In neglecting the dark corners of a child’s soul, gentle parenting does children a disservice. For the fact is that most children know that they’re sometimes bad, and that they sometimes do things out of malice, spite, and greed. Gentle parents are right: shame and guilt are negative feelings which may cause “trauma” for the child, as for the adult. No kidding. But the job of the parent is not to prevent any potential “trauma”, it is to love the child even when they are bad, and to punish them, and most importantly to forgive them. A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it. (I often wonder if the parents also want to avoid the “trauma” of guilt and shame, and so never acknowledge their own reasons for doing the things we do, such as becoming parenting “philosophy” consumers out of vanity, pride, or sloth. We may one day have good reason to ask forgiveness from our kids.)
Forgiveness is the precursor to redemption, a transformation that happens on the inside. A child becomes an individual moral agent only through the transformative process of parental punishment and forgiveness. It is an act of faith on behalf of the parent which calls out the inner goodness of a child while punishing the badness. Faith in the good is precisely what calls out this punishment. Somehow this doesn’t quite work if one holds goodness as the granted condition of the child, for then there is no faith required, no moment of uncertainty that is the ground of trust. There is no view of the child as an autonomous moral agent, and thus it offers no space for a child to grow.
