The thing about having a small child is that they force you into self-development whether you want it or not. You start out thinking you’re just going to teach them to eat peas and put socks on, and before you know it, you’re learning how to breathe through a tantrum in Lidl and interrogate your own childhood at 2am.
I didn’t mean to become a gentle parent. I just didn’t want to shout all the time. Or feel like I was constantly one step away from becoming the adult version of a door slam.
So I read a book. And then another. And then I did what all overwhelmed parents do: I tried to implement it in real life, with varying levels of success, while Googling “is it normal for a three year old to…” ten times a day.
And somewhere along the way, those principles started to sneak into the rest of my life. Not in a smug Pinterest kind of way, but more in the sense that I found myself speaking in soft, even tones in meetings, saying things like:
“I can see this is really frustrating. Let’s find a way through together.”
To Bob. (names have been changed to protect the innocent)
The grown man in finance.
Who was, to be fair, having quite a big feeling about the budget.
It’s weird, but once you start trying to validate the emotional world of a toddler (“you’re angry because your sock is wrong”), you begin to realise that most adults are operating from the same place. Just with email instead of crayons.
The hardest part of gentle parenting isn’t the tone of voice or the limit setting or the magical thinking about peas. It’s the regulation. Yours. That moment when your child does something utterly maddening and you are meant to respond like a calm sea rather than a kettle about to blow. That’s the work. That’s the practice.
And it’s the same at work. When someone fires off a snippy email, or changes the brief for the third time, or takes credit for your idea in a meeting — you can either explode or take a breath and try again.
This isn’t about being a pushover. It’s not about suppressing your own feelings to keep the peace. It’s about seeing the mess for what it is and choosing not to add to it. It’s about responding rather than reacting, even when the Teams chat is chaos and you’re running on four hours’ sleep and leftovers.
It’s also about snacks. And kindness. And knowing when to walk away before you say something you’ll regret to your line manager or your child or the cat.
So no, I’m not saying we should all start offering colleagues cuddles and stickers for good listening (although frankly, I’d work much harder for stickers). But I do think there’s something in this slow, intentional, gentle way of approaching conflict and emotion that might actually make us better at our jobs. And less likely to cry in the bathroom.
Or at least, not every day.