a running tally of incidents. Writing down specific behaviors for a week, along with what happened just before each one, often reveals a pattern that is hard to see in the moment.

The American Academy of Pediatrics encourages parents to watch for patterns in misbehavior, such as a child acting out when feeling jealous, and to talk with the child about the pattern rather than simply giving consequences. That shift, from reacting to understanding, is the foundation of every approach described in this article.

Development Changes What Works

Expectations should match a child’s developmental stage and capacity, and an understanding of child development helps parents set them realistically. Younger children are still learning to manage impulses and put feelings into words; older children are building independence and are increasingly sensitive to fairness and respect. A time-out that helps a preschooler reset may feel humiliating to a ten-year-old, and a reward that once delighted a younger child may feel like a bribe to an older one. Child development is not a straight line, and a strategy that fit last year may simply need to be updated. The AAP offers discipline tips by age and stage, which reflects a basic principle of child development: kids need different kinds of guidance as their abilities grow.

Adjusting your approach as your child grows is not a sign of inconsistency. It reflects an accurate reading of where your child is now, and it keeps your expectations within reach, which in turn makes success more likely for both you and your child.

Why Rewards and Punishments Don’t Always Change Behavior

Rewards and punishments come from a long tradition of behavioral psychology, and they are not without value. Most kids respond to them at least some of the time. Reinforcement shapes behavior, and attention is one of the most powerful forms of reinforcement available to parents. The limitation is that rewards and punishments operate on the outside of behavior. They can increase or decrease how often an action occurs, but they do not, on their own, teach the skills, understanding, or motivation that sustain change once the reward or consequence is removed.

The Limits of Rewards

Sticker charts, prizes, and screen-time bonuses can be useful for short-term, specific goals, and younger kids in particular often enjoy them. Over longer periods, however, rewards can carry a hidden cost. A well-known meta-analysis of 128 studies found that expected, tangible rewards significantly undermined intrinsic motivation, the internal drive to do something because it is satisfying or meaningful. The same analysis found that tangible rewards tended to be more detrimental for children than for college students, while positive feedback enhanced both interest and free-choice engagement.

In practical terms, kids who are rewarded for every task can come to expect a reward for everything. A child who is paid to read may begin to read only when payment is offered. A child who earns a prize for sharing may learn that sharing is a transaction. This does not mean rewards should never be used. It means they work best as a temporary bridge to a new habit, paired with genuine, specific praise, and gradually faded as the behavior becomes part of the child’s own routine.

The Limits of Punishment

Punishment presents a more serious concern. In its 2018 policy statement on discipline, the American Academy of Pediatrics concluded that aversive disciplinary strategies, including all forms of corporal punishment and yelling at or shaming children, are minimally effective in the short term and not effective in the long term. The statement links corporal punishment to an increased risk of negative behavioral, cognitive, psychosocial, and emotional outcomes for children.

Research on physical punishment is especially consistent, and the research base is large. A set of meta-analyses covering 160,927 children found that 13 of 17 mean effect sizes were significantly different from zero, and all of them indicated a link between spanking and increased risk of detrimental child outcomes. If the goal is to reduce aggression, physical punishment works against it. The AAP notes that corporal punishment is associated with increased aggression in preschool and school-age children, and that experiencing it makes children more, not less, likely to be defiant and aggressive in the future.

Harsh punishment often produces fear-based compliance: a child stops the behavior while the adult is watching, but the underlying need remains unmet and the behavior returns in other forms. Over time, fear-based parenting methods can create long-term emotional issues and strain the parent-child relationships that make guidance possible in the first place. That kind of strain can have a negative impact on how safe a child feels to come to you with problems later. The encouraging point is that the alternatives are well studied, and they ask for skills that any parent can learn.

Skill Versus Will

Perhaps the most important reason rewards and punishments fall short is that they assume a child could behave differently if sufficiently motivated. Many challenging behaviors, however, reflect a skill a child has not yet developed rather than a choice to misbehave. Emotional outbursts can indicate undeveloped coping skills. A child who cannot yet tolerate disappointment, transition between activities, or solve problems with a sibling will not acquire those abilities because a privilege was removed. Kids who struggle in these areas often want to behave well, and they may feel ashamed of their outbursts afterward; they simply cannot yet do what is being asked of them.

