Gentle Parenting Doesn’t Work For Neurodivergent Children

“Gentle parenting is for gentle kids. It doesn’t work for neurodivergent children or kids who are strong-willed, it only works for gentle, compliant kids. Try using that nice gentle voice with my kids and they will just laugh at you and then throw the block at your head anyway.”

I hear this a lot. This perspective makes a lot of sense if you see gentle parenting as simply being gentle. Gentle parenting is just a colloquial term for authoritative parenting (See my post on Parenting Styles)

Gentle parenting is not talking sweetly and asking nicely.

Effective parenting tools are built on science and research around how our children’s brains grow and develop, and it is even more ESSENTIAL for neurodivergent kids. The world doesn't always make sense for your Neurodivergent kid. That’s why they have bigger meltdowns, more intense feelings, angry outbursts, and struggle to follow the rules like their neurotypical peers do. 

They need you to help them make sense of the world, to set boundaries, and to provide structures that help them feel safe. They need you to be a container for those big feelings that arise from sensory overwhelm or rejection sensitivity dysphoria. They need you to teach them to use their inherent skills to overcome the challenges of being neurodivergent in a neurotypical world. 

They don’t need harsh punishments, judgment, anger, and control. In fact, these will only make it harder. They also don’t need soft voices, no consequences, and permissive parenting. They need you to see them and the enormous struggles they are facing. They want you to understand that it’s not going to look like or feel like your friend’s home because they aren’t raising the same kid you are. Gentle parenting will not create stress-free, compliant kids. Connection + boundaries don’t automatically equal compliance. It’s a process of becoming your child’s greatest advocate, cheerleader, boundary setter, and guide. It’s a process of learning to manage your own expectations, triggers, feelings of inadequacy and shame. It’s reparenting yourself to move away from a need to control and see those meltdowns and anger as a defect to be fixed, to seeing them as a call for help.

Parenting is a hard job, parenting neurodivergent kids can be so much harder. But the gift of it is that we get to reexamine what’s really important to us. We must learn to give ourselves the same love, gentleness, and compassion when we are struggling, so we can get better at offering that to our children. Our neurodivergent kids are here to teach us what’s really important. So when it’s impossibly hard and you feel like the gentle parenting voice won’t fix the raging storm your child is, you are correct. There’s nothing to be fixed. That anger, meltdown, tantrum, and rage, is your child triggered and disconnected. That feeling in your body that’s arising is your trigger and disconnection. 

Take a breath, offer yourself compassion, find a way to ground yourself, then look at your child again and see them as triggered and disconnected from their own felt sense of safety. Now see if you can shift away from fixing your child’s behavior, to looking for the need below the behavior. Somewhere in there, you will find a child who needs you to be the safe place where they can ride out the storm. 

Once the storm has passed, once we are safe, secure, and feeling grounded, we can look to set the boundaries, allow for natural consequences, and brainstorm strategies that might help prevent a light drizzle from turning into a hurricane.  

Gentle parenting isn’t about being soft or gentle in response to boundary crossing and safety keeping. Gentle parenting is about being gentle with ourselves and our children as we learn to navigate the most difficult job in the world, being human.