Rosie Whitfield thought she was parenting calmly after having two wild boys. She was wrong — she was parenting with too much advice.
Whitfield spent hours online after the birth of her kids, drawn to gentle parenting, which stresses empathy and mutual respect without much punishment. But she worried endlessly about small choices: sleep schedules, tantrums, even letting the TV run for 20 minutes while she did dishes or drank coffee. She felt like those decisions were “ruining their lives forever.”
“I felt like if I was choosing to put the TV on for 20 minutes while I did the dishes or had a coffee, I was choosing to destroy my children’s brains,” she says. She is originally from Birmingham and now lives in Dubai.
She is not alone. Government research suggests around two-thirds of parents with young children feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of parenting information available, and struggle with conflicting advice. Many turn to social media for support. The problem is not just for toddlers — research from Action for Children found that parents of teenagers often describe their own anxiety, exhaustion and uncertainty of how to parent with empathy and patience when close to burnout.
The rise of parenting brands
Parents today face a menu of styles. There is helicopter parenting, which monitors children closely to protect them. Tiger parenting is strict and sets high expectations for achievement. Snowplough parents try to remove obstacles from their child’s path. Dolphin parents aim to be firm but flexible.
Matilda Gosling, author of EvidenceâBased Parenting, says these fads complicate what should be simple. “Some parents think ‘I need to be a snowplough parent and plough all of these obstacles out of the way’,” she says. “But it really complicates what is actually a fairly fundamental part of being human, which is that you are warm and you love your children and you put in place some boundaries around them.”
Gosling sees trends as pendulum swings, with each generation trying to correct what it thinks the last one got wrong. “Throughout history, you get these swings from one extreme to the other,” she says.
Gentle parenting is seen by some as the latest swing away from a strict, detached style popular in the 1990s, which relied on controlled crying, the naughty step and time out. It is built around understanding, empathy and respect, but also emphasises boundaries.
Where gentle parenting sits
The most studied model comes from Diana Baumrind, who identified three parenting styles later expanded to four: authoritative (high warmth and high control), authoritarian (low warmth and high control), permissive (high warmth and low control), and neglectful (low warmth and low control).
“Authoritative is the gold standard,” Gosling says, having looked at more than 1,000 studies. Research shows children raised with an authoritative approach — warmth combined with clear boundaries — tend to achieve better academic results, have higher self-esteem and stronger social skills.
Gosling believes gentle parenting lands on the permissive side. “It’s very much child-led. The child ends up having so much control that there’s no sense of safety coming from the outside.”
Not everyone agrees. Sarah Ockwell-Smith, widely credited with coining and popularising the term ‘gentle parenting’, puts it firmly in Baumrind’s authoritative category. “It [gentle parenting] is not remotely permissive,” she says. Clear boundaries are “super important”.
Ockwell-Smith finds the social media version frustrating. “I have to step away from the Instagram reels and the TikToks because I just want to comment, ‘This is not gentle parenting’,” she says. She argues toddler tantrums and teenage behaviour should be viewed through a lens of ongoing brain development, not as “they’re being naughty” or “they hate me”.
The pressure to get parenting ‘right’
Around 80 years ago, American paediatrician Dr Benjamin Spock published Baby and Child Care, which sold millions of copies and became the main source of advice for mothers for generations. The opening line was “Trust yourself. You know more than you think…”
Spock challenged strict norms of the time. In the decades since, parents have been offered more advice from an increasing range of voices, and research has increasingly focused on the early years.
The irony is that all this advice is supposed to help, and it mostly just makes parents anxious. Gosling describes the situation clearly: “Some parents think ‘I need to be a snowplough parent and plough all of these obstacles out of the way’.” That is not a strategy — it is a way of thinking that strips away confidence and replaces it with constant doubt.
What we make of it
The funny thing about parenting advice is that it is rarely about parenting. It is about the adult doing the parenting. Advice is a proxy for certainty, and certainty is something most parents lack. A strict schedule, a firm boundary, a clear rule — these are promises that the world can be controlled, that chaos can be managed, that the right approach will produce the right outcome.
The disagreement between Gosling and Ockwell-Smith is over which side of that balance gets more weight. Gosling sees gentle parenting as permissive because it puts too much power in the child’s hands. Ockwell-Smith sees it as authoritative because it sets clear limits while explaining them.
The social media version of gentle parenting — exhausted parents calmly negotiating with a child having a supermarket meltdown — is not gentle parenting at all. It is a curated image of patience that bears little resemblance to the actual screaming in the aisle.
The government research shows that two-thirds of parents with young children feel overwhelmed. That number is striking, but it is not surprising. Advice is designed to be persuasive, and persuasion works by making you feel bad about your current position. Every parenting brand is selling a solution to a problem, and the problem is always that you are doing it wrong.
Rosie Whitfield’s worry about TV time is a perfect example. Putting the TV on for 20 minutes while she did dishes or had a coffee felt like a choice that would destroy her children’s brains. That is not a rational assessment of the situation — it is a feeling produced by exposure to too much advice, too much conflicting information, too many voices telling her what a good parent should be doing.
The irony is that the advice she was seeking was meant to help her be calmer. Instead, it made her anxious. She worried about ruining their lives forever. The irony is that the anxiety was the ruin, not the TV time.
There is no perfect way to parent. There is no brand that works for everyone. The authoritative approach — warmth and boundaries — is considered the gold standard, but the gentle parenting placement dispute remains unresolved.
The key facts here are simple:
- Around two-thirds of parents with young children feel overwhelmed by parenting information
- Research from Action for Children found parents of teenagers often describe their own anxiety and uncertainty
- Gentle parenting is widely credited to Sarah Ockwell-Smith, who disputes the permissive label
- Dr Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care sold millions of copies
The lesson is not to ignore advice entirely. The lesson is to recognise that advice is not instruction. It is a suggestion dressed as a command. A good parent is not someone who follows all the rules. A good parent is someone who knows their own child and trusts their own instincts.
That trust is what gets lost in the noise. Rosie Whitfield felt like her confidence and intuition were stripped away as she questioned every decision. The advice was not the problem — the problem was the volume of it. When parenting advice becomes too much, the advice stops helping and starts hurting.
“Trust yourself. You know more than you think…”
Spock wrote that nearly 80 years ago. The advice industry has grown exponentially since then, but the core insight has not changed. You know more than you think. The TV time is not the problem. The doubt is. The anxiety is. The feeling that you are ruining their lives forever is a choice you are making, not a fact about your children.
Stop scrolling. Look at your kid. They are fine. So are you.
Source material: “When parenting advice becomes too much,” the BBC.
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