This perspective is central to Collaborative and Proactive Solutions (CPS), an approach that treats challenging behavior as the result of lagging skills and unsolved problems. In a randomized trial of 160 children and adolescents ages 7 to 14 with oppositional defiant disorder, CPS was as effective as Parent Management Training, a well-established parent coaching approach. In both groups, 45 to 50 percent of participants were in the nonclinical range after treatment, 67 percent were rated as much improved, and the gains were maintained at a six-month follow-up. When parents begin to ask “What skill is missing?” instead of “How do I make my child comply?”, the conversation, and often the behavior, begins to change.

Signs Your Current Approach Is No Longer Working

Every family has difficult days, and a single hard week is not a sign that anything is wrong. Kids have off days, and so do parents. Certain patterns, however, suggest that your parenting method needs to change rather than intensify:

  • Consequences keep escalating, yet the problem behaviors stay the same or grow more frequent, which suggests the consequences are not addressing what drives the behavior.
  • Your child seems to respond only to threats or rewards, and good behavior disappears as soon as the incentive is removed.
  • Interactions with your child are dominated by correction, and positive moments together have become rare, which often signals that frequent misbehavior is straining the parent-child relationships at the center of family life and that you and your child feel more like opponents than allies.
  • Your kids appear anxious, withdrawn, or ashamed after discipline, rather than clearer about what to do differently next time.
  • You often feel angry, depleted, or unsure of yourself, or you feel that every day revolves around conflict, and you notice that your own behavior in heated moments is not what you want your child to learn.

If several of these describe your household, a different approach is warranted. Recognizing the sign early is useful, because patterns are easier to change before they become entrenched, and because a new approach usually brings relief to everyone in the family.

Understanding Parenting Styles

Before choosing new strategies, it helps to understand the broader parenting style and parenting method they belong to. Researchers commonly describe four parenting styles, defined by two dimensions: warmth and responsiveness on one side, and expectations and structure on the other.

Authoritarian Parenting

Authoritarian parenting pairs high demands with low warmth. Rules are enforced with little explanation, and obedience is valued over understanding. Authoritarian parenting leads to fear-based compliance in many children, and it tends to teach children to look to authority figures for control rather than to develop their own judgment. A large meta-analysis of 1,435 studies found that authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful parenting were all associated with higher levels of externalizing problems, such as aggression and rule-breaking, and that harsh control and psychological control showed the strongest associations.

Permissive Parenting

Permissive parenting offers warmth but few limits. A Psychology Today article by a clinical psychologist describes the overly permissive parent as attentive and warm but reluctant to set limits and expectations, and reports seeing struggling children of overly permissive parents as often as defiant children of controlling, authoritarian parents. Permissive parenting can lead to weak boundaries and confusion, because children are left to manage decisions and emotions they are not yet equipped to handle alone.

Authoritative Parenting

Authoritative parenting combines high expectations with warmth and responsiveness. Parents set clear limits and follow through, but they also explain their reasoning, listen to the child’s perspective, and adjust as the child matures. In the meta-analysis cited above, parental warmth, behavioral control, autonomy granting, and an authoritative parenting style were associated with fewer externalizing problems over time. Effects in research of this kind are modest, and no parenting style guarantees a particular outcome, but authoritative parenting is consistently linked with the best outcomes among the four styles.

Many parents recognize that the way their parents raised them leaned toward one of the less effective styles, and that recognition can be uncomfortable. It is also useful. Understanding your default parenting style, and the parenting method you learned growing up, helps you notice when you are reacting from habit rather than choosing a response.

Where Gentle Parenting Fits

Gentle parenting has become one of the most discussed parenting approaches of the past several years, largely through social media. Because the term is new, families often hear conflicting descriptions of what gentle parenting is and whether it works.

