I have talked a bathtub down from the ledge of a full-blown meltdown more times than I can count, narrating the feelings of a four-year-old like a nature documentary about my own kitchen. It works, some nights. Other nights you are just a woman kneeling on a wet floor negotiating with someone who cannot yet tie a shoe, and you start to wonder who this is actually serving.
That wondering has apparently gone mainstream. Dr. Becky Kennedy, the psychologist whose Good Inside platform did more than anyone to put "gentle parenting" into everyday use, has spent nearly two years quietly distancing herself from the term. "The word doesn't resonate with me," she told Forbes in September 2024. Her preferred word now is sturdy. Her own site puts it plainly in the description for a Good Inside podcast episode built around the point: "Nope, this is not gentle parenting. Good Inside parenting is sturdy parenting."
The distinction, in her own telling to Tim Ferriss, is not softness versus strictness. It is who does the deciding. "Boundaries are things you tell people you will do and they require the other person to do nothing," she says. Not: please get off the couch. But: I am walking over, and if you are still on the couch when I get there, I am picking you up, because keeping you safe is my job, not yours to negotiate. "This is zero percent permissive," she insists, pushing back on years of being lumped in with parents who mistook validating a feeling for granting a request.
Willamette Week's June cover story on the backlash reports that Kennedy herself named the overcorrection on a podcast this spring: the culture, as the paper quotes her, went from nobody caring about kids' feelings to kids' feelings dictating parent behavior. The same report describes the strain showing up in ordinary rooms: a Portland classroom volunteer, Emma Maddox, told the paper she now sees children ignore adults outright, and other Portland mothers said they hold back from correcting their own kids in public, worried other parents will judge them as too harsh. One summed it up in two words: "It's exhausting."
The data backs up the mood shift more than the headlines do. A Talker Research survey of 2,000 parents of children ages 0 to 6, fielded for Kiddie Academy last August, found only 32 percent of Gen Z parents still practice gentle parenting, even though they were the first generation raised on it; 41 percent of Gen Z parents have shifted instead to what they call cycle-breaking, consciously not repeating how they themselves were raised. Across the full sample, 31 percent now lean on plain cause-and-effect consequences.
Most parents blend three styles rather than picking one. And the academic ground under gentle parenting is thinner than its popularity suggests: the first empirical study of it, by Pezalla and Davidson in 2024, found about half of self-identified gentle parents talk through a problem while it is still happening, a habit behavioral scientists warn can reward the very behavior it is meant to calm.
None of this is really about a rebrand. It is about who is allowed to decide when the bathtub argument ends. I still narrate the feelings. I have just stopped waiting for a toddler to agree with me before the bath drains.
