Hi {{ first_name | default: "Reader" }},
Two weeks ago I told you I'd chosen the adult friendship with my child over the childhood one. This is the evidence that pushed me there.
Gentle parenting has a definition, and it's sixty years old. In 1966, Diana Baumrind described the permissive parent for the journal Child Development.
The permissive parent behaves in an accepting, non-punitive way toward the child's impulses and desires, "consults with him about policy decisions", makes few demands for household responsibility, and presents herself as a resource for the child to use rather than an example to copy (Baumrind, 1966). Any gentle parenting account on Instagram essentially says the same thing, all these years later.
The following year, Baumrind published the study that made her name known. She observed preschoolers and their parents and sorted the families into three patterns. The children of warm, undemanding parents came out the least self-reliant and the least self-controlled of the three (Baumrind, 1967). Warmth without demands produced children who had never been asked to do anything hard.
Half a century on, the big syntheses say the same thing with more decimal places. Martin Pinquart pooled 1,435 studies and found that permissive parenting was linked to more behavior problems, whereas the authoritative mix of warmth and firm limits was linked to fewer (Pinquart, 2017). A second meta-analysis of 428 studies found authoritative parenting associated with at least one better outcome in every region of the world it examined (Pinquart and Kauser, 2018). The effects are small, as parenting effects usually are once you account for everything else a child inherits and experiences. But they point the same way everywhere anyone has measured them.
The part I find most useful is what happens when you hand a child a decision they aren’t mature enough to make.
Eli Lebowitz's group at Yale ran a trial with 124 anxious children aged 7 to 14. Roughly half got twelve sessions of CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), the standard treatment. The other half got nothing at all, but their parents got the twelve CBT sessions instead. The therapists taught the parents two things: stop accommodating the fear, and tell your child, warmly, that you know they can cope.
The parent-only treatment did as well as CBT (Lebowitz et al., 2020). Anxious children read their parents for information about whether a danger is real. If the parents get worried, it confirms the child was right to be anxious or afraid. A parent who stands firm in the face of danger signals to the child that they have got the situation under control, which breeds confidence in the child.
That's a trial of clinically anxious kids, so I'm extrapolating when I apply it to a parent asking a six-year-old whether she'd like to go to bed now. But the logic transfers. Ask a child to approve every decision, and you're telling them the adults aren't sure.
Katharine Birbalsingh, the headmistress from the other week, told The Times that parents should stop giving children choices over food and clothes and should embrace being authority figures (Woolcock and Davies, 2025). Baumrind's 1967 data and Lebowitz's 2020 trial sit on her side of the argument.
The fix is the one Baumrind found in 1967: warmth with a hierarchy. You are the adult. Your children are not your greatest teachers. You decide bedtime, you take the phone, you carry your own moods, and you love them the whole way through. Warmth without the hierarchy has costs that the research has measured. Warmth with it is the version I'm choosing.
If you found your way here in the midst of a cutoff, my upcoming book was written with you in mind. It's called Cut Off and comes out in the next few weeks.
Join the waitlist → https://cutoffbook.com
Next week: the other way to lose the hierarchy, and why the culture is currently filing it under incest.
Hold steady,
Richard
P.S. If a permissive parent raised you, reply and tell me what it was like from the inside. I want to hear how it felt.
In partnership with
You know I am all about clean living and limiting exposure to real toxins (not just calling people we don't like toxic). A plastic-free chopping board is one way I have reduced my exposure.
Here’s Why Experts Say to Ditch Your Old Cutting Boards
Before you prep another meal, here’s what you need to know:
Plastic boards shed microplastic particles into your food with every cut.
Wooden boards trap moisture and food residue, the perfect breeding ground for hidden bacteria and toxic mold that transfers to your food.
References
Baumrind, D. (1966) 'Effects of authoritative parental control on child behavior', Child Development, 37(4), pp. 887–907. https://doi.org/10.2307/1126611
Baumrind, D. (1967) 'Child care practices anteceding three patterns of preschool behavior', Genetic Psychology Monographs, 75(1), pp. 43–88. PMID: 6032134. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6032134/
Lebowitz, E.R., Marin, C., Martino, A., Shimshoni, Y. and Silverman, W.K. (2020) 'Parent-based treatment as efficacious as cognitive-behavioral therapy for childhood anxiety: a randomized noninferiority study of Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions', Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 59(3), pp. 362–372. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2019.02.014
Pinquart, M. (2017) 'Associations of parenting dimensions and styles with externalizing problems of children and adolescents: an updated meta-analysis', Developmental Psychology, 53(5), pp. 873–932. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000295
Pinquart, M. and Kauser, R. (2018) 'Do the associations of parenting styles with behavior problems and academic achievement vary by culture? Results from a meta-analysis', Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 24(1), pp. 75–100. https://doi.org/10.1037/cdp0000149
Woolcock, N. and Davies, H. (2025) 'Katharine Birbalsingh interview', The Times, 25 February. https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/parenting/article/katharine-birbalsingh-interview-children-school-books-8qs5n2ldr