What Gentle Parenting Gets Right

A 2024 study of 100 parents of children ages 2 to 7, about half of whom identified as gentle parents, described gentle parenting as an approach that emphasizes high levels of parental affection and the emotion regulation of both parents and children. The authors noted that gentle parenting had received no prior empirical scrutiny, and that it appeared distinct from established parenting measures in its emphasis on boundaries. A Psychology Today article likewise describes gentle parenting as falling under the broader authoritative parenting style: gentle in the sense of not harsh or punitive, rather than gentle in the sense of making no demands.

At its best, then, gentle parenting reflects many principles with research support: responsiveness, emotional attunement, clear boundaries, and discipline that teaches rather than frightens. Parents who adopt gentle parenting in this form can feel confident that they are, in effect, practicing an authoritative style with particular attention to emotions.

Where Gentle Parenting Can Fall Short

The same 2024 study found that the enactment of boundaries among gentle parents was not uniform, and that statements of parenting uncertainty and burnout appeared in more than one-third of the gentle parenting sample. A subset of gentle parents who were highly critical of themselves reported significantly lower parenting efficacy than the rest of the sample.

These findings point to several common challenges. In practice, gentle parenting can slide toward permissiveness and weak boundaries when a parent avoids saying no in order to avoid upset. Parents who feel they must get every interaction right may struggle with guilt. The high expectations some parents place on themselves, such as never raising their voice or always staying calm, can lead to frustration and guilt. Some parents also report concern that an emphasis on calm can leave children feeling that strong emotions are unwelcome, which may lead them to suppress genuine feelings, or that praise-heavy positive parenting strategies can divide siblings into “good” and “bad” kids. And gentle parenting, as it is often described online, may not work for serious behavioral issues on its own, particularly when a child has an underlying condition such as ADHD or anxiety that calls for a structured, evidence-based treatment.

None of this means gentle parenting should be abandoned, and none of it means a parent who sometimes loses patience is not a good parent. It means that gentle parenting works best when its warmth is paired with firm, predictable limits, realistic expectations for the adults involved, and professional support when a child’s needs exceed what any home strategy can address.

What a Different Approach Looks Like

A more effective approach does not discard structure. It changes the purpose of structure from controlling behavior to teaching skills. The practices below draw on positive parenting research, positive discipline principles, and on guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics. Positive parenting, in this sense, refers to an approach built on warmth, clear expectations, and teaching, and positive parenting improves children’s emotional well-being and social relationships when it is applied consistently. In daily practice, positive parenting is less a set of techniques than a way of teaching children what to do instead, and it tends to bring more positive outcomes for the whole family than a focus on punishment.

Lead With Connection Before Correction

Focusing on connection before correction enhances a child’s receptiveness to guidance, and it is one of the core ideas in positive parenting. A child who feels understood is more able to listen; a child who feels attacked is focused on defending themselves. When a child feels safe with you, guidance is easier to accept. Connection can be as simple as getting down to your child’s eye level, naming what you see, and pausing before you redirect. When kids feel heard, correction tends to land as guidance rather than as rejection.

Validating a child’s feelings before correction can lower emotional escalation. Validation does not mean agreeing with the behavior, and it does not weaken your authority; it strengthens the relationship that gives your guidance weight. It means acknowledging the feeling behind it: “You’re really disappointed that we have to leave the park. It’s hard to stop something fun.” The Gottman Institute’s model of emotion coaching describes five steps: being aware of your child’s emotion, seeing it as an opportunity for closeness and teaching, listening with empathy and validating feelings, helping your child label emotions with words, and setting limits while helping your child solve problems. According to the Institute, children who learn to understand and regulate their emotions tend to be more self-confident, a foundation for healthy self-esteem, and to perform better in social and academic situations, including with friends.

Stay Calm and Regulate Yourself First

Children borrow their parents’ calm to manage their own chaos. When a parent responds to a meltdown with a raised voice, the child’s distress usually rises to match it; when a parent stays calm, the child has a steadier nervous system to lean on. This is not about suppressing your own emotions. It is about noticing what you feel, taking a breath, and choosing your response deliberately. Your relationship with your child benefits each time you model that pause. Attending to your own needs, including sleep, support, and time away, makes this far more achievable. When parents neglect their own needs for long periods, they can feel their patience run out sooner.

