I REFUSE TO BE LIKE MY STRICT MUM

While Annabel Fenwick Elliott is 'gentle parenting' her toddler, her mother, Sue, was more traditional

- ANNABEL FENWICK ELLIOTT

Gentle parenting: a gag-worthy term right up there with 'sustainable luxury', and often ridiculed by those of our parents' generation. And yet here I am.

I have never once let my son, Jasper, now 20 months, 'cry it out'. As a result, he still co-sleeps. He does not get told off for hurling food across the room. Not only do I partake in the softly-does-it approach, but my own mother, once a no-nonsense disciplinarian, is a convert too. Will it work? This compassion-led, punishment-free social experiment that is so popular among my millennial peers? It's far too early to say, of course, but I can tell you that our parents' model didn't.

THE WRONG APPROACH

Whacking, banishing or shaming children for disobeying has one of two outcomes: it makes them even more rebellious or turns them into overly compliant sheep who never question authority.

My mother, whose heart has always been firmly in the right place, came from a long line of tough, old-school Irish elders and that hardly resulted in a generation of happy, well-adjusted adults. Nor, when she unwittingly passed those lessons down to my brother Charlie and me, did it keep us in line. The scary teachers at our private boarding schools didn't either. By the time we were in our mid-teens, I was bunking off school and in constant trouble, and my beloved sibling was under suicide watch. If anything, the detentions and groundings just made things worse.

I continued to be off the rails well into my 30s, but after much therapy and a revelatory ADHD diagnosis, and thanks to the life-changing medication I've been on for more than a decade, I stand before you a genuinely happy married mother who is utterly determined to break the cycle of trying to scold the next generation into submission. My mother’s noble transformation in her parenting style came, alas, too late - when Charlie and I were already in adolescence.

BEWILDERING CHANGE