Teaching regulation skills should occur when everyone is calm and safe. In the middle of a tantrum, a child’s capacity to learn is limited. Later, when things have settled, you can practice deep breathing together, talk about what happened, and plan what to try next time. If you lose your temper, the AAP suggests that you cool down and apologize, and explain how you will handle the situation in the future, which gives your child a model of how to recover from mistakes.

Model the Behavior You Want to See

Children learn better when parents model desired behaviors consistently. The AAP lists modeling the behaviors you would like to see among its recommended discipline strategies. Children learn how to handle frustration, disagreement, and disappointment largely by watching the adults around them, so the way you manage your own behavior under stress, and the way you treat friends and family, is one of the most influential lessons you teach. Teaching children through example is slower than issuing rules, but it lasts longer.

Give Clear, Positive Directions

Clear and concrete guidance using “do” statements is more effective than “don’t” statements. “Walk beside me” gives a child a specific action to take; “Don’t run” names only what to stop. The AAP encourages parents to use positive language to guide behavior and to give simple, step-by-step directions. Clear expectations, stated in advance and in words a child can understand, prevent many conflicts before they begin and protect the relationship from unnecessary friction.

Offer Limited Choices Within Boundaries

Offering limited choices can reduce defiance and increase a child’s sense of control. The AAP recommends allowing your child to make choices among acceptable alternatives, and its guidance on temper tantrums suggests offering small, directed choices rather than yes-or-no questions. “Do you want to brush your teeth first or put on pajamas first?” keeps the boundary in place while handing the child a real decision. Offering choices within boundaries encourages independence in children and reduces the number of power struggles in a typical day.

Use Specific Praise and Positive Attention

Praise is one of the most familiar positive parenting tools, and it is most useful when it is specific and sincere.

Specific praise reinforces positive behavior and builds the identity you hope your child will adopt. “You waited so patiently while I finished my call” teaches far more than “Good job.” The AAP describes attention as the most powerful tool for effective discipline, used to reinforce good behaviors and discourage others, and it encourages parents to “catch them being good.” Make a habit of giving your child positive attention several times a day, especially in calm moments, so that good behavior earns more of your attention than negative behavior does. When negative behavior is the most reliable way to get a reaction, kids tend to repeat it. Over time, this shift helps positive behavior become the way your child expects to be noticed.

Use Natural and Logical Consequences

Consequences still have a place, but their purpose is to teach, and kids learn most from consequences that make sense to them. Natural consequences occur on their own, such as feeling cold after refusing a jacket on a cool day. Logical consequences are set by the parent and connect directly to the behavior, such as losing access to a toy that was thrown. Consistent and logical consequences should be proportionate to the behavior, and the AAP advises parents to explain consequences calmly and firmly and to be prepared to follow through. Used this way, natural and logical consequences teach lessons without power struggles, because the link between action and outcome is clear.

Rethink Time-Outs, and Consider Time-In

Time-outs are among the most debated tools in parenting. When used well, time-outs can be helpful: a practitioner review notes that time-outs are a component of many evidence-based parent training programs, and that existing reviews suggest they are safe and effective when used predictably, infrequently, calmly, and as one part of a broader set of strategies. Problems arise when time-outs are used frequently, in anger, or as the only tool, at which point they lose their teaching value.

Some families also use a “time-in,” in which the parent stays with the child, helps them settle, and then talks through what happened. A time-in emphasizes co-regulation for younger children who cannot yet calm themselves alone. The choice between the two depends on your child’s age and temperament, and many families use both.

Address the Patterns Behind Tantrums

Tantrums are a normal part of development, but tantrums can be a learned behavior in children when they reliably produce attention or a desired outcome. MedlinePlus describes temper tantrums as attention-seeking behavior and notes that ignoring the behavior, when the child is safe and not being destructive, is one way to reduce its length and severity. The AAP cautions, however, that behaviors such as hitting, kicking, or biting should not be ignored. Pairing planned ignoring with generous attention for calm behavior at other times teaches a child that connection is available without a tantrum.

What the Shift Looks Like in Everyday Moments

Principles are easier to apply when you can picture them. The two common situations below show how the same moment can unfold under a reward-and-punishment approach and under a skill-building approach. They are illustrations rather than case histories, and they show how a change in parenting method, more than a change in effort, alters the outcome. The details in your family will differ.

Example: The Morning Routine

Consider a mother whose seven-year-old refuses to get dressed for school most mornings. Under the old approach, she warns, counts, and finally takes away screen time for the evening. The morning ends with both of them upset, and the next morning looks the same. Under a different approach, she looks for the pattern first and notices that the refusals are worst on days after late bedtimes and when the routine is rushed. She moves bedtime earlier, lays out clothes the night before with her child’s input, offers a choice between two outfits, and praises each step completed. She stays calm when the routine slips and focuses on what went well. Within a few weeks, mornings are not perfect, but they feel very different for both of them, and their relationship in the mornings is warmer.

Example: Conflict Between Siblings

In a second example, a mother and father notice that their kids argue every evening over a shared tablet, and the arguments often end in hitting. Taking the tablet away stops each argument but does not reduce the next one. When the parents focus on the skill involved, they see that neither child yet knows how to negotiate turns or manage the frustration of waiting. They set up a visible turn-taking timer, practice what to say when a turn ends, and step in early with calm coaching when voices rise. They also make time to connect with each child separately, since sibling conflict often eases when kids feel secure in their relationship with each parent and when each child feels seen as an individual. Hitting still results in a brief, predictable time-out, but the focus of their effort is on teaching what to do instead.

In both examples, the parents did not lower their expectations. They changed how they helped their children meet them, and that change tends to make home calmer for the whole family while giving kids skills they can use in the rest of their children’s lives, from school to friendships.

Why Children May Act Out More at Home

Many parents are puzzled when a teacher describes a cooperative, well-behaved student who becomes a different child at home. The Child Mind Institute explains that kids can be different at home and at school for several reasons: some children do well in the structure of school and struggle with less structured time at home, while others work so hard to hold themselves together during the day that they fall apart once they are home. Children may act out more at home than in school precisely because home is where they feel safest.

This pattern is not a verdict on your parenting, and it does not mean your child’s relationship with you is the problem. It can be a sign that your child needs more support with transitions, more predictable routines after school, or a period of quiet decompression before demands resume. When the pattern is intense or persistent, it is worth discussing with your child’s pediatrician, a psychologist or a therapist.

When an Underlying Issue May Be Involved

Sometimes parenting strategies stop working because a child is dealing with something the strategies were never designed to address. Challenging behavior may indicate a child lacks specific skills rather than being malicious, and those missing skills sometimes reflect a developmental or mental health condition.

Children with ADHD often struggle with impulsivity and attention. The National Institute of Mental Health describes ADHD as a developmental disorder marked by persistent symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. A child with ADHD may fully understand a rule and still be unable to follow it in the moment, and may feel frustrated with themselves as a result, which is why consequences alone tend to be ineffective. For children with ADHD younger than 6, the CDC notes that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends parent training in behavior management as the first line of treatment, before medication is tried, and for children 6 and older, combining medication with behavior therapy.

Anxiety, learning differences, sensory sensitivities, and the effects of stressful life events can also show up as defiance, avoidance, or emotional outbursts. Kids with these challenges may feel misunderstood at home and at school. A thorough evaluation can clarify what is driving the behavior, which allows the right supports to be put in place and spares a child years of being misunderstood.

Evidence-Based Parent Training Programs

Structured parent education programs teach many of the skills described above with coaching and practice, and several have strong research support. Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), for example, coaches parents in real time as they play with and give directions to their child. A meta-analysis of 23 studies with 1,144 participants found that PCIT reduced children’s externalizing behavior more than control conditions, reduced parent-related and child-related stress, and increased children’s compliance with parent requests. Programs that required parents to master specific skills showed significantly greater reductions in behavior problems than those that did not.

The value of these programs lies partly in their structure. Rather than receiving a list of tips, parents practice effective strategies, receive feedback, and see change in their own families over a period of weeks. For many parents, that guided practice is what turns understanding into a new, sustainable parenting method, and it can help parents feel more confident in the work.

Putting a New Approach Into Practice

Positive parenting is easiest to sustain when it is introduced one step at a time.

Changing a parenting approach is gradual, and it helps to start small. Parents may struggle most in the first few weeks, when old habits are strongest. Consider the following steps:

  1. Choose one or two specific behaviors to focus on first, rather than trying to change everything at once, and note when and where they occur so you can identify patterns.
  2. Ask what your child may need or lack in those moments, such as rest, predictability, connection, or a particular skill, and plan your response around that need.
  3. Agree on the approach with your partner, any family member who helps with care, or any other caregiver, because the AAP emphasizes that all children need consistent discipline across the adults who care for them.
  4. Increase specific praise for the positive behavior you want to see, and reduce the attention given to minor misbehavior when it is safe to do so.
  5. Give the new approach several weeks. Behavior sometimes worsens briefly when a familiar pattern stops working, before it begins to improve.

Progress is rarely linear, and setbacks are expected. What matters is the overall direction over weeks and months, not any single day. Each calm, consistent response adds to a foundation of trust that makes the next one easier for both you and your child, and it strengthens the relationship that all lasting change depends on.

When to Seek Professional Help

Seeking professional help may be necessary for persistent or severe behavioral challenges. It is reasonable to consult a pediatrician, psychologist, therapist, or other mental health professional if behavior problems continue despite consistent effort, if your child’s behavior is affecting school, friendships, or family relationships, if your child is aggressive or unsafe, or if you suspect an underlying condition such as ADHD or anxiety. MedlinePlus advises contacting a health care provider if tantrums worsen after age 5, if a child hurts themselves or others, or if a child destroys property during tantrums.

Many parents feel hesitant to ask for help, but a professional can help identify the reasons behind your child’s behavior, help you focus on the changes that matter most, teach strategies matched to your child’s needs, and support you as a parent. Asking for help reflects attentiveness and care for your family, and it often brings the most meaningful change in the shortest time.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are Rewards and Punishments Always Harmful?

No. Short-term rewards can help establish a new routine, and calm, logical consequences have a place in a balanced approach. The concern is with relying on them as the only tools, which can affect the parent-child relationships in a family over time, and with harsh or physical punishment, which research consistently links to worse outcomes for children.

How Long Does It Take for a New Approach to Work?

Many families notice some change within a few weeks of consistent practice, although timelines vary with the child’s age, the behavior, and any underlying factors. Behavior sometimes intensifies briefly before it improves, which is a common response to a change in routine rather than a sign of failure.

Is Gentle Parenting the Same as Permissive Parenting?

Not when it is practiced as intended. Gentle parenting in its fullest form includes clear and consistent limits, which places it closer to the authoritative style. It can become permissive when boundaries are avoided in order to prevent conflict.

What If Other Children in the Family Respond to Different Approaches?

That is common, and most children in the same family need somewhat different handling. Siblings differ in temperament, personality traits, and developmental stage, and an approach that suits one child may not suit another. Fairness in a family means each child receives what they need, which is not always identical treatment. When one parent is firmer and the other more lenient, kids notice quickly, so it helps to agree on shared priorities.

References and Further Reading

Dr. Leigh Anne Terrebonne, licensed psychologist and founder of The Terrebonne Group

About the Author

Dr. Leigh Anne Terrebonne, Ph.D.

Dr. Leigh Anne Terrebonne is a licensed psychologist and founder of The Terrebonne Group, a private-pay psychological services practice in Mid-City New Orleans. With more than 25 years as a licensed psychologist and over 30 years of experience providing psychotherapy, she serves as clinical faculty in LSUHSC's Department of Psychiatry and holds a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from Auburn University. Dr. Terrebonne is dedicated to helping individuals, couples, and families build greater self-understanding and lasting well-being.

Learn more about Dr. Terrebonne →
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